Cyberpunk 2077 2.3 with FSR 4 is transformative for AMD Radeon GPU owners

Cyberpunk 2077 now looks significantly better on the latest AMD Radeon GPUs, thanks to its support for the latest AMD FSR 4 upscaling tech. Unlike AMD's previous versions of FSR, this one properly uses the AI cores found in AMD's latest GPUs, and I've found that it suddenly turns the game from a blurry, noisy mess into a sharp and stable graphical showcase. Slowly but surely, AMD is catching up with Nvidia here, and I love to see it.

As I found in my AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, AMD FSR 4 is a significant upgrade over FSR 3.1, with a much sharper image that's not far off the results from Nvidia DLSS 4 using its new Transformer model. AMD hasn't completely caught up here yet - FSR frame gen still doesn't use the AI cores, for example, while Nvidia is using its Tensor cores to generate up to three extra frames for each one rendered by the GPU. However, as we'll see in these Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks and comparison shots, this game now looks way better on the latest AMD GPUs than it did before.

One of the most irritating artefacts when you enable FSR 3 is fine detail in areas such as fences and wire mesh simply disappearing. As you can see in the image above, with AMD FSR 3, the fence in the middle has several gaps in the lines, where the algorithm hasn't been able to resolve the detail. This is one area where FSR 3 really struggles, and it's much worse in action than it is in a screenshot, as the gaps in the fence move and shimmer.

Compare that to the result with FSR 4 next to it, where all the lines of the fence are correctly resolved, with no silly gaps in them. For all intents and purposes, the FSR 4 image is basically indistinguishable from the native 1080p image on the right. All the screenshots in this article are taken with the in-game resolution set to 1,920 x 1,080, and the respective FSR versions on their Quality setting, so this really is the best of FSR 3 vs the best of FSR 4. It's also well worth right-clicking on the images and opening them in new tabs, so you can take a closer look at the details.

Likewise, as you can see in the wire mesh above, FSR 3 can't resolve the detail in the wires, making for a blurry image and massive gaps in the wires. Meanwhile, the FSR 4 image is significantly sharper and looks more realistic.

We're not just talking about fences, though. Take the image of these bowls below, and look at how blurry the pattern looks with FSR 3, compared to the FSR 4 image. The latter does a massively better job of resolving the detail in the upscaled image, so you can see the pattern properly, and it doesn't just look washed out and blurry.

Foliage is also much improved with FSR 4, where, like the fences earlier, FSR 3 puts gaps in blades of grass, and also blurs moving leaves with digital noise around their movements. It's difficult to capture the latter in a screenshot, but you can see in the image below that FSR 4 does a much better job of resolving individual blades of grass than FSR 3, and the detail in the tree trunk is sharper as well.

Importantly, when you're playing the game, you don't need to peer closely at fences in the distance to see the difference - it's evident as you play, as there's much less shimmering and noise around the edges of objects, and the whole scene looks sharper and less blurry.

What's more, the performance hit from using FSR 4 is small compared to FSR 3. As you can see in the graph below, enabling FSR 4 at 1080p with the ultra ray tracing preset on a Radeon RX 9070 XT improves the average frame rate from 83fps at native 1080p to 128fps. The FSR 3 frame rate is 3fps quicker at 131fps, but that's a worthwhile compromise for the massive improvement in image quality. There's no latency penalty either, with the system latency measured at 24ms using both versions of FSR, both of which are more responsive than the 35ms measurement at native resolution, thanks to the higher frame rate.

Meanwhile, enabling FSR 4 at 2,560 x 1,440 improves the frame rate from 53fps to 90fps compared to native res (just 2fps lower than with FSR 3), with a 1% low of 74fps - that's perfectly playable on this mid-range GPU, and the game looks fantastic too.

It's not all good news, though. At the moment, you can only run FSR 4 on one of AMD's new Radeon RX 9000 GPUs, with the current cheapest option in the range being the Radeon RX 9060 XT. Unlike FSR 3, you can't run it on any GPU you like, even including the last-gen AMD Radeon RX 7000 lineup. Also, while it's great to see AMD catching up here, FSR 4 is still only supported by a fraction of games compared to Nvidia DLSS 4, and Nvidia still has the lead on frame gen tech as well.

Still, if you want to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a new AMD GPU, this new update is fantastic, making the game look significantly better for only a small performance penalty. If you're thinking about upgrading, make sure you check out our guide to buying the best GPU, which includes several AMD cards that support FSR 4.

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