AMD has a new trick to make games run smoother – but only for RX 7000 GPUs
All the focus was on the launch of FSR 3 yesterday (finally), but AMD has also implemented a separate Fluid Motion Frame feature at the driver level, which aims to significantly increase frame rates using frame generation technology.
What is the difference between these technologies? We’ll get to that in a moment, but the most important thing to know about AMD’s Fluid Motion Frame (AFMF) technology is that, because it’s a driver feature, it can be applied to games without the developer having to build in support ( as required with FSR 3).
What does it do? AFMF literally plugs in extra frames (engages in frame generation) for the game to increase the number of frames per second (fps). The result is an artificially smoother frame rate experience.
If VideoCardz According to reports, there are some initial catches. First off, AFMF is still in beta and has only been released in AMD’s Adrenalin preview driver, and it currently officially supports 12 games (including Starfield – see the full list below).
- A plague story – Requiem
- Border countries 3
- Check
- Empty space
- Deep Galactic Rock
- Dying Light 2
- Far cry
- Ghostwire: Tokyo
- Hitman 3
- Hogwarts legacy
- Horizon zero dawn
- Enhanced edition of Metro Exodus
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Resident Evil 3
- Resident Evil 4
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
- Starfield
- The Last of Us Part 1
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
In addition to these caveats, also note that this feature is only available for AMD’s current generation (RX 7000 family) graphics cards.
Analysis: An exciting new world of smoother gaming – with a few catches
So, where is the line drawn between FSR 3 and AFMF? Well, the latter is driver-side frame generation, and an advanced form of that is included in FSR 3 (along with the upscaling capabilities and so on).
You can basically think of it as FSR 3 getting that fancy frame generation (which of course is also in Nvidia DLSS 3) and much more, while AFMF offers a toned-down version of it – but with the significant plus of being available with much wider support .
So it will be applicable to a whole range of games, but AFMF won’t be nearly as good as FSR 3 and its frame generation quality (obviously, otherwise FSR 3 would be quite redundant). The other thing to remember is that AFMF will obviously be exclusive to AMD Radeon GPUs as it’s in the Adrenalin driver, and as mentioned it’s only RDNA 3 graphics cards to start with.
Ultimately, we may see more GPUs on our list of AMD’s best graphics cards, and we can certainly hope that the RX 6000 family will be taken into account.
While a dozen games are officially supported as mentioned, as AMD makes clear, you can enable AFMF for any DX11 or DX12 game using the app settings in the Adrenalin software.
Because this is still in the early stages of AFMF, results are likely to be unpredictable.
AMD throws one in bunch of side notes for those who will be experimenting with AFMF, and that includes the fact that: “AFMF can introduce additional latency into games and is recommended to be combined with AMD Radeon Anti-Lag/Anti-Lag+ for the optimal experience.”
Team Red added: “As AFMF may introduce additional latency into games, AFMF may not provide the optimal experience in fast-paced competitive titles.”
At this point you will also need to play in full screen to use AFMF, with no HDR and V-Sync disabled, and ideally FreeSync is also recommended for the best experience with this frame rate generation technology.