Call of Duty Black Ops 6 to see debut of new AMD FSR upscaling, powered by AI

AMD has revealed that it’s working on a new “ML-based FSR” that will be integrated into Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, hinting that we could be about to get a new AI-enhanced AMD FSR 4 upscaler or frame gen-tech sometime soon.

With Black Ops 6 already including the latest AMD FSR 3.1 tech, we know the mystery new FSR isn’t just an upgrade for Black Ops 6 from an older version to the latest version. As such, we could be about to see a brand new system for boosting your frame rates and image quality from AMD.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been a launch partner for AMD, with the Texan tech company securing support for its latest software features and ensuring compatibility and slick performance at launch for the huge new title. As we noted in our Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 review, it’s the best CoD title in years, so AMD is understandably pulling out all the stops to showcase what it can do with the game, which seemingly includes a debut for a new FSR tech.

The announcement of the new feature was made in a launch video for the company’s new AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, which was finally officially announced yesterday and will be available to buy on Nov 7th.

In the video, SVP and GM for Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh, talks up the collaboration the company is doing with Activision on the new CoD title, pointing out the work on game optimizations and the integration of AMD FSR 3.1. He then goes on to say that “they’re working very hard to enable the next generation, ML-based FSR” in the game.

As to what a possible FSR 4 could be, the implication here is that it will either be an upscaling of frame generation tech that more closely resembles the machine learning (ML)-enhanced tech used in Nvidia’s DLSS suite. DLSS takes advantage of Nvidia GPU Tensor cores to help accelerate its algorithms, so AMD’s new solution could be looking to do the same on its GPUs.

Notably, this would be something of a change from AMD’s previous developments of FSR that have largely remained platform-agnostic, so they work on AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs. A version that more directly involves the company’s own GPU AI core capabilities – as found on the likes of the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT – could help it bridge the gap between the image quality and performance of AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS.

Time will tell just what’s in store for this new version of FSR but if you’re just chomping at the bit to get in and play Black Ops 6, check out our Black Ops 6 loadouts guide to find the best kit for your play style.