This FSR update finally made my RX 9000 feel next‑gen

My First Hours With AMD FSR Redstone: This Is The FSR I Wanted Years Ago

The first time I flipped on AMD FSR Redstone in a ray-traced scene, my brain did a double-take. It wasn’t the usual “eh, a bit sharper, a bit faster” tweak. Reflections calmed down, the shimmer I’ve come to associate with earlier FSR denoising basically vanished, and frame generation stopped looking like a weird AI hallucination layered over my game.

I’ve watched AMD chase Nvidia’s DLSS for years. FSR 1 was a usable “better than nothing.” FSR 2 and 3 grew respectable. FSR 4 (now “FSR Upscaling”) finally made me stop auto-defaulting to DLSS on a green card. But it still felt like catching up. Redstone is the first time AMD feels like it’s on the same kind of playing field: ML-based frame generation, much improved ray-trace denoising, and a smart approach to easing path-tracing costs with Radiance Caching.

Quick note on terms

“Frame generation” means the tech that synthesizes intermediate frames to make motion look smoother (it doesn’t render extra game logic frames). “Ray Regeneration” here refers to AMD’s denoising/reconstruction for ray-traced lighting and reflections. “Radiance Caching” is the idea of reusing a learned representation of global illumination to avoid expensive full path-trace every frame.

What Actually Caught My Attention

The headline wasn’t the marketing buzzwords. The moment it clicked was when I realized two things:

• ML-based frame generation stops producing the smeared motion and ghosting that plagued prior FSR frame gen builds. Motion clarity and edge stability are noticeably better.
• Ray Regeneration tames the noisy, flickery reflections that made ray tracing feel like a visual tax rather than an upgrade. Temporal stability plus fewer denoiser artifacts make ray tracing feel “worth it”.

Radiance Caching — the big promise for cheaper path tracing — isn’t shipping in games yet. It’s an ambitious idea: pre-bake a neural/global-lighting representation so runtime can afford fewer bounces. If it works in practice, path-traced modes could become playable on more mainstream hardware; for now it remains a future payoff.

Where FSR Redstone Fits in the 2025 Graphics Arms Race

Zoom out: AMD, Nvidia, and Intel are all converging on the same stack — upscaling, frame generation, and AI-assisted ray tracing. The differences are in polish, hardware support, and developer adoption.

Nvidia retains a maturity edge. DLSS has more iterations and wider game support; multi-frame generation and mature ray reconstruction exist in more titles. AMD’s historic advantage was broad, open support, which made FSR an easy dev choice. Redstone shifts that model: the most advanced ML features require dedicated AI hardware in RDNA 4 (RX 9000) GPUs. That makes the new tech Radeon-only in practice and narrows the “works everywhere” advantage that earlier FSR had.

FSR Redstone Frame Generation: The Big Leap

In practice, Redstone’s frame gen follows a modern ML flow: the renderer provides a recent real frame plus motion vectors and depth; neural models synthesize the in-between frame. The result is interpolated frames with far fewer hallucinations. That matters more than raw synthetic FPS numbers — if the fake frames don’t sell the illusion, they’re useless.

Latency and “Fake Frames” — a reality check

Frame generation doesn’t make your GPU produce real frames faster; it fills gaps with guessed frames. Input latency won’t match the readout of synthetic FPS. So for competitive esports where every ms matters, native frame rate still wins. For single-player or heavy ray-traced modes, frame gen can make the experience dramatically smoother without needing a full hardware upgrade.

Driver and Software Setup (complete)

If you want to try Redstone yourself, here’s how to get started and what to expect:

1. OS requirements: Windows 10 or Windows 11 are supported. Use the latest Windows cumulative updates for the best driver compatibility.
2. Drivers: Download the latest Radeon Adrenalin drivers from AMD’s official driver page (https://www.amd.com/en/support). Look for drivers that explicitly mention FSR Redstone, FSR Upscaling, or Redstone SDK support. If you’re on a public beta channel or an OEM-supplied test build, follow the notes in that driver package — AMD occasionally ships Redstone bits in optional/beta drivers first.
3. Adrenalin settings: After installing the driver, open Radeon Software and check the “Gaming” or “Graphics” settings. There will be a Redstone/FSR block if your driver and GPU support it. Toggle FSR Upscaling modes (e.g., Quality/Balanced/Performance) and Frame Generation on or off there, then use per-game overrides as needed.
4. In-game toggles: In titles that support Redstone directly, you’ll typically find three independent toggles: FSR Upscaling (image reconstruction/upscaling), FSR Frame Generation (synthesizes intermediate frames), and Ray Regeneration (ray-trace denoising/reconstruction). Enable them one at a time to compare behavior, and restart the game after driver or SDK updates.
5. Notes: Full Redstone’s ML features require RDNA 4 (RX 9000-series) with dedicated AI cores. Older Radeon cards will keep classic FSR features but won’t get the accelerated ML blocks. If a game doesn’t show Redstone features, it likely needs a game update or a newer driver.

How I Tested (methodology)

Testing Redstone in a few early titles was a mix of objective and qualitative checks. My session used an RX 9000-series engineering sample provided for early testing with Windows 11 and the latest Adrenalin driver AMD supplied at the time. I focused on a few representative scenarios:

• Ray-traced reflection-heavy scenes (to stress Ray Regeneration).
• Fast-action camera pans and traversal segments (to stress frame generation).
• Native rendering vs. FSR Upscaling alone vs. FSR Upscaling + Frame Gen (to judge quality and responsiveness).

Capture method: I recorded raw gameplay at the output display using a capture card and internally recorded frame-time telemetry with vendor tools. I compared visual artifacts by stepping through frame-by-frame captures and checking motion stability, ghosting, and reflection noise.

Limitation: Early access testing like this is constrained by driver iterations and game patches. I’m sharing qualitative results and clear visual observations; exact, repeatable fps snapshots require stable retail drivers and fixed game builds, which will come as more titles roll out Redstone support.

What I Observed

Overall, Redstone’s ML frame generation and Ray Regeneration are meaningful upgrades. Motion looks cleaner, and reflections feel materially less noisy. I noticed:

• Much-improved edge stability in motion, especially with foliage and fine geometry.
• Fewer denoiser artifacts in reflections—surfaces read more like polished metal/glass than wet sand.
• The subjective “playability” of ray-traced modes improved: modes that felt too slow or noisy before now felt like a real option for longer play sessions.

Where it stumbles: multi-frame generation (using more than two frames to predict an interpolated frame) still isn’t present in this build, and Radiance Caching is not yet shipping in consumer titles. Dev support matters — without game-side integration, the features can’t turn on.

Who Should Care — and Who Should Wait

If you already own an RX 9000 GPU and play visually heavy, single-player or cinematic games, Redstone is a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade. If you’re competitive and prioritize lowest possible input latency, wait: synthetic frames won’t replace native responsiveness.

TL;DR / Key takeaways

• FSR Redstone is a major quality jump for AMD’s stack: cleaner ML frame gen and better ray-trace denoising.
• Full-featured Redstone needs RDNA 4 (RX 9000). Older hardware keeps legacy FSR only.
• Latency caveat: frame generation improves perceived smoothness but doesn’t fully replace native framerate for esports-level responsiveness.
• Radiance Caching is promising but not yet available in shipping games — watch dev support through 2026.

Conclusion

After a few hours with FSR Redstone, it’s clear AMD has closed a lot of ground. The frame generation and ray-trace improvements make ray-traced modes feel less like a visual novelty and more like a practical choice. The caveat is the same one you’ll hear a lot: the best bits need RDNA 4 hardware and developer integration. If you have an RX 9000 and like prettier single-player games, this is worth trying. If you’re waiting for broad game support and Radiance Caching to materialize, give it another patch cycle or two.