AMD seems to be rethinking its approach with FSR 4, which now appears ready to become officially open source.
What started as a simple administrative mistake on GitHub might end up being the reason why the company officially releases the source code of its most advanced upscaling and frame generation technology to date.
An Accidental Leak with Major Consequences
At one point, AMD accidentally published the full source code of FSR 4 in a public GitHub repository under an MIT license. Although the files were quickly taken down, the impact had already been made. Because the MIT license is very permissive, the code spread instantly, allowing enthusiasts and modders to work with it freely — without any restrictions or penalties.
Recently, Andrej Zdravković, AMD’s Software Director, mentioned in an interview during CES that the company’s long-term goal has always been to stay committed to open-source principles. However, he admitted that the “accidental release” in August accelerated the timeline. AMD now plans to officially publish the FSR 4 library, while keeping the core technology closed to avoid giving direct advantages to competitors like NVIDIA.
The leak proved that FSR 4 doesn’t need to be exclusive to the new Radeon RX 9000 series. Thanks to the leaked code, several modders managed to make the technology work on older architectures like RDNA 3 (RX 7000) — and even on competing hardware.
Although performance on older cards suffers slightly due to the lack of dedicated AI hardware, the visual improvements are significant enough that many users prefer it regardless.
With growing pressure from a community that has already experienced the benefits of FSR 4 on “unsupported” hardware, AMD seems to have no choice but to make official what everyone already suspects: FSR 4 will indeed become open source.
