AMD has recently extended its “Fluid Motion Frames” technology, its fancy schmancy rendition of driver side frame interpolation that was introduced with AMD FSR 3, enabling enhanced frame rates for a broader range of gamers.

Driver side frame interpolation is now here for Radeon RX 7000 series (RDNA 3) and surprisingly enough the 6000 series (RDNA 2) as well.

Last week, AMD released the “Adrenalin 23.30.01.02” graphics card driver update, which introduced support for AFMF (AMD Fluid Motion Frames). Initially, this technology was only available for the latest RDNA 3 “Radeon RX 7000” GPUs and now AMD have expanded support to include its “Radeon RX 6000” RDNA 2 GPUs in the Radeon RX 6000 family.

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-23-30-afmf-tech-preview

Do be warned however, the introduction of Fluid Motion Frames at this point in time is strictly on a “beta” Preview driver and may cause issues and loss of stability, having installed it myself I now have graphical glitches when viewing images inside of Windows and total hitching when watching videos in full screen.

AMD Fluid Motion Frames can be enabled on any DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 titles or at least that’s the theory anyway because this is a driver side implementation and not a genuine developer implementation of AMD’s FSR 3 results will vary wildly in terms of “performance” uplift, general effectiveness of the frame interpolation, loss of graphical fidelity with artifacts and ghosting and actual support.

Obviously much in the way of how NVIDIA artificially segment their RTX 4000 series of graphics cards with DLSS 3 being exclusive only to ADA Lovelace, in actuality RTX 3000 and even RTX 2000 series of graphics cards could theoretically enable DLSS 3 for frame interpolation, but the quality of experience would most likely be hindered by inferior and outdated RTX graphics cards.

According to NVIDIA’s Bryan Catanzaro what makes ADA Lovelace excel (more so) with fake frame generation is the advancements with its “optical flow accelerators” and I’m inclined to believe that somewhat, though obviously it should not be artificially locked to the most expensive GeForce products when it could just as easily “work” to a limited extent on previous generation hardware.

I’ve always had my reservations about frame interpolation since NVIDIA introduced their DLSS 3.0 update, I rightfully scrutinized DLSS 3 because the very concept of “frame interpolation” in the PC sector can go fuck itself, we already have to deal with barbaric upscaling technologies around us, the fallacy of upscaling and yet being quote on quote “better than native” resolution (when compared to a cancerous botched TAA implementation) according to NVIDIA’s top shills, Digital Foundry.

The very same Digital Foundry who declared in a sponsored video regarding NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 that frame interpolation was a “performance booster” and yet on their coverage of AMD’s fake frame solution it somehow “doesn’t” actually increase performance.

How it started.

How it’s going.

Imagine that.

When in reality all DLSS, XeSS and FSR have brought us is the justification of increasingly more barebones and cancerous PC ports, so what if every single modern game is a broken and unoptimized piece of shit that can’t even run at 4K 60 on modern hardware? Just use FSR / DLSS, it’s just as good.

But frame generation is where I draw the line, I can live with upscaling tech like FSR which works better when the native resolution is higher, but what good is it to incorporate frame interpolation if all it actually does is dramatically increase input latency over FSR / DLSS / XeSS upscaling without actually increasing the overall “smoothness” as your frame times practically remain identical?

And don’t even think about looking at your 1% lows either.

Now obviously, I’m not bagging AMD specifically here, I just hate the technology as “Fluid Motion Frames” or FSR 3 or HYPR-RX or whatever the goddamn fuck you want to call it in conjunction with NVIDIA’s proprietary black box tech just makes the future of PC gaming look ever the more poor in terms of actual performance and actual optimization.

But given how AMD’s interpretation is available to be used across the entire Radeon RX 7000 series and previous generation RX 6000 hardware on a DRIVER LEVEL, meaning this can be used across hundreds and hundreds of games (in theory) to a worse extent much like how “Radeon Super Resolution” provides FSR on a driver level too.

It’s the worse of two evils, I’d bank on FSR 3 and “Fluid Motion Frames” all day every day, it’s an open source solution that gives developers more freedom as a cross vendor “solution”. Though it begs to mention that developers can continue to incorporate cancerous TAA solutions and possibly pinning the blame of “ghosting” and “artifacts” on the upscaling tech rather than the game itself but I digress.

So does Fluid Motion Frames actually work? Well I don’t know, I’m not particularly retarded enough to buy NVIDIA’s “LDAT” vaporware to properly gauge input latencies but I have tried to use Fluid Motion Frames across several games with my own Radeon RX 6800 XT and my results are inconclusive.

So far only the in-built Radeon OSD overlay can accurately detect the “increase” in framerate, other OSDs simply cannot actually portray the theoretical framerate figure when Fluid Motion Frames are enabled. I have enabled the Radeon OSD on the left hand side of the screen while other measurements are displayed on the right, which is effectively the actual frame rate.

Playing Black Ops 3 at 3440×1440 on the custom zombies map of Rust, with Fluid Motion Frames enabled it’s theoretically “doubling” my framerate from ~110 to over 200 frames per second, however most likely due to the lack of AMD Anti-Lag+ being available for the RX 6000 series, the actual gameplay experience is far less smooth and fluid than simply having Fluid Motion Frames disabled which shoots my framerate up to 120 instantly.

So, for enabling Fluid Motion Frames I receive a performance drop of over 12% and my overall experience has been hindered as a result, with mouse movements feeling “jerkish” and less accurate.

So then I tried Borderlands 3, a notorious woke pile of shit providing an even more heinous gameplay experience, stutters galore normally, especially when running the game on DirectX 12.

Testing the game on DirectX 11 shows little to no benefit, the frames have visually “increased” and you’re not really going to be able to see and feel the actual changes it makes to gameplay, input lag is noticeable and my mouse movements aren’t as precise, and in some instances running around Sanctuary the Fluid Motion Frame performance drops drastically low, lower than native performance even.

Again, this isn’t a proper “performance analysis”, you’re not really going to see the difference between my own mouse movements when playing back a compressed video at 60 fps, this is merely me trying Fluid Motion Frames for the first time to see if I can notice anything in which case Borderlands 3 might be somewhat viable if Anti Lag+ was offered natively for RDNA 2.

I don’t really like it.

For me at least it negatively impacts actual performance and hinders the accuracy and sharpness of my own mouse movements, this is not an in-depth analysis this is just a first test and merely my own thoughts, I don’t believe that it’s viable to use Fluid Motion Frames on RX 6000 series hardware, I believe that frame generation should at least be properly tested for a positive enhancement with RDNA 3 graphics cards, but the fact that this driver side solution does indeed “work” on RDNA 2 is quite staggering.

So in reality my entire tests are completely worthless, nobody should really be judging Fluid Motion Frames unless analyzed properly on RDNA 3 GPUs at the very least, sorry for wasting your time I guess.

I’d love to properly evaluate Fluid Motion Frames / FSR 3 properly at a later date on the hardware intended for frame generation (RDNA 3 and beyond), not just in terms of raw performance but actual implications of input latency but I’m lazy and I’m extremely cheap, for a synthetic solution of which I despise dearly I seemingly can’t bring myself into buying a brand new graphics card alongside an open source response time tool.

For those like myself stuck on a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card I don’t believe it’s viable to enable frame interpolation, but you may in fact see a benefit if you’re running a moderately high native frame rate, say around 80-90 FPS and you happen to be running a high refresh rate panel (144-165Hz) but the input lag penalty might still put you off, but if you’re the kind of person who uses a controller to play their games frame generation might not actually be such a bad option to enable.

Or you could just buy a quality display, such as a premium OLED television and enable black frame insertion, there’s a fucking lifehack for you.

But even still, AMD can keep their fake frames all I ask for is Anti Lag +.