AMD hints at open-sourcing FSR 4 after accidental release forces the company's hand

AMD hints at officially open-sourcing FSR 4 upscaling and frame generation technology in the wake of accidental release -- accidental release may have forced the company's hand

Hot on the heels of one of AMD's David McAfee suggesting that the company might dust off the blueprints for its Zen 3 CPUs for another production run, another exec let out a hint about AMD's future plans with FSR 4. In an interview at CES, AMD's president of GPU Technologies and Chief Software Officer Andrej Zdravković suggested that the FSR 4 Redstone technology might be open-sourced. The statements come in the wake of an accidental release of the FSR 4 code earlier this year. The hint came during a Q&A that Tom's Hardware attended when Chips and Cheese's George Cozma asked Zdravković if an open-source release was in the cards. The software head responded that the accidental public release in August was unexpected, but that it intends to release the source for the FSR4 library while keeping the core technology closed, so as not to give Nvidia engineers an advantage. He continued by stating that AMD intends to "work as openly as possible," and was then asked to be specific about FRS 4's open release. Zdravković then said "that's the long-term plan," seemingly corroborating an earlier remark that "open sourcing is in [AMD's heart and mind]". While the Radeon chief's words aren't a direct statement, it's likely that FSR 4 will see an official open-source release sooner rather than later. The August leak was by way of a GitHub repository that was part of FidelityFX SDK, which itself bears a broad MIT license, except for a handful of specific files. Many have taken this to mean that although AMD pulled the source code down, theoretically it can't put the genie back in the bottle, as all of the published data, including the core AI model and its weights (a critical piece to replicate the technology), was arguably MIT-licensed for a brief moment in time. Keeping FSR 4 as an exclusive selling point for 9000-series Radeon cards might not really be a realistic option anymore, either. As soon as they got their hands on the source code, industrious modders quickly tweaked the algorithm to work on RDNA 3 and older cards, and even on 3000-series GeForces. While this comes with a hefty performance penalty versus running it on contemporary cards, many found the quality-versus-performance tradeoff very much worth it, given the significantly better output of the FSR 4 model. Don't be surprised if that FSR 4 GitHub repository pops up again soon.

AMD suggests that FSR 4 will eventually be open-sourced, bar the core technology, as part of its 'long term plan'

Let's face it, modders have been doing a better job of expanding FSR 4's user base than AMD has. Although AMD's presentations and stands at this year's CES event have been heavily focused on AI (to the point that it seems to have forgotten what the C in CES stands for), it hasn't entirely left gaming out of the loop. At a discussion with press members and graphics wizards, the future of FSR 4 was laid out: the software library will eventually become open-source, with only the core technology remaining behind closed doors. The members in question included Tom's Hardware, which reported on the Q&A session, and it was AMD's president of GPU Technologies and Chief Software Officer, Andrej Zdravković, who provided the pertinent answers. Tom's writes that, "The software head responded that the accidental public release in August was unexpected, but that it intends to release the source for the FSR4 library while keeping the core technology closed, so as not to give Nvidia engineers an advantage." Technically, that's already happened, as back in August 2025, somebody at AMD accidentally uploaded source code for the FidelityFX SDK to GitHub, before swiftly removing it. Although it was only briefly around for anyone to grab hold of, modders rapidly managed to get FSR 4 running on non-RDNA 4 hardware, albeit with a sizeable performance hit. As a quick reminder, FSR 4 is AMD's latest iteration of its upscaling and frame generation package, but unlike previous versions, which ran entirely on standard shaders for everything, this one requires access to the matrix units in RDNA 4 GPUs to work as intended. That's because FSR 4 now works just like DLSS does, in that neural networks are used to fix upscaling artefacts and interpolate frames. Previous iterations of FSR (namely 3.1.5 and older) are already open-source and available on GitHub. In other words, as long as you comply with the MIT license, you are free to use the code however you like. You'll notice that FSR 4 is also there, but that's just a remainder of the boo-boo from last year; no files remain within the repository. Obviously, AMD doesn't want to give away all the secret stuff behind the neural networks that are used in FSR 4, because Intel and Nvidia would be able to go through it all and perhaps use the information to improve their own AI systems. However, every other aspect of the FSR SDK looks like it will become open-source soon enough. What will that mean? Well, nothing new as such, because modders have already managed to get FSR 4 working on older GPUs, such as the RDNA 2-powered Radeon 6000-series. But having the source code for the whole shebang might just make it easier to create third-party apps that do a nicer job than AMD's software at overriding FSR implementations in games. Adrenalin is a lot better than it used to be, but it's still quite clunky to use. If open-sourced FSR 4 can fix that, then everyone's a winner.