AMD’s new graphics driver offers a free framerate boost for all PC games – with a few standout features

By James On Jan 24, 2024

AMD has released a new GPU driver, Adrenalin version 24.1.1, which uses Fluid Motion Frame technology to increase frame rates.

AMD’s Fluid Motion Frame (AFMF) feature is driver-level frame generation, or to put it another way, it’s a bit like FSR 3 (which includes AFMF, and much more), but it works for all DX11 and DX12 -PC games with no exceptions (while FSR 3 must be supported by a game to work).

Obviously you’re not getting the same experience that FSR 3 offers, and there are trade-offs here with the quality as you’d expect, but it’s still a cool feature that increases fps (frames per second) for those with RX 6000 and RX 7000 graphics cards. (Unfortunately, RX 5000 GPUs or older generations are not supported – and neither are Nvidia GPUs, as this is a driver feature).

Frame generation is a very literal term in that this feature produces and inserts additional frames into the active game, increasing fps and providing an (artificially) smoother gameplay experience (in theory, but with some caveats, which we will come back to).

AFMF was previously testing with AMD’s preview graphics drivers, but this marks the official release in a completed Adrenalin driver. As well as AFMF, AMD’s Adrenalin 24.1.1 driver also features support for a number of new games: Tekken 8 and Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (the latest in the renamed Yakuza franchise).

Plus the other big step here is support for the latest in AMD’s arsenal of RDNA 3 graphics cards, the RX 7600 XT, which doubles the VRAM compared to its vanilla sibling, the RX 7600.

Analysis: Thinking outside the box

It’s of course great to have a look at frame generation at the driver level, because for games that don’t support FSR 3 you can get a nice boost. In fact, AMD assumes that frame rates can be almost doubled in the best case (for example, citing an increase of up to 97% at 1080p, although that is with FSR 2 in quality mode in combination with AFMF).

As we said, there are caveats here, including that only RX 6000 and 7000 GPUs are invited to the party (and 700M series GPUs for laptops – and indeed portables like the Asus ROG Ally). The other big catch is that, as AMD notes in the release notes, “AFMF preserves image quality by dynamically disabling frame generation during rapid visual motion.”

In other words, in fast-moving scenes, the feature is automatically disabled, as visual artifacts and other annoying things can pop up, and AMD doesn’t want that to ruin the experience.

AMD also notes that AFMF “can introduce additional latency into games and may not provide the optimal experience for fast-paced competitive titles,” such as shooters as an obvious example. It is recommended that Radeon Anti-Lag be active to reduce input latency. Ideally, for these types of games you should also be running at a decently smooth frame rate in the first place, pre-AFMF (60fps minimum).

The argument from opponents is that AFMF is certainly not that great for some games, and because you already need a smooth frame rate, boosting is less useful anyway (and also that it does not happen in certain scenarios). , Anyway).

That said, AFMF is clearly better than nothing, and will work well in some games, but there may be cases where performance is shaky. Even if you enable AFMF globally, AMD explains that certain fast-paced shooters and similar genres – which are more prone to potential issues – will still have it disabled, and you’ll need to manually enable AFMF in the per-game settings. . The message here is that if you do this, be prepared for potentially bad results, especially if the game is running at a lower fps on your system (at least before AFMF is applied).

It’s possible that further refinement could improve the way AFMF handles fast-paced games with lots of quick, fast movement, and we’ll see later. But for now, this is still an impressive tool for speeding up fps in a wide range of games – across the board (well, for DX11/12) – even if it works best for titles where you already have a somewhat smooth frame rate .

Through VideoCardz