I tested AMD FSR 4 on the ROG Xbox Ally X20 and Strix Halo — and the performance ‘boost’ is a total optical illusion

AMD finally dropped FSR 4 for integrated silicon — officially bringing next-generation upscaling to the Z Extreme handhelds and Strix Halo laptops. It’s built to be AMD’s silver bullet against Nvidia’s DLSS. A massive, free software upgrade that magically boosts picture quality and hands you more frames per second.

So over the past week, I’ve updated my ROG Xbox Ally X20 and TUF Gaming A14 with the new drivers and fired up the benchmarking tools to see what AMD has cooked.

And what I found completely breaks the current narrative. We’re all trained to think a new version of AI game scaling tech will send your frame rates skyrocketing. If you come in with that assumption, you’ll be left disappointed.

However, if you understand the optical illusion AMD has actually pulled off here (and how Performance mode is now the new Balanced), it completely changes how you will game on Team Red’s silicon.

How to get FSR 4 right now

If you have a compatible AMD handheld or APU, they have thankfully baked this early-access driver directly into their software. Here is how to activate it on the ROG Xbox Ally X20:

You cannot toggle this on the fly mid-game. You must turn the FSR upscaling tile on in the Command Center before you launch your game, and then select the FSR setting inside the game’s display menus.

As for with Strix Halo laptops, you just need the latest AMD Adrenalin drivers to get it, so get those updated!

Balanced mode is a trap

So let’s get into the actual numbers. My standard FSR advice has always been to leave it on the Balanced preset. But when I ran one-to-one tests comparing FSR 3 against the new FSR 4 on the exact same settings, the new tech didn’t give me more frames.

In fact, I frequently lost them.

So why is it slower? FSR 4 isn’t just a simple spatial algorithm anymore. It’s a heavier, vastly more complex machine-learning model — requiring more overhead and compute power to analyze and reconstruct the image.

A direct preset-to-preset comparison doesn’t math. You have to change the way you use it.

Performance mode is the way to go

Through my testing, one thing became abundantly clear: FSR 4 running in Performance actually delivers a notable picture quality increase over FSR 3 running in Balanced mode.

This is the true breakthrough. With FSR 3, dropping your game down to Performance meant accepting a blurry, pixelated picture — especially in motion. FSR 4 is so much sharper at rebuilding images that it’s not a compromise anymore.

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In Dying Light: The Beast, you can see that foliage and stonework come through with much more clarity with FSR 4 vs FSR 3. At that lower internal resolution, AMD’s able to pick up and upscale more detail.

In Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it becomes so clear when you look at the fur detailing on the jacket collar. With FSR 3, it’s softer and clumpier, whereas individual hairs are more sharply defined with the 4th generation.

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Moving over to Cyberpunk 2077, that NPC is rendered much more sharply — especially in the hair. Forza Horizon 6 shows a sharpening of the reflections on that wet asphalt, and there’s cleaner edges to details like computer screens and the robotic suit in Pragmata.

All of this on performance, and the numbers take a jump too.

Game on against Intel Panther Lake?

Make no mistake about it. FSR 4 is the biggest free upgrade AMD handhelds and laptops have received in a long time, but only if you rewire how you tweak your settings. It’s not a one-to-one swap for a Balanced preset — a confident drop to Performance mode will get you a better picture quality and frame rate to boost.

But after the past few months of watching Intel really take the gaming fight to AMD with Panther Lake chips and XeSS 3, is this enough to take on Team Blue? Sort of.

This is a catch up effort, but there are places where Intel continues to lead, such as with a stronger GPU silicon on handhelds and multi-frame generation. But that Arc G3 Extreme is definitely pricier.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out! And if you’ve noticed differences in your own experiences, let me know in the comments box below.

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Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom’s Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom’s Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you’ll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn’t already.