AMD’s frame generation tech, dubbed AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), is the lesser-known counterpart to NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 and the company’s own FSR 3, both of which require per-game support to work. AFMF works on a driver-level, which means any modern game is supported right out of the box. AFMF 2 improves on this by adding more granular controls, wider compatibility and reduced latency.
AFMF Gets Upgraded
The feature is currently only available via a dedicated preview driver (meaning standard Adrenalin driver will not get this feature at this time), which you can download in this driver webpage. Supported hardware include Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs, as well as Ryzen APUs with Radeon 600M, 700M or 800M onboard graphics.
AFMF 2 improves on the original implementation in several fronts. First off, AMD claims the newer version cuts latency by 28% on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX with Cyberpunk 2077 running at 4K “RT Ultra” preset compared to the original; while Ryzen 8700G (Radeon 780M) sees a 12% reduction in latency for Counter-Strike 2. The API support is also expanded to include OpenGL and Vulkan-based titles, on top of existing DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games.
With AFMF 2, AMD is also providing two new parameters to adjust: Search Mode and Performance Mode. ‘Search Mode’ essentially uses AI to improve the resolution fallback mechanism – in normal situations, AFMF is temporarily disabled in fast motion scenes to avoid image smearing issues, but this switchover process may introduce jitter (microstuttering). Search Mode is designed to reduce the aggression of fallbacks, which should improve frame consistency.
Performance Mode is fairly straightforward – with this enabled, this reduces the processing overhead, which can be useful for integrated graphics that comes with limited performance on tap. As such, AMD says the ‘Auto’ setting will use Quality for discrete graphics (which has the same overhead as AFMF 1), while Performance is default for all integrated graphics.
Other improvements include support for borderless fullscreen mode, though RDNA 2-based models, such as Radeon RX 6000 and Radeon 600M, will lack borderless fullscreen support. AMD is also coupling AFMF 2 with Radeon Chill, which saves power by capping the framerates.
Pokdepinion: I can see Ryzen laptops benefit quite a lot from this.
