ASRock Ryzen | Radeon Experience @ SM Cyberzone Geek Con DX

SM Cyberzone Geek Con DX

We visited the April 18-19 weekend stop at SM City Manila for Cyberzone Geek Con DX, anchored by AMD Ryzen | Radeon together with DataBlitz and PC Express, which gave the six AMD AIB partners their own dedicated booths running ASRock, GIGABYTE, Sapphire, XFX, PowerColor in a clean side-by-side, with ASUS supporting the lineup through demo systems and the Tekken 8 Raikiri Challenge activation.

The event was free admission, and the floor saw steady traffic across both days from cosplayers, PC enthusiasts, and walk-in shoppers.

ASRock Demo

ASRock arrives at the show floor wearing two hats: motherboard maker and Radeon AIB partner. They are one of only a handful of brands that commit to both halves of the AMD platform story in the Philippine market, and the booth setup at the experience area reflected that, a working AM5 build front and center on an ASRock board with an ASRock-branded RDNA 4 graphics card.

ASRock’s identity in the local market has shifted over the last few generations from the budget-tier ASUS sibling brand into something closer to an enthusiast-leaning maker that happens to also serve the value end of the segment. That shift is visible across the Steel Legend and Taichi product families, and the live demo running on the booth monitor surfaced exactly that, current AAA titles running through the AMD FSR pipeline on RDNA 4 silicon mounted in an ASRock chassis. Walk-up traffic could literally see what FSR 4 looked like running in real time.

ASRock Demo PC

ASRock’s RDNA 4 and AM5 Lineup

ASRock’s RX 9000 SKU stack covers the segment top-to-bottom across three brand families:

• Taichi: the flagship-tier line. Triple-fan cooler, top-tier components, factory OC headroom, and the heavier industrial-design treatment ASRock reserves for the line that competes against the other brands’ top SKUs.
• Steel Legend: the mainstream enthusiast pick. Lighter aesthetic with the brand’s standardized white-and-grey accent treatment, and pricing that consistently lands in the value-enthusiast slot.
• Challenger: the price-sensitive entry tier. No-frills cooler design, no factory OC bells and whistles, and a price that tracks closer to MSRP than the cooler-shroud-premium SKUs above.

All three lines cover both the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, with the lower 9060-series SKUs covered by the same model lineage.

On the motherboard side, ASRock’s AM5 stack is broad. The X870E Taichi sits at the enthusiast top end, and notably this is the board AMD itself uses in its own FSR Redstone test configurations. The X870 Steel Legend WiFi serves as the premium mainstream pick, and below that the B850 and B650 Steel Legend / Pro RS lineups cover the value-enthusiast and budget tiers while still bringing the full AM5 platform feature set. ASRock’s pricing in the Philippines tends to land at or below the segment median, with standard 3-year warranty coverage on both motherboards and Radeon SKUs through their PH service channels.

Note: Details below are shared between our series covering the SM Geek Con DX Experience booths from AMD AIB partners.

What’s Running Underneath: AMD FSR in 2026

It’s easy to walk past a working PC and miss the software stack that’s pulling the weight on the screen. On every one of the AMD-powered demo rigs at Cyberzone Geek Con DX, the actual frames you were watching were doing more than just rasterizing pixels in the conventional sense; they were being reconstructed, sometimes generated, and sometimes denoised entirely by AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution stack. And the FSR you saw in the Cyberzone is a meaningfully different thing from the FSR most readers last paid attention to.

FSR Redstone: AMD’s Neural Rendering Stack

The naming has shifted, and it’s worth getting it right. What launched alongside RDNA 4 in 2025 as FSR 4 is now part of a broader umbrella AMD calls FSR Redstone, a four-component neural rendering suite that sits at the top of AMD’s image-processing stack. The components break down like this:

• FSR Upscaling: the ML-based super resolution component (this is what was previously called FSR 4). The current shipping version is FSR Upscaling 4.1, with sharper inference output and improved Ultra Performance and Dynamic Resolution Scaling behavior over the original FSR 4 release.
• FSR Frame Generation: ML-powered frame generation that predicts and inserts intermediate frames between rendered ones, building on the FSR 3.1.4 frame generation foundation but with a fully neural model on supported hardware.
• FSR Ray Regeneration: a standalone ML-based real-time denoiser for ray-traced workloads, restoring full-quality detail from sparse samples without being tied to a specific rendering framework.
• FSR Radiance Caching: a neural radiance cache for path tracing that learns and predicts how light propagates through a scene, accelerating global illumination workloads. Currently a developer technical preview ahead of broader 2026 game integrations.

All four ML components are accelerated on the dedicated AI hardware in RDNA 4, which is why the suite is officially exclusive to the Radeon RX 9000 series at the moment. AMD’s RDNA 4 silicon ships with native FP8 instruction support, a hardware capability that earlier RDNA generations don’t have, and FSR Redstone’s inference pipeline was built around it.

The Cross-Platform Reality: FSR 3.1 Stays Doing the Heavy Lifting

The other half of FSR’s 2026 story is the part that doesn’t fit on a marketing slide as cleanly: FSR 3.1, the analytical, non-ML version, is still the upscaler that the broadest swath of gaming hardware is actually running. RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 graphics cards, Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go 2 handhelds, the entire current-gen console install base, and millions of GeForce and Arc users all rely on FSR 3.1 as the cross-platform performance lever in modern titles. AMD designed the FSR Redstone SDK with analytical fallback paths exactly so developers can ship one integration and serve the entire spectrum of hardware. Newer RDNA 4 cards get the ML pipeline; everyone else gets the proven 3.1 path.

On the AIB lineup at the experience booth, that translates to a fairly elegant story: the RX 9000-series cards on display were all running FSR Upscaling and Frame Generation through the ML pipeline; older RX 7000 / RX 6000 hardware on PC builds elsewhere on the floor, plus the cross-platform installed base, all stay in the same software ecosystem through 3.1. AMD has effectively turned FSR into a tier-aware solution; no one is left without an upscaler.

Driver-Level FSR: The Quietly Important Update

One of the underrated additions that came with FSR Redstone is the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver-level override. For any title that ships with FSR 3.1 integration, an RDNA 4 card running the latest driver can automatically substitute the newer ML-based FSR Upscaling without the developer needing to push a patch. The Radeon overlay surfaces a green checkmark indicating which Redstone features are active in real time, a small UX touch that makes the whole stack visibly working.

This is the mechanism that closes the gap between AMD’s installed base of older FSR integrations and the new ML pipeline. A Cyberpunk 2077 install that shipped with FSR 3.1 support a year ago can now run FSR 4 / FSR Upscaling on an RX 9070 XT just by toggling the override in the driver. 200+ titles were on the supported list by the end of 2025, with frame generation enabled in 40+ of those, and the count keeps climbing as more games adopt the FSR SDK 2.x integrations.

Why the Ryzen Pairing Matters

The reason every booth at the Cyberzone show floor was running an AMD CPU isn’t just brand alignment; it’s that the Ryzen + Radeon platform pairing is genuinely the path of least resistance for getting the most out of FSR. The X3D class of Ryzen chips, the 9800X3D, 9950X3D, and the dual-die 9950X3D2, sidestep the CPU bottlenecking that high-frame-rate FSR scenarios will otherwise expose, particularly when Frame Generation is in play, and you’re pushing the GPU into the 200-300+ FPS regime where CPU per-frame overhead starts mattering more than ever.

AM5 also brings PCIe 5.0 across the platform, USB4, and EXPO memory profiles that make the platform setup story straightforward. Pair an AM5 board, pick your chipset tier, with a 9000-series Ryzen and a Radeon RX 9070 XT, and the entire FSR Redstone stack runs the way AMD intends.

FSR in Practice: Benchmark Showcase

To put numbers behind the FSR story, here’s a snapshot from our test bench running an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32GB of DDR5-6000, on Windows 11 Pro 25H2 with the latest AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver. Three games were captured across the three common monitor resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4K) with FSR set to Quality preset where applicable, all in their respective high or ultra graphics presets.

Each game block below has two tabs, FPS for averages, 1% for the 1% low, with one chart per resolution. Rows are listed in generational progression order (oldest FSR to newest), not sorted by frame rate.

Cyberpunk 2077: FSR through the Years

Cyberpunk is the most demonstrative title in the set because its menu still exposes the older FSR steppings (FSR 2.1 and FSR 3) alongside the new FSR 4 and the FSR 4 + Frame Generation combination. This single game lets you see the full FSR progression captured back-to-back on the same hardware:

A few honest readings from this data. The analytical steppings (FSR 2.1, FSR 3) and the ML-based FSR 4 land within a few frames of each other on raw FPS, and FSR 4 is actually slightly slower than FSR 3 at 1080p (211.1 vs 216.9). That’s not a regression. The FSR 4 ML model has a higher compute cost than the older analytical pipeline; the win for FSR 4 is image quality, sharper inference, cleaner motion stability, less ghosting on disocclusion, not raw frame rate at the same upscaling ratio. You’re trading a small amount of headroom for a meaningfully better picture.

The headline number is in the highlighted row. FSR 4 with Frame Gen 3.1 takes 4K Cyberpunk from 62 FPS native to 132 FPS, over 2x the rendered framerate at the same resolution and image settings. That is the modern FSR pitch in one data point: native 4K performance reserved for previous-generation flagships, delivered by a performance-tier RX 9070 XT.

F1 25 : FSR4 at Work

F1 25 is more representative of what most modern titles will look like in 2026, an FSR 3 implementation upgraded to FSR 4 through the driver override path. The data here cleanly separates from Cyberpunk’s unique “all four FSR options exposed” menu because F1 25 just gives you one FSR toggle and lets the driver pick the version:

F1 25 is the cleaner story. FSR 4 here lands at the same raw FPS as FSR 3 but with the better-looking ML-based reconstruction. At 1440p, FSR 4 actually opens a meaningful gap over FSR 3 (249 vs 223 average). And the reason this matters more than the Cyberpunk numbers in some ways, F1 25’s update of older FSR 3 to FSR 4 through the driver path is what most of the existing FSR 3 game catalog will look like over the next twelve months as developers either patch in native ML support or AMD continues expanding the override list.

Crimson Desert: AMD’s new Poster Child for Native FSR 4.1

Crimson Desert is one of the freshest titles to ship with native FSR 4.1 integration, the latest stepping of FSR Upscaling, with the inference improvements that came with FSR SDK 2.2:

Crimson Desert is the kind of demanding 2026-era release where FSR earns its keep cleanly, native 4K hovering in the high 40s lifts to a comfortable 66 FPS average with FSR 4.1, and the 1% low climbs from 46.5 to 62.5. That 1% low improvement matters more than the average for actual perceived smoothness; the floor of the experience is what defines whether a game feels playable or stuttery, and FSR 4.1 raises that floor by 35% at 4K in this title.

Advancing FSR

What FSR has become in 2026 is no longer a single setting in a graphics menu. It’s a tiered, ML-accelerated rendering stack with a clear story for both new RDNA 4 hardware and the broader cross-platform installed base. RX 9000-series owners get the full Redstone treatment with neural upscaling, neural frame generation, ray regeneration, and the developer-preview radiance caching, while everyone still on RDNA 2/3, consoles, or handhelds gets a proven analytical FSR 3.1 implementation that keeps the ecosystem unified.

Walking the Cyberzone show floor on April 18-19 made the practical version of all that visible. The cards on the AIB tables were running the new pipeline. The crowd watching Cyberpunk hit triple-digit 4K frame rates wasn’t reading benchmark sheets; they were watching it work. That’s the difference between a launch deck and a working build, and the Manila leg of Geek Con DX gave us plenty of the latter.

The Cyberzone Geek Con DX run is over for the Manila leg, but the AMD AIB partners on the Geek Con DX floor, including ASRock, remain available through their respective Philippine retail channels.

Catch the next leg of Cyberzone Geek Con DX as it tours other SM properties through 2026.