Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have all made high-quality image upscaling a cornerstone feature of their new GPUs this decade. Upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel’s Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) are all ways to transform a lower-resolution source image into a higher-resolution image, delivering better-looking games without requiring as much graphics hardware as you’d need to render the higher-resolution image natively. Later additions have focused on improving ray-tracing performance and “frame generation” technologies that boost frame rates by creating new AI-generated frames to insert between natively rendered frames.

Generally speaking, Nvidia’s DLSS technologies have provided better image quality than AMD’s FSR, but they have only been available on newer Nvidia hardware—the GeForce RTX 20-series or newer for most features, with frame-generation features locked to the RTX 40- and 50-series. FSR’s results don’t look as good, but they have benefited from running on just about anything, including older GPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and even integrated Intel and AMD GPUs.

Today, AMD is trying to shift that dynamic with something called “FSR Redstone,” a collection of ray-tracing and frame-generation features all intended to boost AMD’s image quality while being relatively easy to implement for game developers who are already using FSR 3.1 or FSR 4.

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I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my personal homebrew Steam Machine, a self-built desktop under my TV featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 8700G processor and a Radeon 780M integrated GPU. I wouldn’t recommend making your own version of this build, especially with RAM prices as they currently are, but there are all kinds of inexpensive mini PCs on Amazon with the same GPU, and they’ll all be pretty good at playing the kinds of games that already run well on the less-powerful Steam Deck.

But this kind of hardware is an imperfect proxy for the Steam Machine that Valve plans to launch sometime next year—that box will include a dedicated GPU with 8GB of dedicated video memory, presenting both benefits and possible pitfalls compared to a system with an integrated GPU.

As a last pre-Steam Machine follow-up to our coverage so far, we’ve run tests on several games we test regularly in our GPU reviews to get a sense of how current versions of SteamOS stack up to Windows running on the same hardware. What we’ve found so far is basically the inverse of what we found when comparing handhelds: Windows usually has an edge on SteamOS’s performance, and sometimes that gap is quite large. And SteamOS also exacerbates problems with 8GB GPUs, hitting apparent RAM limits in more games and at lower resolutions compared to Windows.

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