Stabbing that Fstab

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.

**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:41)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Hi, welcome to the program. It is July 21st, 2026 And here we are once again, it's The Jeff Gerstmann Show. That's right. It is, the summer's almost over. I don't know if you know this, but the summer ends sometime in early August now. Kids go back to school super early, it's really strange. I don't understand. I don't understand how this is supposed to work, but it seems like kids are getting a raw deal when it comes to the summer break from school these days. But hey, we're here making things happen about video games. I have been making things happen with the Steam Machine. We talked about it a lot last week. But to just check in on the power of the Steam Machine, it's been really interesting. So these are changes that I think will roll out to everybody in a more direct capacity as time goes on. But right now, if you fiddle with it, you can get it working with FSR4. And if you're not familiar with FSR in a general sense, it is an upscaling technology. It is specifically AMD's upscaling technology. NVIDIA has DLSS, which you may have heard discussed a little bit more often. But FSR has been around for a good long time as well. Not as good as DLSS in most cases. But FSR4, 4.0, 4.1.1, is a massive step up from previous iterations in terms of quality, in terms of clarity of image, and things of that nature. And so you can fiddle around with the compatibility layers and enable FSR4 on the Steam Machine right now, and then kind of force games to use it in some cases. And games that use FSR3 will kind of upgrade automatically. Sometimes in the menus, they will just straight up say, FSR4, 4.1.1, Forza Horizon does this, a handful of other games, Cyberpunk will readily acknowledge the exact version. Some other games won't, and so you'll just have to assume, like, okay, well, it's clearly it's working.
And I did this, and it is been... It's a big deal in terms of, again, the clarity of image. The problem with upscaling technology is that it is rendering the game at a lower resolution, and then through the power of algorithms and machine learning, it is then blowing it up to whatever resolution you're going for, whether that's 4K or 1440p or whatever. And so as a result of that, you are able to squeeze more performance out of a thing because it's natively rendering at a lower resolution, and then using magic powers to blow it up. And that's been the basis, really, of most GPU features and increases for the last handful of years have really been based around this upscaling stuff. Even consoles are using this, obviously. The Switch 2 has Nvidia parts in it, and DLSS is a possibility there, and PlayStation has been working with AMD for their own flavor, their own offshoot of this stuff, and that's what PSSR is.
Anyway, my experience with the Steam Machine as it ships was that there were a lot of games that just didn't run great and you could not make them run great. My testbed game, The First Descendant, which is, again, I have to under... I'm not going to tell you it's a good video game. What I am going to tell you is that it is a perhaps overly demanding video game in a technical sense in some ways. And it supports most of the modern features of modern games, letting you kind of play around with some of that stuff. And so it's kind of ended up becoming that testbed game for me. I don't intend to apologize for that. It's just how it's worked out. Anyway, FSR3 with The First Descendant, all of that other stuff, basically unplayable. Or if you want to get it running at a playable frame rate, the image quality takes a huge dive to the point where it looks like a swimmy, dreamy, almost like an AI-generated mess, or like you were playing a video game and the video game took DMT. I don't know. It's this weird, dreamy, fucked up looking quality, and the fidelity on it is unacceptable. And that was the only way to get it running at a decent frame rate, was to turn up the FSR3 stuff to a degree that's just like, this looks bad. FSR4 completely changes the conversation around that particular game and also others. Again, it's kind of been the test bed here.