Valve’s Steam Deck is a fantastic handheld for the price with some brilliant specs and a great battery life. Built on AMD hardware, the handheld isn’t able to use the same DLSS technology as the Nintendo Switch 2, but many have used older versions of AMD’s FSR to bring decent image quality to the device.

Now, Steam Deck users can get a massive upgrade to image quality on demanding games as AMD’s much-improved FSR 4 upscaling becomes available on the handheld. Following an AMD leak that allowed the upscaling tech to work on older RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 hardware, the team behind the Decky Framegen plugin have added the technology to Valve’s handheld.

Using Decky Loader, which you can install here, you can install the latest version of the Framegen plugin on your Steam Deck. While the tool is mostly used to inject generated frames into your games, you can use its OptiScaler to simply use image upscaling without fake frames instead.

Via Steam Deck HQ, the use of injected FSR 4 into demanding games is a night and day difference with extremely noticeable results. One image shows off the difference between Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man Remastered with the Spider-Punk outfit. With FSR 3, the pattern on the back of the outfit is almost incomprehensible, but with FSR 4 it’s clear as day.

As someone who has used the Steam Deck for years now, FSR upscaling is an essential tool for a lot of demanding games, and it simply doesn’t look great. Games like Hogwarts Legacy look extremely rough on the system with image breakup so bad I simply couldn’t keep playing.

With FSR 4, AMD’s upscaling tech is actually usable at the 800p resolution of Valve’s handheld and look pretty damn great. Yes, there will still be image breakup in movement, but it won’t be as bad as before, and games should look cleaner and more stable than in the past.

Of course, there is a minor trade off to this: performance. FSR 4 is heavier to run than FSR 3 specifically due to the lack of bespoke hardware found in more modern AMD hardware. In some games, you may notice a single frame difference between the upscaling options and in some it may be more drastic. However, the beauty of a Decky Loader plugin is that, if you don’t like it, you can simply turn it off.

For more Steam Deck coverage, read about the upcoming Valve Fremont home console that was leaked via Geekbench tests.