AMD announces next-gen 'FSR Diamond' AI-enhanced upscaling for future Xbox consoles, but the question is whether it's coming to PC and which GPUs will support it

Not sure about you, but I'm still wrapping my head around the nuances of AMD's FSR 4 and FSR Redstone upscaling platforms. But never mind, because here comes a whole new one, FSR Diamond, announced yesterday by AMD's consumer computing boss, Jack Huynh. Ostensibly, this one is specifically for Xbox rather than the PC. But the lines around Microsoft's definition of Xbox are growing ever more blurred. So, that might not mean quite what it seems.

For now, we just have Huynh's post on X when it comes to FSR Diamond, but there actually a fair few details therein. He says FSR Diamond is part of Project Helix, AMD and Microsoft's "multi-year deep co-engineering partnership driving next-gen performance, breakthrough graphics, and compatibility with your existing Xbox game library." Put another way, Project Helix is the next Xbox.

But, immediately, the wording feels like it's leaving the door open for all kinds of "Xbox" gaming, not just strictly console gaming. Either way, AI is inevitably set to play a big role in this new FSR Diamond generation of upscaling. Next-gen neural rendering, next-gen ML-based upscaling, and new ML-based multi-frame generation are all name-checked by Huynh.

The final major detail is "next-gen Ray Regeneration for RT & Path Tracing." Again, that's pretty much what you'd expect and means FSR Diamond ticks all the expected boxes for next-gen upscaling, albeit it's very much been Nvidia, not AMD, setting the tone with its DLSS upscaling over recent years and AMD playing catch up.

The immediate questions are where this leaves AMD's FSR Redstone, what it means for the PC more broadly and what GPUs will end up being compatible with FSR Diamond. For now, we'll have to speculate and guestimate. But there are some data points out there.

Xbox is undoubtedly converging with the PC as the Xbox Ally demonstrates, it's really just a PC handheld with a few Xbox software frills, and Project Helix very clearly sets out to extend. There's always been plenty of cross pollination between AMD's PC and Xbox technology, even when the hardware was quite distinct. But now that Xbox and PC are moving ever closer together, that's surely only going to be more true.

So, it seems pretty likely that FSR Diamond, or at least a generation of FSR upscaling for PC GPUs that's closely related to it, will be coming to the PC. The question remains, what AMD GPUs for the PC will support FSR Diamond or whatever relation to it the PC receives?

Unfortunately, there are good reasons to think it may end up being exclusive to AMD's next-gen RDNA 5 graphics cards. And that's because of the heavy ML or AI emphasis of FSR Diamond. RDNA 5 is expected to have a block of dedicated Nvidia Tensor Core-style units to support much improved AI performance and there's good chance that FSR Diamond may require that hardware.

RDNA 4 does obviously have hardware to support AI acceleration, and physically it has matrix math engines in its CUs that are roughly equivalent to the Tensor cores located in Nvidia's GPU SMs. But AMD's matrix math engines support a narrower list of data types than Nvidia's Tensor cores and are less performant. Presumably, AMD will be upgrading those engines for future GPUs including Project Helix, potentially leaving RDNA 4's matrix engines incapable of running FSR Diamond. Indeed, high-profile hardware leaker Kepler_L2 has said that FSR Diamond will be tied to RDNA 5.

That's pretty frustrating given that FSR Redstone only came out at the end of last year, is limited to RDNA 4 GPUs like the Radeon RX 9070 XT, and doesn't exactly have universal game support. But then it reflects AMD's approach to GPU hardware.

Nvidia started putting Tensor cores into the RTX 20 family of GPUs way back in 2018, making it easier for legacy GPU families to support at least some aspects of future ML-based upscaling technologies.

AMD has been rather more conservative about adding dedicated ML hardware to its consumer GPUs. But if expectations around RDNA 5 are correct, that will change with its next graphics cards. The benefit of that should be scope for much more powerful AI-based upscaling. The downside is that legacy GPUs probably won't have sufficient AI-acceleration capability to run the new upscaling platform.

Microsoft has said that alpha versions of the Project Helix hardware will be released in 2027, which presumably will ship with FSR Diamond on board. AMD's next-gen RDNA 5 GPUs may well appear in 2027, too. So, it's looking like 2027 is set to be the year for FSR Diamond. Will it close the gap to Nvidia's DLSS? At a guess, I'd say it will compared to anything Nvidia is offering today. Quite what Nvidia will be doing by the time FSR Diamond is actually usable on an RDNA 5 GPU in a PC, however, is whole different story.