They shouldn’t have released a new architecture without dedicated AI accelerators as late as 2022 then, even though they had working AI accelerators at that point - which they were only selling to data centers. FSR 4 can’t be ported back to older AMD architectures for the same reason that DLSS can’t physically work on anything older than an RTX 20 series card (which came out in 2018, by the way). You can only get so much AI acceleration out of general-purpose cores.

AMD’s GPU division is the poster child for short-sighted conservatism in the tech industry and the results speak for themselves. What’s especially weird is that the dominant company is driving innovation (for now at least) while the underdog was trying to survive with brute forcing raster performance above all else, like we’re in some upside-down world. Normally, it’s the other way around. AMD have finally (maybe) caught up to one of Nvidia’s technologies from March of 2020, almost half a decade ago. Too bad they are 1) chasing a moving target and 2) have lost almost every other race in the GPU sphere as well, including the one for best raster performance. The fact that their upcoming generation is openly copying Nvidia’s naming scheme is not a good sign - you don’t do that when things are going well.

Things might change in the future and I hope for there finally being some competition in the GPU sector again, but for now, it’s not looking good and the recent announcements haven’t changed anything. A vocal minority of PC gamers dismissing ray tracing, upscaling and frame generation as a whole reflects neither what developers are doing nor how buyers are behaving - and the fact that AMD is finally trying to score in all of these areas tells us that the cries of fanboys were just that and not reflective of any reality. If the new generation of AMD GPUs ends up finally delivering decent ray tracing, upscaling and frame generation performance (which I hope, because fuck monopolies and those increasingly cringey leather jackets), I wonder if the same people will suddenly reverse their course and embrace these technologies. Or maybe I should stop worrying about fanboys.