Upscale a little house together

Red Dead Redemption 2now has officialFSR 2.0support, as of the just-released1.31 update. This makes Rockstar’s cowboy epic/improvised teleconferencing softwarethe latest game to work with AMD’s upscaler without mods; anunofficial FSR patch for RDR2has been out for a while, but this update should make it even easier to simply enable or disable FSR in the settings menu. Alongside its rival,Nvidia DLSS, which Rockstar alsoadded last year.

I haven’t tried it yet so won’t hold forth on how FSR 2.0 looks or runs in RDR2, but it should provide a healthy performance boost to AMD GPU users – even if their hardware isn’t on par with the verybest graphics cards. Although games upscaled using DLSS tend to look slightly better than when FSR 2.0 is in play, the latter represents a sizeable quality improvement on the old FSR 1.0, and can be well worth using where DLSS isn’t available. Which might be everywhere, depending on your rig, as DLSS only works on Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards whereas FSR 2.0 is compatible with all modern GPUs.

This update also shows that FSR 2.0 adoption is picking up pace. Originally launching forDeathloopand Deathloop alone, the updated upscaler has found its way into the likes ofMarvel’s Spider-Man Remastered,God of War,Dying Light 2,Farming Simulator 22, andDeep Rock Galactic, among a handful of others. DLSS still leads it, with other 200 supporting games to its name, though FSR 2.0 has more to come:Hitman 3,EVE Online,The Callisto Protocol, andLies of P, to name just a few.

Modders are still having their way with the tech, too. Besides it being added to games with no official support, FSR 2.0 has evenshown up in Metro Exodusas a kind ofNvidia DLAAalternative, applying the quality-enhancing powers of its image reconstruction feature without upscaling from a lower render resolution.

Still, the primary purpose of FSR is to speed up performance, hence why upscalers like it and DLSS are usually the most exciting things to find in a game’s list of dry, dull video settings. On a Radeon GPU and can’t enjoy some bear stew/commit murderous train robberies without bad FPS? Give FSR 2.0 a go.