AMD pushed out its latest Adrenalin driver last week, and while the 26.3.1 release notes don’t scream major upgrade, the technology additions inside are worth paying attention to for anyone on RDNA 4 hardware.
The headline addition is FSR Upscaling 4.1, now officially enabled for Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards. FSR 4.1 is an incremental but meaningful step forward from the FSR Redstone framework. According to AMD SVP and GM Jack Huynh, writing on social media at launch, the update delivers “sharper image quality for ML-based upscaling, delivering finer details and smoother camera motion across all ML-powered AMD FSR games.” Specifically, FSR 4.1 addresses a known issue with FSR 4’s grass rendering in Crimson Desert, where ghosting and blur artifacts were noticeable in open-world scenes, and extends Ultra Performance mode’s frame rate extraction further than before.
Ray Regeneration 1.1 also arrives in this driver, bundled with Crimson Desert support from day one. Ray Regen is AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s Ray Reconstruction: a denoising technique for ray-traced and path-traced workloads that improves reflection fidelity and global illumination. Version 1.1 tightens both, with Crimson Desert being the first launch title to support it natively. TechSpot’s coverage notes that despite the improvements, FSR 4.1 still trails NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 in raw image quality, according to a recently leaked comparison. That gap may narrow, but for now DLSS holds the quality crown at the top of the upscaling market.
Beyond the new tech, 26.3.1 also adds official support for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and fixes a Cyberpunk 2077 crash-on-load bug that had been affecting users with Path Tracing enabled since at least the 26.2.1 release. A general input bug, where users lost keyboard and mouse control while interacting with the Adrenalin software, has also been patched.
Known issues remain, and AMD’s transparency about them is appreciated: Battlefield 6 still triggers crashes on AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 setups, FSR indicators can show incorrectly inactive on RX 9000 hardware in that title, and Death Stranding 2 still has intermittent crash issues on Radeon RX 5000 series products. AMD says it is working with developers on the Battlefield 6 issues specifically.
FSR 4.1 is exclusive to Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs. Older generations remain on FSR 4.0 or earlier. The driver is available now via AMD’s support page and through the Adrenalin software auto-detect update path. If you’re on an RX 9070 XT or RX 9060 XT, this one is worth grabbing before you sit down with Crimson Desert or Death Stranding 2 this week.