Image upscaling technologies have already gained favor with most gamers. Still, there remains a group of opponents who prefer “perfectly” rendered images over those they see as made up by artificial intelligence. With the Radeon RX 9060 XT and AMD’s FSR 4, we’ll show why that view isn’t entirely accurate—and how new algorithms manage to deliver near-native detail from low-res frames with a level of detail comparable to traditional native rendering.
Disclaimer: This article could not have been created without the support of AMD and Gigabyte. It is intended to help readers better understand the technology. The content reflects the author’s own views and is based on independent testing and measurements. The sponsor had no influence on the editorial content..
Most of the misunderstandings around image-upscaling technologies stem from how they were born. The first generation still used data from a single frame to rescale to a higher resolution. Since then, explanations of super sampling or super resolution have often repeated a simplified line: the game engine renders at a lower resolution and artificial intelligence fills in the rest. It supposedly draws on training from the same games at higher resolution and, because it “knows” how the frames should look in higher quality, it “imagines” the missing details into the low-resolution frame.
The popularity of this explanation is reinforced by AI models for enlarging photos, which today can add details to old, low-quality pictures that were never there. Sometimes they miss, creating a wrong shape or inserting a pattern or color that doesn’t belong. That’s why gamers worry that AI upscaling in games will add things that shouldn’t be there—things that wouldn’t appear with proper native rendering.
We’ll examine in one of the following chapters why, if super resolution worked that way, it could not achieve the level of detail that modern reconstruction technologies do today.
Trust isn’t helped by the technology developers and PR teams themselves, who talk about each new generation of upscaling in superlatives.
They try to ride the AI wave, attribute miraculous abilities, and sometimes oversimplify. Only when they present the next generation’s improvements do they admit the shortcomings of the previous one.
Another group of opponents argues that with the advent of upscaling, developers neglect graphics optimization—rather than tuning visuals, they push gamers to use upscaling, which will ultimately lead to lower graphics quality.
But upscaling as such won’t hurt visual quality—if anything, the opposite. From the very beginning, game artists have wrestled with how to work around technological limits. Naturally, they would like to render everything as faithfully and as high-quality as possible, but there has never been, is not, and for a long time will not be enough performance for that.
When you want more than hardware can handle
Developers have several ways to deal with limited performance. The simplest is to restrict players’ graphics settings. If they cap the maximum detail level at a point where the game runs smoothly on most cards, they can count on praise for good optimization. But the downside is that a year or two later, when more powerful GPUs arrive, you still won’t be able to unlock higher details in that same game. At launch it may run smoothly but look average—and its visuals will age faster.
Some developers go the opposite route, deliberately including settings that current hardware can’t handle at maximum quality. They bank on more powerful GPUs arriving later, so they add “experimental” options. But then they often get criticized for poor optimization because the game isn’t playable at maximum settings even on the fastest hardware available.
For developers taking that approach, image-upscaling techniques are a gift. And players see it that way too—especially those who want to enjoy new games at high detail levels without owning top-tier, latest-generation GPUs.
Upscaling shouldn’t be dismissed as a patch for hardware or software shortcomings. It’s more a way to push graphics quality higher, even when raw computational performance isn’t enough to “faithfully render every pixel.”
Faithful rendering means redrawing the entire frame, point by point, up to a hundred times per second—even when very little has changed between frames. That’s a huge waste of computational capacity, which could be put to better use.
In the next chapters, we’ll look at how upscaling used to work, and how things improved with the advent of temporal supersampling—using samples gathered over time from multiple frames. We’ll demonstrate this with the popular Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, a remaster of the original game where developers added temporal supersampling support alongside ray tracing.
Radeon RX 9060 XT: The Most Affordable Addition to the New Radeon Family
For testing and comparison, we’re using the budget-friendly Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC 16G from Gigabyte, which I recently reviewed on HWCooling.
To remind you of the key specifications of the card:
- GPU: Radeon RX 9060 XT (RDNA 4), 2048 stream processors
- Clock speeds: Boost Clock up to 3320 MHz, Game Clock up to 2780 MHz (ref. 3130 / 2530 MHz)
- VRAM: 16 GB GDDR6, 128-bit bus, memory speed 20 Gb/s
- Connectors: PCIe 5.0 ×16, power via 1× 8-pin
- Outputs: 2× DisplayPort 2.1a, 1× HDMI 2.1b, max resolution 7680 × 4320 (8K)
- Card dimensions: 281 × 118 × 40 mm
- ARGB lighting with 16.7 million colors, customizable via Gigabyte Control Center
- WINDFORCE cooling system featuring Screen Cooling (heatsink with open fin layout), three counter-rotating Hawk fans, composite heatpipes, copper base, thermal gel component cooling, and a metal backplate
You can find a more detailed description of the card in the review and on the Gigabyte product page.
We’ll demonstrate how one of AMD’s technologies, Anti-Lag, works in practice using a top-tier gaming monitor, the AORUS FO27Q3, also from Gigabyte. It uses a QD-OLED panel developed by Samsung. With a resolution of 2560 × 1440 pixels, it offers a 360 Hz refresh rate and is certified with VESA ClearMR 13000 and VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400. For gamers, the major advantage over LCD monitors is that OLED can redraw pixels with significantly faster response times.
The basic monitor specifications are summarized in bullet form below. For a detailed description and demonstrations of supported technologies, visit the monitor’s product page.
- Panel type: 27″ QD-OLED, resolution 2560×1440 at 360 Hz, 10-bit
- Adaptive v-sync: FreeSync Premium, VRR
- Image parameters: viewing angles 178°, brightness 250 cd/m² (Typ, SDR APL 100%); 1000 nits (Typ, HDR APL 3%), 99% DCI-P3 color space coverage, GTG response 0.03 ms, factory calibration with △E< 2
- Certifications: VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400, motion clarity ClearMR 13000
- Connectors: 2× HDMI 2.1, 1× DisplayPort 1.4, 1× USB Type-C (Alternate Mode; Upstream port; Power Delivery up to 18 W), 2× USB 3.2 Downstream, 1× USB 3.2 Upstream, audio jack 1× headphones, 1× microphone
- Audio: 2× 5 W speakers
- Supported technologies: Tactical Switch, OSD Sidekick, Black Equalizer 2.0, Dashboard, Crosshair, Timer, Counter, Night Vision, Eagle Eye, PiP/PbP, Auto-Update, KVM, 6 axis Color Control, Apply Picture Mode, HDMI-CEC, RGB Fusion 2.0, pivot 0–90°, VESA Wall Mount 100×100 mm
