AMD's FSR Redstone officially debuts in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 — AMD's answer to Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction

FSR Redstone, AMD's next-gen upscaling tech leveraging machine learning to improve every part of the graphics pipeline, is here, and it's officially debuting in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. The feature is an answer to Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction, and it has now been confirmed (and formally announced) by a senior graphics executive at AMD.

Redstone was originally introduced back at Computex 2025 as a set of features that form a next-gen framework for FSR; it's technically not FSR 5.0 but it may eventually morph into that, considering how it's supposed to work on Nvidia GPUs as well. Ray Regeneration represents one of four features that essentially "are" FSR Redstone.

Ray Regeneration works to clear up noisy and incomplete ray tracing data, such as lighting and reflections, in the render pipeline before the upscaler kicks in to enhance the image. Similar to resolution upscaling, it uses machine learning to fill in the blanks between pixels that couldn't be accurately ray-traced at that moment. The end result is a better final frame with fewer visual artifacts in shiny surfaces.

The Ray Regeneration setting in COD: Black Ops 7 specifically states "it is recommended to be used [in conjunction] with FSR4 or newer," suggesting it could be applied to FSR 3 as well. This is corroborated by the fact that the DLL mentions INT8 (even though it currently uses FP8 code), a data format supported by older GPUs like the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 lineups.

FSR 4 is exclusive to the RX 9000 series since it has specific hardware needed for the machine learning capabilities of Redstone. Therefore, Ray Regeneration being potentially available on previous FSR versions means Redstone features, at least in some capacity, can run on older silicon as well, for which OptiScaler devs and the community will surely be up to the task.

It's also important to keep in mind that this is just one of the four features that make up Redstone. We're still missing Neural Radiance Caching, ML Super Resolution, and ML Frame Generation — all of which could potentially be added to Black Ops 7 in a future update. After all, Black Ops 6 was the first to adopt FSR 4 when it came out, even if Battlefield 6 has completely stolen the spotlight.

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