Despite being seven years old – practically an eternity in hardware terms – the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 has got a new lease of life thanks to AMD FSR 3. Team red’s new, open-source upscaler isn’t officially recommended for any Nvidia graphics card older than its GeForce RTX 2000-series GPUs, but it seems to work just fine with them anyway.
AMD FSR 3 is currently only available for two games: Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. However, AMD plans to increase this roster of games substantially in the future. Unlike Nvidia DLSS 3, which is a proprietary tech limited to current-gen Nvidia GPUs, FSR 3 uses standard GPU shaders and cores, so can be used on a variety of graphics cards.
Now, it’s only officially recommended for certain GPUs, generally more recent ones like the AMD RX 7800 XT, but that hasn’t stopped folk from putting FSR 3 through its paces in older graphics cards. YouTube tech aficionado Daniel Owen, whose excitement towards FSR 3’s launch was something to behold, has tested the upscaler on a range of GPUs.
Their findings with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 are especially noteworthy. Without FSR 3, the GTX 1060 struggles to muster a playable performance level, even at low settings and 1080p, for Immortals of Aveum.
However, when FSR 3 is enabled, we see a clear performance improvement, thanks to Performance Upscaling and Frame Generation. Now, it doesn’t eliminate all issues, as the gameplay’s still a bit laggy, but it’s a massive boost from the footage without the upscaler in action.
Owners of old cards will be delighted at this news. If you’re rocking a GTX 1060 or similar in your rig, there’s very little reason not to enable FSR 3 in games that have it implemented. One of the most impressive things about frame generation tech is that it seems to have very little downside to using it. The algorithms rarely make mistakes that impact user experience.
What makes this particularly significant is that the GTX 1060 has been effectively abandoned by Nvidia in its own suite of upscaling technology. DLSS only works with RTX cards, meaning the RTX 2000-series onwards, so older cards haven’t been able to benefit at all.
AMD’s commitment to keeping its tech open to a wide range of graphics cards must be applauded. Team red is increasingly a broad church where even Nvidia GPU users can benefit.
Of course, even FSR 3 can’t save you if your graphics card is horribly outdated and you want to hit 60fps on the latest games. Check out our best graphics card guide to help you find a worthy upgrade for your rig.