• AMD has revealed that FSR Redstone will debut on December 10
• This is a suite of AI-powered tech to speed up frame rates and bolster visual quality
• It’s for RX 9000 GPUs only, and owners of RX 7000 (or earlier Radeon models) aren’t happy with that – although the situation could change

AMD has revealed that it will debut FSR Redstone technology to improve frame rates and visual quality with upscaling on some Radeon GPUs come December 10.

VideoCardz noticed a post on X from AMD’s Jack Huynh, VP of Computing and Graphics, who posted a dramatic clip revealing the date – and the fact that Redstone will be for RX 9000 graphics cards only, as you’ll see right at the end.

The speculation was very much that GPUs before the current generation would be ruled out, which includes the relatively recent RX 7000 models, but now that this is confirmed, many gamers aren’t happy. Why not? I’ll discuss that in a moment, but first, let’s recap what Redstone is and what those last-gen GPU owners are missing out on.

FSR Redstone is essentially a bundle of different tech innovations that are roughly equivalent to what Nvidia has achieved in more recent times with DLSS.

Redstone builds on FSR 4 and includes Ray Regeneration, which improves ray-traced visuals and is equivalent to Nvidia’s Ray Reconstruction.

There’s also FSR Radiance Caching to improve lighting (like Nvidia’s RTX Neural Radiance Cache), and a key addition in FSR Frame Generation, AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s Multi Frame Generation, which seriously boosts frame rates by generating more than one artificial frame. All of these features are AI-powered.

Analysis: RX 7000 GPUs and earlier left in the darkness… for now

AMD’s Redstone launch is a bit odd, as technically one aspect has already arrived – Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 had Ray Regeneration when it launched last week. The tech has faced criticism in this first incarnation, though, and looks lacking compared to Nvidia’s Ray Reconstruction. Team Red also hasn’t been drawn to comment on this early launch – with no official announcement provided – leaving folks to speculate about what’s going on here, frankly.

At any rate, we now have an official launch date for the full suite of tech (presumably it’ll include all aspects of Redstone, as previously teased). The problem is with the RX 9000 (RDNA 4) exclusivity now confirmed; a lot of gamers with RX 6000 and RX 7000 graphics cards are unhappy, particularly in the latter camp.

Let’s face it, the last-gen flagship RX 7900 XTX is hardly an old GPU, and it’s still a very powerful graphics card – indeed, it’s a match for the top RDNA 4 GPU, the RX 9070 XT, when it comes to rasterization (non-ray-traced gaming), if not more powerful in some instances. But clearly, when it comes to upscaling and the surrounding Redstone tech, this is where the last-gen flagship is left behind.

And when you consider just how much money people spent on an RX 7900 XTX, it’s not surprising that they’re miffed that Redstone is leaving them out in the cold. A fair few other RDNA 3 GPU owners aren’t pleased either, as you might imagine – I just highlight the flagship to illustrate a particularly painful point in terms of its cost.

Of course, AMD may introduce support for RX 7000 GPUs at a later date. There will be reasons why Team Red is keeping Redstone for RX 9000 graphics cards right now, and indeed FSR 4 too – most likely worries about how it’ll perform on older hardware.

However, that could – indeed, arguably should – change going forward, or that’s the hope for many. Of course, there are no guarantees, which is why people are getting angry with the situation – particularly if they spent a grand on an RDNA 3 flagship.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).