The latest AMD Adrenalin driver lets you turn FSR 4 on in a bunch more games but OptiScaler might still come in handy for older titles

It's been about six months since AMD FSR 4 launched and one of the only real problems with it has been uptake. There just haven't been many games that officially support the upscaling and frame gen tech, and enabling it has often required the use of a third-party tool. Now, though, AMD has finally added the ability to enable FSR 4 in a bunch of games by flipping a toggle switch in the latest Adrenalin driver.

The Adrenalin 25.9.1 drivers, AMD explains, enable FSR 4 in over 85 games: "By updating your AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver, you automatically unlock access to this cutting-edge technology on your AMD Radeon RX 9000-series graphics card. Simply enable FSR 3.1 within the supported game and ensure the FSR 4 toggle is turned on from the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition application."

These titles are limited to ones that support DirectX 12 and FSR 3.1—more specifically, games that "have integrated a signed FSR 3.1 DLL according to the guidelines in our FSR 3.1 documentation for developers." That doesn't include Vulkan games, unfortunately.

Previously, to get FSR 4 up and running in games that aren't officially supported, AMD RX 9000-series gamers had to use third-party software OptiScaler to force-enable it. This, however, involved manually pasting files into your game installation folders and even changing settings in a batch script.

After launching towards the start of the year, there's been a lot of interest in seeing wider adoption for FSR 4. In addition to frame gen, AMD's latest generation of upscaling, in particular, has been lauded as it seems to finally be a competitive option against Nvidia's DLSS in terms of visual fidelity.

A slide from an AMD presentation showing much improved spire rendering using FSR 4 compared to other upscalers in Space Marine 2. (Image credit: AMD)

Unfortunately uptake has been pretty slow, though—it was only a month ago that Cyberpunk 2077 got FSR 4 support, for instance. Now, it should be easier for more users to make use of it. There are a couple of potential things to note, however.

First, this new driver-level override only works for (some) games that support FSR 3.1. OptiScaler, on the other hand, claimed to allow you to get FSR 4 up and running in games supporting FSR 2 and higher. So for non-3.1 games, you might still have to rely on OptiScaler if you want to try enabling FSR 4.

Second, we should remember that while this is a first-party solution, it's still only a one-party solution, meaning the games this update will benefit haven't had the FSR 4 implementation worked on by its devs (duh, that's the point, I know). Which means they might not look or perform quite as well as they could if FSR 4 were added officially by the game devs.

Oh, and of course there's the fact that only gamers with Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards will be able to use the tech.

Still, it's a lot better than the minimal number of games that could get FSR 4 officially up and running before. Given Nvidia recently added a DLSS Override global toggle, with this AMD FSR 4 update in the mix, gamers on both green and red sides of the aisle can finally have some current-gen driver-level upscaling to rely on.