Valve Adds FSR 4 Directly To Proton Experimental and Steam

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There are a few ways for us to enhance games further outside of the in-game settings, and one of those is injecting FSR 4 upscaling. Most games use some form of upscaling, a technology that lets a game run at a lower resolution and uses an algorithm to make it appear higher resolution. We use it a lot to make demanding games run at a stable framerate on the Steam Deck, but there are some very obvious downsides. FSR 4, AMD’s newest implementation of the upscaler, fixes a lot of those issues, making the game look significantly better and saving on some performance. Usually, this would require manually injecting it by switching out some files, or using a plug-in to automatically do it. However, based on a new update, it appears Valve is going to make the process significantly easier.

According to a new discovery from Brad Lynch over on Twitter/X, Valve has actually added the FSR 4 DLL file to Steam and is coming to Proton Experimental. Theoretically, this means we don’t need to use any external program or plug-in or manually change files to inject and utilize FSR 4 in our games. This is only applicable to the games that have FSR 3, and is most likely aimed to provide an easy solution to upgrade to FSR 4. And yes, this is the version of the DLL that supports older GPUs, which is perfect for the incoming Steam Machine.

This is very interesting to see, because it could mean a few things. It seems like this is just being added to Steam, which means we may be able to utilize it on the Steam Deck. And if it’s being added to Steam, it could mean that Valve is going to provide a solution to allow us to easily upgrade without needing to use any launch option. If that’s the case, we could be seeing a one-click button that allows us to upgrade to FSR 4.

Now, I did try to download the depot for myself to see if I could see the same changes that Brad showed in his picture. However, I was not able to. Still, the DLL is definitely for FSR 4, and I consider Brad a trustworthy source. He also mentioned that this is a tweaked version of the DLL by Valve, which could make integration easier, optimize it for their hardware, or even make it work better with a Steam client integration. It points to Valve finding a way to make this DLL and upgrade to FSR 4 as accessible as possible.

Per the leaked build of Proton, this is a new version of the upscaler that uses FSR 4.1.1, and it can work on RDNA 3.5 GPUs, like the ones used in the ROG Xbox Ally X. This was confirmed by VideoCardz and is pretty significant, and could mean universal support for most handhelds that use Proton.

Time will tell for sure what exactly this means in due time, but I know I’ll be excitedly waiting to find out.

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