FSR Upscaling Performance
On this page, we are going to deep dive into FSR Upscaling performance on the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX 7900 GRE 16GB Gaming OC Video Card by looking at how upscaling scales between quality settings in several games. The graphs below will show the native resolution performance, compared to FSR Quality, FSR Balanced, FSR Performance, and FSR3 Frame Generation where supported. We will test at 1440p raster and ray tracing, and 4K raster to see what performance FSR allows at 4K gaming.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora always runs with ray tracing remember, so turning on upscaling greatly improves the gameplay experience in this game. This game has a lot of upscaling options, so we tested them all. The FSR Ultra Quality option has a very high-quality FSR, but as you can see its performance gain is rather small at 15%. To get a good performance gain, you’ll want to use the FSR Quality mode which boosts performance by 44%. This game also supports FSR3 Frame Generation built-in, and with Frame Gen turned on and keeping with the Ultra Quality FSR option, you get a nice 115% smoothness improvement. Now, the base you are starting from is 61FPS, which is right on the border of being enough to really enjoy Frame Generation.
4K is very demanding for this game, again remember that ray tracing is always on. The only FSR quality setting that seems playable to us here is at the FSR Performance level. So you’ll have to utilize FSR Performance quality mode at 4K to play the game on the SAPPHIRE RX 7900 GRE NITRO+. We did want to include FSR3 Frame Generation as well, and as you can see with the Ultra Quality mode it’s the same as FSR Performance, so there’s no advantage there. However, if you use FSR Performance Quality and Frame Gen, then the smoothness goes to about 121″FPS” of smoothness. That could work if you really needed the smoothness boost.
Alan Wake 2
In our first graph, we are running Alan Wake 2 at 1440p in raster and ray tracing (RT). In native resolution, the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 7900 GRE NITRO+ is hitting 77FPS, we can see that just enabling FSR Quality mode gives us a 66% performance improvement getting us well above 100FPS at 1440p. If you want even higher, Balanced and Performance will get you there, but Performance does have much-reduced image quality at 1440p. With Ray Tracing, the game is not playable in native resolution. However, just enabling FSR Quality makes it playable at 72FPS, a 64% improvement in performance. If you need more, Balanced is your best option at 1440p, we wouldn’t drop below Balanced quality.
We also wanted to test 4K resolution using FSR upscaling, to see if 4K is viable on the SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 7900 GRE NITRO+. At 4K and running FSR Quality mode, the game is playable at 67FPS. If you want things even smoother, using Balanced FSR at 4K is a great option.
Starfield
For Starfield, we are restricted to the render percentage slider to change the scaling with FSR. We have dynamic resolution turned off. With the Ultra preset, 75% render is the default, and as you go down the quality levels it changes to 62% render, and then 50% render as the lowest render option. The game is already playable on the SAPPHIRE RX 7900 GRE NITRO+ at native resolution at 1440p, but 75% render does get us a small 11% improvement in performance. We can get to 100FPS at 1440p, but at 50% render, the game doesn’t look very good at 1440p. We wouldn’t drop below 62% render here, and keeping it upwards of 70% is a good idea at 1440p. 
*Note, we are using the Starfield patch that includes FSR3 Frame Generation support, however, we tried it on this GPU with this press driver, and the game kept constantly crashing to the desktop, it would not work. Hopefully, a driver can fix it.
Is Starfield playable on the SAPPHIRE RX 7900 GRE NITRO+ at 4K? Well, yes actually, even at 75% Render we are averaging 60FPS. Just to be sure, you can hit up 62% render for 71FPS and the game will be very smooth at 4K.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 was already playable on the SAPPHIRE RX 7900 GRE NITRO+ at 1440p. Turning on Quality FSR improves performance by 25%. Where FSR really helps is with RT, with Ray Tracing turned on the game is not playable at the native resolution. You will need at least FSR Quality to get a 75% boost in performance, but really FSR Balanced is where you want to be for the smoothest experience on the 7900 GRE with Ray Tracing at 1440p.
4K is doable on the SAPPHIRE RX 7900 GRE NITRO+, but you will need at least FSR Quality to reach near 60FPS. Better yet, FSR Balanced will give you a fluid and smooth experience at 4K, we wouldn’t drop below Balanced though, for image quality sake.