When TechPowerUp spoke to AMD's Chief Software Officer and Senior Director of Software earlier in June, the executives made bold claims about the quality of its new FSR 4.1 implementation coming to older RDNA 3 GPUs, stating that, despite underlying technical differences, the actual output would have the same quality as it does on RDNA 4 GPUs. There was, however, little discussion about a potential performance hit from the upscaling tech, although it seems as though that discussion may not have been necessary at all, according to testing that has shown up on r/radeon on Reddit.

Based on the testing by the redditor, who tested AMD's FSR 4.1 in Cyberpunk 2077 on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX at 3840 × 2160p resolution, high settings, and with Ray Tracing on and Ray-Traced Lighting set to Ultra, the performance improvements can be as high as 100% compared to testing conducted without the tech enabled. In benchmark screenshots shared by the redditor, the RDNA 3 GPU managed to get a 49.82 FPS average (43.46 minimum and 60.51 maximum) with FSR 4 set to Balanced and 60.81 FPS average (52.94 minimum and 73.03 minimum) with FSR 4 set to Performance. While there are no results posted, the tester claims in a follow-up comment that performance went "from 24~FPS at native to 50~FPS with FSR 4 Balanced and 61~FPS with FSR 4 Performance." These tests were conducted on a Windows 11 Pro installation with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X CPU and 128 GB of RAM, which is an unconventional setup for gaming, and it may ultimately mean that gaming performance could be higher with a more gaming-focused PC build. As the updated FSR version rolls out to older hardware, we will likely see more tests on other hardware tease out the true performance and image quality benefits, but a ~100% performance uplift is promising, especially for gaming handhelds on Radeon 780M iGPUs, for example.

Linux and Git creator Linus Torvalds revealed that he upgraded to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X processor powered machine after 15 years of upgrading among Intel processors. This is likely his main machine from which he does pioneering work on the future of Linux and his other creations. His May 24 dated "State of the Kernel" blog post reveals that his hardware upgrade was the most exciting piece of news to share among the community.

"In fact, the biggest excitement this week for me was just that I, upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn't Intel-based. No, I didn't switch to ARM yet, but I'm now rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn't matter so much right now during the calming down period, but I will most definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window," he stated. What makes this story big is the fact that the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, and a processor with a similar multi-core architecture to AMD's EPYC enterprise processors, is now being used by the creator of the most popular enterprise operating system.

The HEDT or high-end desktop platform occupies the gray area between desktops and workstations. It has been originally meant for power-users, enthusiasts, and creative professionals. Over the years, with ballooning core-counts, memory bandwidth, and I/O connectivity, the target-audience of the HEDT evolved. Now these processors are useful for people who need a lot of multi-threaded CPU performance with more I/O connectivity than what traditional desktop platforms offer; and who have not use for "workstation" features such as ECC memory, or simply don't want to spend the money.

AMD doubled CPU core counts for its traditional Ryzen desktop platform this year with the introduction of 12-core and 16-core parts; forcing its 3rd gen Threadripper family to begin with even higher core-counts, starting with the 3960X 24-core part at $1,399. Intel, on the other hand, is in a bit of a pickle. Intel's 10 nm silicon fabrication node development isn't benefiting its desktop or HEDT platforms. Allocations of its 10 nm node are mopped up by its high-volume mobile processor and high-margin enterprise processor businesses, leaving too little allocation to roll out desktop or HEDT 10 nm chips at scale.