If you read that headline and thought, “wait, didn’t AFMF 2 already come out,” then you’re thinking of the preview release back in July. At that time, AMD released a beta driver that contained support for the AI-improved, driver-based frame generation technology, and invited users to help test it. As a beta driver, it had various limitations, including a lack of the latest driver updates.
Now, AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 has found its way to the mainline driver branch with the release of AMD Software Adrenalin Edition version 24.9.1. This update supports all Radeon RX 6000, RX 7000, and newer AMD GPUs, which primarily means the Radeon 890M graphics built into the company’s Ryzen AI 300 processors.
It’s important to note support for those integrated GPUs because one of the major features of AFMF 2 is specialized “Performance” mode specifically meant for use with integrated graphics processors. It’s not completely clear what the technical difference between Quality and Performance modes is, but the upshot is that it’s a less intensive option that works better on integrated GPUs.
We’ve already written pretty extensively about AFMF 2 and tested it in our original reporting, so you can head over there to read about that. However, it’s not the only new feature coming in the latest driver. Another cool upgrade coming to AMD graphics users is “Geometric Downscaling.” This is a video playback feature that promises to improve the image quality of downscaled videos.
Basically, when you’re playing a video in a viewport that is lower-resolution than the video itself, the video stream has to be downscaled, but doing this in a native fashion can introduce video artifacts, just like aliasing in a video game. The new Geometric Downscaling feature offers, in AMD’s words, “a better visual experience” while watching videos.
Unfortunately, Geometric Downscaling does require an RDNA 3 GPU, excluding those using Radeon RX 6000 parts and the integrated graphics of most of AMD’s desktop CPUs as well as many of its mobile processors, like the Ryzen 6000 family and Ryzen 7030 series parts. Hopefully AMD can get the feature backported to the previous architecture, but the company hasn’t promised to do so.
If you’re an AMD user, you probably already have the new driver queued up for download in the Adrenalin software, but if you’d prefer to do things the old-school way, you can still head to the company’s site to grab it.