Powercolor Hellhound 7900 XT Tested – Just How Effective is FSR?

The GPU power battle rages on, and I suspect it will continue to do so. However, it seems in recent years the biggest performance gains haven’t been thanks to increased speeds and core counts, but through AI scaling technologies. While Nvidia has DLSS and Intel has XeSS, AMD has been making waves with their own technology, FSR. Which one is better is a debate for another day, and frankly, one with an ever-changing answer on a per-game basis too. However, today, it’s all about the new Powercolor Hellhound 7900 XT, one of the most potent AMD cards to date, sitting just below the XTX models. However, with FSR technology, just how far can we push FPS in some of our favourite games?

What is FSR?

FSR, like rival brands’ similar technologies, is technically an AI-trained upscale technology. It renders a game at a lower resolution and then upscales it to your native resolution. If all goes well, you get a potentially massive FPS boost, while retaining a visual fidelity that is close to rendering at native resolutions. As AMD put it “A state-of-the-art spatial upscaling algorithm delivers near-native resolution quality gaming experiences with super high-quality edges and detail.” and well, from our own personal experience, it works really, really well.

It’s also been with us for quite some time now, with new versions of FidelityFX being released over the last year, and new versions announced that are on the horizon. They all largely do the same thing, but better than the last, and the number of games supports continues to grow pretty much every week.

Games with FSR Support

There are well over 100 games that now support FSR, and there are now more than a dozen games that support the newer FSR 2. A complete list is available on the AMD website, but most games are proud to tout the scaling features they support, so you can usually simply check the appropriate Steam page (or equivalent) for your favourite game.

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