AMD hyped FSR Redstone hard. The reality is underwhelming

Each December, our crew looks back on the whole year. One episode dedicated to our top hardware picks. One episode devoted to the success (and failures) of our early predictions. To ready myself, I’ve been reviewing the highs and lows of 2025.

FSR Redstone’s launch really encapsulates the last 11 months.

AMD first teased the arrival of its supercharged, graphics-enhancing tech for Radeon RX 9000 series cards in mid-November via Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. The game’s launch contained a new machine-learning version of ray regeneration—and then just days later, the company hinted at a full release on December 10. It didn’t say much after that. It didn’t launch much, either.

That’s how the situation feels, at least.

The official debut of FSR Redstone comprises four technologies—FSR Upscaling, FSR Frame Generation, FSR Ray Regeneration, and FSR Radiance Caching. Machine learning powers the whole set.

AMD touts Upscaling and Frame Gen as “new” due to the upgrade. Ray Regeneration is truly new, applying deep learning to the denoising of ray-traced scenes. Radiance Caching will also be new when it drops in 2026, striking a middle-ground approach to global illumination via projections, rather than real-time calculations.

(Is a product launched if it isn’t accessible until the coming year? Perhaps I’m just a stickler.)

Hit the AMD website and you’ll see about 200 games listed as supporting FSR Redstone—that is, “one or more” of the technologies. That group narrows considerably to just 32 titles for Frame Generation. And Ray Regeneration? That only exists in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 right now.

You wouldn’t be wrong to look at Redstone as mainly enhanced upscaling, with the promise of further visual enhancements down the road. But you may not want them.

As early benchmarks show, the relatively limited group of Radeon GPU owners who even have access to Redstone may not get much use out of it—or that much of an improvement over earlier FSR iterations. Tim Scheisser at Hardware Unboxed dissects Frame Generation’s irregular frame pacing, and how the subsequent judder likely will affect those with variable refresh rate monitors much more adversely. Meanwhile, Steve Burke and the Gamers Nexus team dug into latency, showing similar lag when using Redstone vs. FSR 3.1—so still a killer for certain games and game modes.

AMD

The situation isn’t all bad, of course. The Gamers Nexus video has a fun quiz embedded in its coverage, asking viewers to identify the FSR 3.1 vs. FSR Redstone in a split-screen comparison. I could immediately spot the Redstone version. It’s prettier. And as Hardware Unboxed’s testing showed, Redstone is capable of outperforming Nvidia’s competing DLSS tech in image quality for select details, making the tussle between the two companies closer to even.

But as a value-add for existing Radeon customers (and a select group at that—remember, Redstone features only work on current Radeon 9000-series graphics cards), this Redstone launch feels underwhelming. Yes, the promise is definitely there. Yes, AMD has proved before that it can and does improve its technologies. Yes, competition is good and necessary for healthy consumer choice.

At the same time, PC gamers find themselves staring down the barrel of a hardware apocalypse, where building new or even upgrading may become outright unaffordable. If software is to be our saving grace—if tech giants’ claim that newer GPU architectures will continue to show smaller rasterized performance gains—this feels like an ill omen for the future.

“Enshittification” is a term we’ve used on the show before, coined by Cory Doctorow several years ago. The overwhelming majority of 2025 has felt like a turbulent version of that process, simultaneously accelerated and erratic. Redstone isn’t necessarily an outcome of enshittification, but boy, does it drive the point home. Hardware? Too expensive. Software to bridge the gap? Full of compromises and future promises.

In a year full of big statements and lackluster delivery, I don’t like this launch as a capstone. But maybe that’s the era we’re in. Consumers won’t matter to businesses until they realize that, actually, we do.

In this episode of The Full Nerd 

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Will Smith discuss Crucial’s unceremonious end at Micron’s hands, the return of 32-bit PhysX, and a rumored extension on B650’s lifespan. You all of course caught some of my thoughts already on Crucial last week, but both Will and Brad weigh in with very relevant points—including the affect on PC vendors like Dell and HP.

The most unexpected (and maybe unwanted) revelation: Will is willing to touch poop with his bare hands and admit it live on camera. To quote one YouTube comment, “Unhinged preshow today.” 

Maybe a little, yes.

Willis Lai / Foundry

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This week’s offensive nerd news

I exaggerate some, but Kohler’s attitude toward its toilet cam stinks. As does its crappy spin on privacy and encryption. I’m gonna be that party pooper that reminds y’all to always weigh convenience against security…and to dig into the details of any security measures.

Thankfully, not all interesting news this week reeks. Well. Sort of.

Kohler Health

• Poo by any other name: Kohler obviously doesn’t understand what EE2E means for encryption. Or know about other, sketchier uses for toilet cams.

• Backup, backup, backup: An AI-flavored reminder that you should always have good backups on hand, in case of catastrophe. Or possibly predictable outcomes.

• JavaScript was created in 10 days? I am so unproductive compared to early internet pioneers.

• Speaking of bloat: Given our complaints on the show this week about Windows 11’s resource hogging, the only obvious solution to our problem is this crazy lightweight Linux distro. Or that’s what I imagine Will saying to me at some point.

• A case for aging gracefully: I suppose we all must accept that white plastic won’t stay white, and not interfere with nature taking its course.

• Are you entitled to AT&T settlement money? PSA: The deadline got extended until December 18, so get in those last claims if you qualify!

Noctua/Prusa

• Speaking of poop brown: If you love Noctua’s commitment to earth tones, now you can replicate its exact color scheme with a 3D printer.

• Would I go back? Eh: Operation Bluebird wants to reclaim Twitter as a trademark, now that use of the name and the logo have been abandoned. I’m not sure if we can go back to those halcyon days where we only ever described our breakfasts in two sentences, though.

• “Divide by zero, go to hell”: Or so famously said one of my college’s professors. Perhaps he knew just how bad such attempts would go.

• Update Notepad++ if you haven’t already! Traffic jacking led to malware downloads instead of legit updates. You’ll want version 8.8.9 for the patched version, and you’ll have to do the update manually.

• Not a friendly rivalry: I can’t imagine having a budget that would accommodate $50,000 of computer replacements/repairs. Much less creating that amount of damage.

In just a few days, I’ll be making my nominations for the best of 2025—along with the worst trend of the year. I have petitioned Adam to let us name more than one trend, because [waves hands at everything].

Catch you all next week…

~Alaina

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.