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AMD's FSR 4.1 now works on Radeon RX 6000 cards, Xbox Series X and S, and Ryzen AI Max, AI 9, and Z2 SoCs

Earlier this year, AMD brought the previously RX 9000-exclusive FSR 4 upscaling tech to Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards and promised an early 2027 release for RX 6000-series products. Christmas has come early for RDNA 2 and many other Radeon gamers, as Radeon honcho Jack Hyunh has announced an FSR 4.1 release for Radeon RX 6000 series cards, Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, Ryzen Z-series handhelds, and machines with Ryzen AI Max and AI 9 chips today.

To accomplish this feat, AMD says it tweaked FSR 4.1's neural network model to support the INT8 shader hardware (as opposed to the higher-precision FP8 matrix acceleration hardware on Radeon 9000 cards). Additionally, the version specific to handhelds is slimmed down even further, to less than half the size of the full one.

AMD says that compared to FSR 3, games on the aforementioned GPUs and APUs will now deliver better image quality, all else equal. With Cyberpunk 2077 running in FSR Balanced mode at 4K, our quick testing with a Radeon RX 6900 XT shows that running FSR 4 costs just about 13% performance, a small price to pay for sharper and more stable visuals, especially in motion.

And the higher upscaling quality of FSR 4.1 might let gamers use Performance mode where they might previously have used Balanced, or so on, which might offset that performance cost.

There are more goodies in store, too. The Radeon team says that FSR Frame Generation now ought to have better frame pacing, resolving a longstanding complaint with the tech and potentially making for smoother gameplay with framegen enabled. Support for the Vulkan API with FSR 4.1 is set to arrive at some point, as well, a boon for some games and console emulators. Finally, AMD says FSR Ray Regeneration will also be coming to more games, too. The company showed the tech running in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and that integration is available now.

To get all this goodness into your GPU, you can download the just-released Radeon 26.10.1 drivers from the AMD Adrenalin application or directly from AMD's website. The updated software also adds support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, and Final Fantasy Resonance. You can check out the full release notes here.

For owners of Xbox and Ryzen Z2-series handhelds, AMD says that an update from their manufacturers will be forthcoming, as those devices depend on OEM-specific drivers.

We're pleased to see that Radeon gamers are getting upgrades for their existing graphics chips along the lines of what Nvidia has been delivering throughout 2025, because the way things are going, it looks like it'll be around 2077 before there will be a new gaming graphics card launch. If you're an RDNA 2 gamer, go give FSR 4 a shot and see what you think.

China’s tech giants drop $35 billion on export-compliant Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPU orders to power AI ambitions, according to reports

20 October 2026 at 13:10

Chinese technology giants ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly spent over $35 billion on orders for more than 3 million Nvidia RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs. The huge order for the RTX Pro 5500, fully compliant with U.S. restrictions on exports of AI-capable GPUs to China, is reportedly far beyond Nvidia's planned production for this card. As a result, Nvidia has, according to sources who spoke to Reuters, told its customers that it isn't in a position to fill the orders as it far outstrips its planned production for this GPU.

The RTX Pro 5500 is a workstation GPU with the same number of CUDA cores as its flagship RTX 5090 GPU, but with 84GB of GDDR7 memory attached, making it a good option for AI applications. The RTX Pro 5500 is a popular choice at the moment for Chinese buyers as exporting it isn't currently restricted by the U.S. government. It's less powerful than the H200 and B300, Nvidia's AI-focused GPUs for the enterprise market, but those GPUs remain either banned or heavily restricted. As China competes with the U.S. in the race to produce newer, better AI models, GPUs like the RTX Pro 5500 continue to be indispensable.

The report reveals some interesting data about the Chinese tech firms orders. Two of its sources revealed that the cards are priced at around $11,400 each, reaching a total order value of $35 billion. Meanwhile, another source suggested that Nvidia has informed its partners that it may only be able to deliver enough cards to meet between 5% and 10% of the demand. Meanwhile, Nvidia is reportedly in a position to only produce 3 million RTX Pro 5500 cards globally in 2027.

Neither Nvidia nor the three Chinese companies have confirmed any of this on the record. However, an Nvidia spokesman told Reuters that demand from the Chinese market for these chips has faced "unprecedented growth since 2022" since export restrictions were introduced. "U.S. firms continue to be restricted by a combination of outdated U.S. export controls, which cover gaming products released nearly half a decade ago, and China's own limits on U.S. imports."

While trade hostility between the U.S. and China shows no sign of abating, demand for Nvidia's GPUs hasn't slowed down, despite U.S. attempts to restrict Nvidia's ability to export to China. Meanwhile, export-restricted Nvidia AI chips continue to reach China despite the restrictions, bypassing the Trump administration's efforts in the process.

Mods can almost double DLSS 5 performance through Foveation, reducing resolution at the edges of frames

Popular graphics post-processing injector software ReShade, commonly used to mod DLSS 5 into unsupported games, now has a foveated imaging add-on, including another standalone project that doesn't need precursor software, allowing DLSS 5 to affect only what's in view, reducing GPU load and increasing FPS.

Foveated imaging is nothing new; it's a technique that's been used in VR to increase performance. It works by only rendering what's in view, often increasing the resolution in the center and reducing it at the edges. Our eyes work in a similar way, with the clearest image in a small area in the center of your vision, blurring on the edges. With foveated rendering, you barely notice the lower-resolution edges as the peripheral vision is less concerned with fine details.

I made a foveated rendering mod for DLSS5 than can double performance by reducing the resolution inputs near the edges
 from r/DLSS

Instead of varying the resolution of the image, however, it varies the level of detail in DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. DLSS NR loads a whole AI model into your GPU and renders images in real time, making it a resource-intensive task; but the task is minimized greatly when most of the detail is only asked for in the middle of the image. That's what projects like maximedgoulet’s Foveated DLSS5 and ClarkCheekyKent’s CheekyFoveatedDLSS aim to do; with Foveated DLSS being a ReShade add-on and CheekyFoveatedDLSS capable of being a standalone integration.

Both implementations allow you to adjust the size of the center area with the highest rendering quality, with independent width and height adjustments to suit your personal situation, as some people have a larger focus area than others or have a different monitor distance. You can also adjust the render fall-off rate, so the image quality lessens more quickly or slowly past the focus area.

As Maximedgoulet's implementation is an add-on for an injector, the pipeline is quite long compared to the standalone integration of CheekyFoveatedDLSS, which Reddit comments claim is more convenient and more polished. Though both show a big improvement in performance, Maximed's Reddit post on Foveated DLSS5 claims an improvement from 48 to 80FPS in The Witcher 3 with 2x Multipass at ultrawide 7680x2160p on an RTX 4090. Considering Maximedgoulet’s 4090 could not handle DLSS-NR on an ultrawide, this implementation might genuinely be feasible to make Neural Rendering more playable.

You can now modify the vBIOS on Nvidia gaming GPUs without flashing thanks to a solo developer’s project

Panchovix on GitHub recently released a VBIOS configurator for RTX 30-to 50-series cards that doesn’t require flashing. The loader provides a UI for easy configuration and lowers the risk of bricking your GPU by avoiding a risky flash process, and it's available for Linux, too.

Software like MSI Afterburner or ASUS GPU Tweak is often the go-to tool for quickly changing your graphics card’s settings; however, those tools have hard limits to how much you can push the graphics card. If you want to tweak your GPU beyond the firmware’s set limits, you can change it by tweaking the parameters in the VBIOS. Configuring VBIOS is similar to changing BIOS settings in the BOOT menu. With the VBIOS loader, you can change settings beyond the firmware’s hard limits.

The way it works is by storing the modified VBIOS image in the GPU’s register key; as the Nvidia driver looks for a VBIOS override on startup, it finds the VBIOS image and restarts, applying the override settings. The flash chip on the graphics card is not overwritten, reducing the risk of bricking your GPU. However, this does not protect the card from any extreme settings that could destroy electrical components; it merely provides a safer and more convenient way to adjust and apply VBIOS settings, including a way to roll back to the default VBIOS settings should you face any instability.

Bricking a flash chip isn’t as catastrophic as it seems, however. As long as you have a backed-up version of the VBIOS, you can easily buy an SPI flash chip programmer or even build your own using a cheap Raspberry Pi Pico and its many clones; sometimes programming the flash chip may not even require desoldering. Programming a flash chip is very tedious and inconvenient, though, which is why avoiding the risk of a botched flash process altogether is so appealing.

Unless you’re familiar with power delivery, voltage tables, and the patience required to test for hours, we wouldn’t recommend jumping into this unless you’re prepared to risk your GPU. However, you can still safely take advantage of this software by tweaking the fan curves and other settings you’ve applied and tested in software like MSI Afterburner if, for some reason, the startup settings don’t stick. This software will give your GPU new default settings that override at every startup, so long as Nvidia doesn’t remove the registry key that allows the VBIOS override.

Modder brings full Nvidia DLSS 5 suite to three generations of AMD gaming GPUs

The DLSS-NR project on AMD by Daniel Blanco was first released on September 3, 2026, bringing DLSS 5 Neural Rendering to Radeon GPUs; in the latest 0.8.0 update, however, it makes all the main DLSS features available, featuring DLSS SR, Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration, and the newest DLSS NR model, along with more performance improvements.

While AMD has equivalents for most DLSS features like FSR upscaling, frame generation, ray regeneration, and anti-lag, it’s not as commonly supported by most games compared to Nvidia’s offerings. Even if players could use the AMD equivalent features, Neural Rendering is one that AMD just doesn’t have an equivalent for yet, which is why mods like DLSS-NR on AMD were made.

Daniel Blanco wanted to fill the gap with NR in its initial release, but in the latest update, he added all the DLSS features: DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution 4.5, Frame Generation, and the latest 310.9.16 improved Neural Rendering build that we covered recently with modders using it on unsupported games. Interestingly, the update notes say it includes FSR 4.1.1 upscaling; AMD GPUs already use FSR, but having FSR 4.1.1 specifically gives the mod a consistent version of FSR to work with, instead of having to be compatible with the various implementations of FSR in different scenarios.

The mod currently supports three generations of Radeon GPUs: RX 9000, 7000, and 6000 (RDNA4, 3, and 2, respectively), in any DirectX 12 game that uses FSR, DLSS, or XeSS. You can install the mod by downloading the NeuralHub mod loader, which provides a UI for you to install it into the games it detects. You then enable FSR, DLSS, or XeSS in the game, and the mod will insert itself into that upscaler pipeline, allowing it to inject any of the settings you configured for the game in the NeuralHub; it even provides an overlay to tweak the DLSS settings without leaving the game.

With a few improvements from the first version, the developer says the output quality is very similar to what DLSS produces on Nvidia GPUs natively, except for “some effects that may not be working 100%.” In the developer’s own testing, he found it to be playable at 90-100FPS at 1080p on an RX 9070 XT, while saying that he’s making improvements every day, planning to match the performance of a 5070Ti.

Real-world results are mixed, however, as Reddit users report showing no performance loss over native FSR, while others experience losing single-digit FPS to up to 25% lower FPS in various games. The developer still has to account for many factors since there are a myriad of PC configurations, but the results look promising as he bridges the gap between AMD and Nvidia GPU features — though it won’t work with anti-cheat, unfortunately.

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