How AMD's new FSR 4 tech could be the handheld gaming PC upgrade we've been waiting for
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
Love it or hate it, frame generation software continues to be a major feature of gaming graphics updates.
AMD's new FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4 frame-gen software offers massive updates for the Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT discrete GPUs, allowing AMD's new GPUs up to 3.7x better performance over the pure silicon power of the new RDNA 4 architecture.
While we aren't likely to see AMD release mobile variants of the new Radeon GPUs, we might see some of the RDNA 4 tech make its way to AMD's integrated graphics tiles on the Ryzen Z2 generation and the Ryzen AI 300 series chipsets.
While there are some divisive opinions around frame-gen software, it can be a game-changer for handheld gaming PCs. After all, AMD's AFMF 2 update did smooth out performance on the Asus ROG Ally X.
So, can FSR 4 do the same?
Based on AMD's benchmark data, FSR 4 upscaling alone offers significant improvements to the pure silicon performance of the RDNA 4 Radeon 9000 series GPUs across multiple games.
The Radeon 9000 series silicon offers 4K gaming speeds of 39-97 frames-per-second (fps), depending on the title. With FSR 4 upscaling, that range moves to 78-134 fps. With FSR 4 upscaling and frame generation enabled, the Radeon 9000 series offers frame rates of 144 to 233 fps for up to 3.7x performance gains.
Now, these benchmarks are provided by AMD, and are using the Radeon 9070 XT GPU with FSR 4 in "Performance" mode, in a test configuration with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and an MSI MEG x670E ACE motherboard. The games were run in 4K (3840 x 2160) at "Ultra," "Extreme," and "Maxed" presets.
While we tend to prefer independently verified performance benchmarks, these GPUs were just announced, so we'll need to wait until the review embargo lifts to see how they held up in testing by media outlets and analysts.
Based on these results, FSR 4 looks like a pretty solid update compared to previous versions of the software.
It's also interesting to compare the FSR 4 gains to Nvidia's RTX 50-series, as Nvidia's flagship GPU also struggles to game in 4K at 60fps with more demanding titles, relying on Nvidia's DLSS 4 frame-gen software to fill the gaps.
AMD announced the Ryzen Z2 series, a second-generation of gaming handheld chips, at CES earlier this year.
We've only seen one system with a second-generation Ryzen Z2 chip so far, the Lenovo Legion Go S, which houses a Ryzen Z2 Go processor. If you take a look at the Ryzen Z2 generation, the Z2 Go is the most budget-friendly processor, as it uses old Zen 3 CPU architecture, RNDA 2 GPU architecture, and houses just 4 CPU cores. So, the Z2 Go is not exactly the most thrilling.
The Ryzen Z2 and Z2 Extreme are far more impressive chipsets, though the Ryzen Z2 is very similar in terms of Zen 4 and RDNA 3 architecture compared to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. However, software differences make a "night and day" difference between the Z2 and Z1 Extreme. While the Asus ROG Ally X will likely remain one of our favorite gaming handhelds, there's reason to look forward to a Ryzen Z2 series update.
If AMD can bring the RDNA 4 updates to FSR to older architecture, or if FSR 4 tech can influence an update to AMD's Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) tech, that could help AMD level the playing field with Intel's Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake isn't a handheld chip, Intel does have internal teams dedicated to helping the handheld market, and the raw power of Lunar Lake's Intel Arc iGPU outperforms the Z1 Extreme as we saw on the MSI Claw 8 AI+.
While we don't benchmark with super sampling tech, we did witness Lunar Lake perform better than the RDNA 3.5 architecture of AMD's "Strix Point" Ryzen AI 300 series in a head-to-head demo of F1 24 at 1080p with medium settings.
FSR 4 is currently a Radeon 9000 series exclusive, but that may change in a few months if AMD can bring FSR 4 to older architecture.
We also could see FSR 4 become available on future AMD chips like the Ryzen AI 400 series and Ryzen Z3 generation if the software requires RDNA 4 architecture. Not that either chip has been announced or even hinted at by AMD, but the Ryzen AI 300 series will be a year old come Summer 2025, so we will likely see some AI PC chip updates from AMD later this year.
Regardless of personal feelings, frame-gen software can have a major impact on gaming experiences. Whether you choose to enable frame-gen is up to you.
I see a better case for FSR, DLSS, and XeSS when it comes to laptops and handhelds rather than desktops because of the hardware limitations of those form factors. But that's a matter of my personal opinion.
Valve's Steam Deck reminded me of what's most important in gaming — and it's not graphics
I tried gaming on the Lenovo Legion Go S and now I want to buy a Steam Deck instead
This ROG Ally and Steam Deck mount looks ridiculous — and its creators know it
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
35 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
The $14 Billion AI Google Killer
A new AI darling is making waves in Silicon Valley. It's called Perplexity, and according to reports, both Meta and Apple have quietly explored acquiring it. Valued at a staggering $14 billion following a May funding round, the startup is being hailed as a revolutionary threat to Google Search's search dominance. But here's the thing: it mostly just summarizes web results and sends you links. So why the frenzy? Perplexity billed itself an 'answer engine.' You ask a question, and it uses large language models to spit out a human-sounding summary, complete with footnotes. It's essentially ChatGPT with a bibliography. You might ask for the best books about the French Revolution or a breakdown of the Genius Act. In seconds, it generates a paragraph with links to Wikipedia, news outlets, or Reddit threads. Its pitch is a cleaner, ad-free, chatbot-driven search experience. No SEO junk, no scrolling. But critics say it's little more than a glorified wrapper around Google and OpenAI's APIs, with minimal proprietary tech and lots of smoke. It's fast, clean, and slick. But, they argue, at its core, it's mostly just reorganizing the internet. Big Tech's Obsession That hasn't stopped the hype. In May 2025, the San Francisco, California based company closed another $500 million funding round, pushing its valuation to $14 billion, a sharp increase from its $9 billion valuation in December 2024. Jeff Bezos, via the Jeff Bezos Family Fund, and Nvidia are among its notable backers And now, tech giants are circling. According to Bloomberg, Apple has held talks about acquiring Perplexity. Meta has also reportedly considered the move, though no formal offers have been confirmed. The logic is clear. Perplexity is fast-growing and increasingly seen as a 'Google killer,' especially among tech influencers and X power users. Traffic to its site has exploded in recent months. The company now offers a Chrome extension, mobile app, and a Pro version that gives users access to top-tier AI models like GPT-4 and Claude. Still, it's unclear what exactly makes Perplexity worth $14 billion, other than the fact that it's riding the AI wave. Why AI Skeptics Are Rolling Their Eyes For AI skeptics, Perplexity's rise is yet another example of hype outpacing substance. The site doesn't train its own models. It's not building new infrastructure. It's not revolutionizing search. It's just offering a polished interface to ask questions and get AI-generated summaries pulled from public websites. There are also growing concerns about how Perplexity sources its information. A number of news organizations, including The New York Times, Forbes, and Wired, have accused the company of plagiarizing and scraping content without permission or proper attribution. Journalists and publishers warn that this kind of AI-powered search experience threatens to cannibalize news traffic while giving little back to content creators. On June 20, the BBC became the latest outlet to threaten legal action against Perplexity AI, alleging that the company is using BBC content to train its 'default AI model,' according to the Financial Times. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has defended the company as an 'aggregator of information.' In July 2024, the startup launched a revenue-sharing program to address the backlash. 'We have always believed that we can build a system where the whole Internet wins,' Srinivas said at the time. So Why the Gold Rush? Simple. Search is money. Google earned $50.7 billion from search ads in the first quarter, a 9.8% increase year over year. If Perplexity can convince even a small share of users to switch, and then monetize that experience, it becomes a real threat. Apple and Meta, both increasingly wary of relying on Google, see Perplexity as a fast track into the AI search race. But the stakes go even deeper. Whoever controls the next search interface controls the user. Just as Google replaced Yahoo, Perplexity could theoretically replace Google. That's why Big Tech wants in, even if it's not entirely clear what they're buying.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
3 Best Tech Stocks for the Second Half of 2025
Reddit's revenue stands at an incredible year-over-year growth rate of 61%. AMD's AI product improvements could inspire a new round of investor interest. Meta Platforms' decision to advertise on WhatsApp unlocks a new revenue stream. 10 stocks we like better than Meta Platforms › We're nearly halfway through 2025, and what a ride it's been for the stock market. As of this writing, the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, and Dow Jones Industrial Index are up 2%, up 1%, and down 1%, respectively, year to date. So, as attention turns to the second half of 2025, three contributing analysts have selected their top buys within the technology sector: Reddit (NYSE: RDDT), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD), and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META). Here's why. (Reddit): 2025 has been an up-and-down year for Reddit stock. As of this writing, it's down 13% year to date. However, the stock has been extremely volatile throughout the year. It's been up as much as 37% and down by almost 46%. So, obviously, Reddit isn't a stock for every investor or investment portfolio. That said, growth-oriented investors willing to hold for years might want to take the stock's recent volatility as an opportunity to accumulate shares. Reddit is a social media stock. It boasts more than 108 million daily average users and is growing fast. As of its most recent quarterly report (for the three months ended on March 31), the company's revenue growth stood at 61%. The company makes money through selling ad space, like its much larger social media rival, Meta Platforms. While Meta's ad ecosystem has existed for more than a decade and now draws in about a half-billion dollars per day, Reddit's ad ecosystem remains in its infancy. This creates a possibility for investors. Meta has already proven that the social media advertising model works -- and works very well. Meta has ridden that model to a staggering market capitalization of $1.7 trillion. Reddit, on the other hand, has a market cap of only $26 billion. In a move that mirrors Meta, Reddit recently announced plans to integrate artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ad tools into its network. This strategy could help marketers increase return on investment (ROI) by improving ad targeting and content. With its large, increasing user base and blistering revenue growth, there's every reason to think Reddit's long-term prospects remain bright -- and its stock price will rise. Will Healy (Advanced Micro Devices): On the surface, Advanced Micro Devices might look more like a second-quarter than a second-half stock. Since reaching an intra-day low of $76.48 per share on April 8, the stock has risen by approximately 65% over the last six weeks. However, that increase could be just the beginning of what is gearing up to be a second-half comeback. On June 12, AMD released its development pipeline for its AI accelerators through 2027. Investor interest coalesced around its MI400 GPU, which it plans to release sometime in 2026. The MI400 should significantly improve upon the recently released MI350, offering double the compute power, 50% more memory capacity, and 2.5 times the bandwidth. Such advancements are on track to close most of its competitive gap with Nvidia, though Nvidia will almost certainly counter with its own improvements. Additionally, AMD will integrate the MI400 with its Helios rack system. This rack system will combine the MI400 with AMD's upcoming Venice CPU and Pensando Vulcano NICs, providing AMD with a unified AI rack-scale infrastructure for modeling and inference. This is occurring as AMD has begun to benefit from accelerating revenue growth. In the first quarter of 2025, its data center and client (PC) segments grew revenue by 57% and 68%, respectively, while revenue for the gaming and embedded segments declined at a slower rate. Thus, the overall annual revenue growth of 36% in Q1 is significantly faster than the 14% yearly increase in 2024. Moreover, while AMD trades at a higher P/E ratio than Nvidia, improving profitability places its forward P/E ratio at 32, slightly below that of its larger rival. Furthermore, AMD's 7.5 price-to-sales (P/S) ratio is far below Nvidia's sales multiple of 24, likely making the stock more attractive to value-oriented investors. Admittedly, AMD continues to play catch-up in the AI accelerator market. Nonetheless, with the chip company closing the gap, that low P/S ratio could easily persuade investors to bid AMD stock higher as they anticipate the MI400's release. Justin Pope (Meta Platforms): Oftentimes, winners keep winning. Shares of social media giant Meta Platforms have primarily moved in an upward direction since 2023, but I like the stock's chances to continue its run over the second half of this year. Most investors already know that Meta Platforms is a beast in digital advertising. It makes virtually all of its revenue and profits from advertising to the 3.43 billion people who use its family of apps each day. What investors may not realize is that for years, Facebook and Instagram have carried the company's advertising water. Meta generated approximately $160.6 billion of its $164.5 billion in total revenue last year from ads placed in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and third-party mobile apps. Missing from that list is WhatsApp, the wildly popular communications app with over 3 billion monthly active users. But that's changing. Meta recently announced that it will finally place ads in WhatsApp statuses and channel pages. That will open up an entirely new revenue stream for the company, which, given the massive ad revenue Facebook and Instagram produce, could drive significant growth as monetization ramps up over time. Analysts anticipate that Meta's earnings will grow at an average annual rate of 18% over the next three to five years. I wouldn't be surprised if WhatsApp's incremental ad revenue helps the company meet or exceed those estimates. Meta's price-to-earnings ratio has risen to 27, but, frankly, that's still reasonable for the growth you're likely to see over the coming years. Meta waited over a decade after acquiring WhatsApp to make this move, demonstrating just how well its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, can play the long game. Investors would probably be wise to consider partnering with Meta as buy-and-hold investors at these prices. Before you buy stock in Meta Platforms, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Meta Platforms wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $664,089!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $881,731!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 994% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Jake Lerch has positions in Nvidia and Reddit and has the following options: long July 2025 $150 calls on Advanced Micro Devices. Justin Pope has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Will Healy has positions in Advanced Micro Devices. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Meta Platforms, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 3 Best Tech Stocks for the Second Half of 2025 was originally published by The Motley Fool
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Nvidia: How the chipmaker evolved from a gaming startup to an AI giant
Over the past two decades, Nvidia (NVDA) has skyrocketed into global conversation. The semiconductor company is considered an international leader in the design and manufacturing of computer chips and helped revolutionize the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Beyond its strengths in the gaming, data, and AI fields, Nvidia announced plans this March for a quantum research center in Boston, where CEO Jensen Huang said researchers could tackle problems from drug discovery to materials development. Here's a look at Nvidia's path to where it is today, from creating hardware for the gaming industry to designing the chips that power AI. On April 5, 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem founded Nvidia with an initial focus on designing and producing 3D graphics processors for computing and video games. The company's first product release, the multimedia processor NV1, didn't get the reception the founders were hoping for. What followed was a financial situation so dire that Nvidia laid off half its staff, leading to its unofficial motto: 'Our company is 30 days from going out of business.' In addition to the NV1's unimpressive return, a partnership that Nvidia had forged with Japanese video game company Sega to produce console graphics chips fell through, adding to the pressure. However, even as it pivoted to another company for chips, Sega invested $5 million in Nvidia — funding which allowed Nvidia to survive going out of business. Despite financial challenges and a smaller team, Nvidia released its next chip in 1997. It was a success. RIVA 128 allowed for support of high-resolution 2D and 3D graphics, and over a million units were sold in its first four months of sales. With the foundation of RIVA 128 sales, Nvidia produced RIVA TNT, which further cemented its place in the industry with better image quality and performance. Two years later, on Jan. 22, 1999, Nvidia went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at $12 a share, and by May, it shipped out its 10,000,000th graphics processor. Later in 1999, Nvidia released GeForce 256, calling it the world's first 'Graphics Processing Unit.' By marketing the chip directly to customers instead of just including it within a device or console, the company popularized the term 'GPU.' With their ability to break larger tasks into smaller ones that could run at the same time, known as parallel processing, GPUs took on the heavy workload of powering graphics. It allowed devices to work on other processing functions faster, which meant GeForce 256 offered smoother, faster, and more realistic graphics. Finding growing success in supplying GPUs to both customers and consoles like Xbox, Nvidia joined the Nasdaq 100 and the S&P 500 in 2001. In 2006, Nvidia launched CUDA, a platform that allowed users to access their GPUs' parallel processing capabilities to run their own software instead of just graphics. Between 2006 to 2017, Nvidia invested nearly $12 billion in research & development with a large portion of those funds going towards CUDA. CUDA downloads slowed entering the 2010s, and while CUDA provided users with the ability to use chips for purposes other than gaming, it didn't initially seem to pay off for investors. 'Some investors were big Nvidia fans in the late 2000s and gave them the benefit of the doubt for the first five years of the CUDA investment," Acquired podcast co-host Ben Gilbert said in a 2022 episode. "But in the mid-2010s, market demand still wasn't showing up in a big way, and it was becoming a bigger and bigger investment." However, later technological developments would make CUDA crucial to the company. "It made all of our products more expensive since we were selling these gamer cards while putting computing acceleration into them," Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia's vice president of applied deep learning research, told Yahoo Finance in 2023. "It took a lot of commitment to follow through. … I would say it was about 10 years before Wall Street really started to believe this investment was worth anything." In 2012, students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever used CUDA to train the visual-recognition neural network AlexNet with two Nvidia GPUs. AlexNet's breakthrough performance in identifying images demonstrated that using GPUs to train machine learning models cut training times significantly compared to the CPUs that were previously used. Following this advancement, Nvidia began pivoting its focus to artificial intelligence, supported by its revenue from gaming. By 2016, it announced the DGX-1, a system designed specifically for deep learning and the large language models that were on the rise. That year, Nvidia stock nearly tripled in price. 'It's 'destiny meets serendipity,'' Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Yahoo Finance at the time. 'People think it's an overnight success, but like most overnight successes, it took us years.' At the same time, Nvidia took the opportunity to make strategic acquisitions, such as wireless company Icera in 2011 and hardware company The Portland Group in 2013. It tried to acquire the semiconductor and design company Arm (ARM) in 2020, but the deal ultimately fell through after regulatory concerns. In March 2022, Nvidia announced the H100 'Hopper' chip, promising faster training and better performance for artificial intelligence. Controlling a significant majority of the market share with this GPU, major companies, including Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), and Microsoft (MSFT), turned to Nvidia with billions as they began to develop AI and data-driven products. One such company is OpenAI ( whose relationship with Nvidia stretches back to 2016, when Nvidia donated the first DGX-1 supercomputer to the startup. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a language model built on Nvidia GPUs that quickly reached headlines. In less than two months, ChatGPT set the record for the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study, reaching 100 million monthly active users in January 2023. "A new computing era has begun," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a 2023 statement. "Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI." With investors increasingly interested in artificial intelligence and as the demand for GPUs to run models continues to grow, Nvidia's revenue for the quarter ending in January 2024 more than doubled its results year over year. Following the quarterly report's release, Nvidia had the largest one-day gain in stock market history, adding $277 billion in value. It then hit a valuation of $2 trillion the following day. The record wouldn't stand for long, however; Nvidia beat it again just two months later. That March, Nvidia announced its next chip: Blackwell. Offering higher performance with reduced cost and energy consumption, the chips were designed to work better than previous versions when linked to work together in large numbers. Soon after, Nvidia announced a 10-for-1 stock split in June 2024. Following the split, it passed Microsoft and Apple (AAPL) to become the world's most valuable company at $3.3 trillion. By November 2024, it was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Despite its successes, Nvidia also encountered challenges throughout its rise. In 2018, it faced a class-action lawsuit alleging it did not properly disclose to investors the impact of the cryptocurrency market on revenue from sales of GPUs. At the time, 'miners' of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (BTC-USD) and ethereum (ETH-USD) used the GPUs to complete transactions and secure new crypto tokens. The process requires significant computational power, which made Nvidia GPUs a popular choice. Nvidia paid a $5.5 million settlement in 2022 to the SEC because of the issue, and in December 2024, the Supreme Court dismissed Nvidia's appeal, allowing the 2018 case to proceed. This wasn't Nvidia's first time managing legal issues regarding its chips. In 2016, it settled a case involving the marketed performance and actual capabilities of its GTX 970, with payouts of $30 per purchase. On top of legal issues, there is also the challenge of supply keeping up with demand. A global chip shortage first occurred in early 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and an increased reliance on technology for remote work. Other factors that lengthened the shortage through 2023 included the initial US-China trade war, severe weather events, and the Russia-Ukraine war. A December 2024 report from the IDC projected global demand for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) to grow by over 15% in 2025. President Trump announced Project Stargate in January 2025, which involves tech companies such as Oracle (ORCL), OpenAI, and SoftBank (SFTBY) investing $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States over the next four years. Nvidia, as a technology partner to the project, saw a jump in its stock, and reached a $3.6 trillion market cap. Later in the month, however, the Chinese company DeepSeek released its own AI model, which was reportedly trained at a significantly lower cost than that of competitors. Following the announcement, Nvidia stock dropped $589 billion, almost 17%, marking the largest single-day loss in stock market history. Following the drop, March 2025 brought the debut of Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra, the successor to Blackwell. The new chip was announced to have 1.5 times the performance of the previous chip, which could help AI models answer queries faster. In April 2025, Trump banned the export of the company's H20 chip to China, as chips like Nvidia's are critical in the race to develop AI technologies. In its first quarter report, Nvidia said it expects to miss $8 billion in potential sales because of the ban. Despite the expanded limitations on exports, Nvidia continues to grow and even briefly passed Microsoft again in June as the world's most valuable company. Looking forward, some even expect it could be the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap. '[Nvidia] really got the AI revolution going,' ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood told Yahoo Finance earlier this year, 'and we think it's still going to play a mighty role." — Nina is a data reporter intern for Yahoo Finance. Sign in to access your portfolio
