By Monica J. White
Publication Date: 2026-08-12 15:45:00
The GPU market is a hellscape right now, and Nvidia’s RTX 50 Super isn’t coming to save us all (not that it would even if it did arrive). If you want a new GPU, my advice is not to get one. But what if you’re desperate? Please, don’t default to Nvidia.
I own an Nvidia GPU in my main PC and an AMD GPU in another computer, but if I were shopping now, I’d either get an Intel Arc B580 (yes, really) or try AMD. Its latest drivers and updates make it worth revisiting.
Older cards finally support FSR 4.1
Sure, there are caveats, but I’ll take it!
AMD had one strong upside compared to Nvidia: its FSR tech wasn’t locked to a particular generation of GPUs. That changed with the release of FSR 4, which became an RX 9000-series exclusive. AMD cited hardware-based reasons for this change: FSR 4 relies on the second-gen AI accelerators found in RDNA 4, so it couldn’t work on RDNA 3 (or older, obviously).
That felt final at the time, but I always hoped it’d change, and my hopes weren’t in vain.
AMD opened up FSR 4 Upscaling 4.1 for the RX 7000 series earlier this year, proving that it was possible. We already knew it sort of worked, as many users
