AMD Previews AI-Enhanced Fluid Motion Frames 2 To Crush Latency On Radeon GPUs

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AMD seems to like releasing technologies that aren’t quite perfect out of the gate, only to release a second version that’s quite good. The company did this with Precision Boost Overdrive, it did this with FidelityFX Super Resolution, and now it has done it once more with its Fluid Motion Frames feature. A new driver enables preliminary support for “Fluid Motion Frames 2” in just about any game.

In case you aren’t familiar, “AMD Fluid Motion Frames” (AFMF) is the name of a driver-based frame generation technology that doesn’t require game integration. You simply toggle on AFMF in the AMD Adrenalin software and enjoy the benefits of frame generation in whatever game. However, the original version had some limitations and was somewhat questionable in terms of its utility.
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Elden Ring hits 60 FPS even with ray-tracing using AFMF 2 on our Ryzen 7 8700G’s Radeon 780M.

AFMF 2 is a considerable update over the original version. For one thing, it now supports OpenGL and Vulkan in addition to Direct3D 11 and DirectX 12 games. Using AI, AMD has updated the algorithm used to generate the additional frames, and there are now two separate settings to toggle. One is “Search Mode,” and users can use this option to control exactly how the algorithm falls back to native rendering during periods of high motion.

AMD emphasizes that AFMF 2 is part of HYPR-RX, but you don’t have to enable HYPR-RX to use it.

Meanwhile, “Performance Mode” lets you enable a performance-optimized version of AFMF that offers lower quality, but improved ability to increase framerates. This is meant for machines with integrated graphics, including various gaming handhelds (such as the ASUS ROG Ally X) as well as the Ryzen 8000G family. In fact, that’s what AMD tested it with, and we did too, albeit briefly.
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Anime RPG Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis looks quite fluid even on max settings with AFMF 2.

Loading up a few games on a test bench with a Ryzen 7 8700G CPU, 48GB of DDR5-7400 memory, and the new AMD preview driver, we found that AFMF 2 works very well to improve the visual smoothness of games. This is true even when they aren’t already running at a high frame rate, which was a major limitation of the original AFMF. Not only that, but we also didn’t notice any particular image quality issues.

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Annoyingly vague chart: AMD

While using AFMF 2 does definitely increase the visual fluidity of games, it doesn’t do anything for their input responsiveness. However, it also doesn’t really make things worse. In fact, AFMF 2 supposedly has a smaller input lag hit than the original algorithm by as much as 28%, at least according to AMD. We didn’t measure it ourselves, but speaking subjectively, the difference in input lag between AFMF 2 off and AFMF 2, in combination with Radeon Anti-Lag, is very small.

Enabling AFMF 2 currently must be done manually, but AMD is seeking help from the community to identify cases where it works well. If you’d like to help out, all you need is a Radeon GPU from the 700 family, 6000 family, or 7000 family. That’s RDNA 3 integrated graphics, and RDNA 2 or 3 discrete graphics. You can head over to AMD’s site to read the company’s remarks on AFMF, or simply grab the new preview driver over here.

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