Do you all remember that mod we talked about before? It's developed by a netizen, allowing gamers to boost frame rates painlessly even with older graphics cards.
Its principle is to replace the DLSS 3 with high barriers to entry from the old Huang family with the open-source FSR 3 from Su Ma's family. Then, you can enjoy the joy of frame interpolation technology on any non-40 series N card.
I have to say, this clever move may have some minor bugs in certain games, but it does bring the dividends of frame generation technology to many old graphics cards.
Who wouldn't want their gaming frame rates to skyrocket without having to change their graphics card hardware, right? With my 2080, I'm set for another 5 years!
But hey, let's not forget, the prerequisite for swapping out DLSS 3 for a mod is that the game itself has to support DLSS 3. If the game doesn't support it...
Sorry, but the frame rate and stuff won't see any increase.
However, AMD recently rolled out a pretty neat update, solving the issue where A-card users couldn't utilize frame generation tech.
They introduced a new feature called AFMF (AMD Fluid Motion Frames).
The impressive thing about AFMF is that it doesn't require game developers to adapt it like DLSS 3 or FSR 3 in order to enable it on a specific game.
The aim of this initiative is that as long as your game supports DX11 or DX12, you'll be able to experience frame generation joy on A cards.
In short, if you have an A card powered by RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 GPU cores, whether it's integrated or discrete graphics, after updating the firmware drivers, you'll be able to enable AFMF's frame generation feature in AMD driver game settings.
Then, just casually open up any game, and you'll immediately notice a significant increase in frames per second.
For example, Tony tested it with a 7840H laptop. After enabling AFMF, the frame rate in Overwatch at 2K resolution jumped from 80 frames to 110 frames.
The performance of the Gwent launcher in The Witcher 3 also saw a boost, going from 40 frames to 70 frames, which is almost a doubling of performance.
However, another game from the Polish donkey, "Cyberpunk 2077," is a bit disrespectful; it crashes with a black screen directly when AFMF is enabled.
And the recently popular games "Worker" and "Magic Beast Paru" have gone through some reverse optimization waves, ironically becoming even laggier...
In terms of user experience, AFMF doesn't perform well on laptops. While the frame rate increases, the difference isn't significant due to the relatively low refresh rate of laptop screens.
Apart from that, in FPS games, when the view shakes rapidly, there isn't enough time for frame rendering, resulting in a drop back to the original frame rate, and there's a certain delay issue.
There's this feeling that even though the frame rate has increased, the experience doesn't seem to have improved...
On the desktop side, with an RX 6800 graphics card paired with a 4K 160Hz monitor equipped with FreeSync, the experience is much smoother compared to integrated graphics.
Whether it's FPS competitive games or "Cyberpunk 2077", doubling the frame rate is a performance boost, making gameplay feel quite futuristic.
The improvement in frame rates with AFMF is indeed noticeable to the naked eye, but overall, there's still a certain gap compared to DLSS 3 frame generation.
This gap stems partly from differences in game developers' adaptation and partly from NVIDIA's superior utilization of AI horsepower in frame generation, which currently surpasses AMD by a considerable margin.
To put it simply, the speed and quality of AFMF frame generation are far inferior to DLSS 3. However, AFMF does have its own advantages. For example, in the integrated graphics field, NVIDIA's DLSS 3 is completely irrelevant.
In the recently booming PC handheld gaming sector, it happens to be the main battlefield where AFMF can shine.
If you happen to have an ROG Ally equipped with a Z1 Extreme processor, after updating to the latest firmware, you can also enable the AFMF option.
At a screen resolution of 900P, "GTA5" can double its frame rate from over 50 frames per second to around 100 frames per second when enabled.
Other AAA games like "Big Brother 2" and "Sekiro" can also achieve doubled frame rates.
When playing AAA games on handheld consoles, it's certain that we can't expect graphics improvements. The hardware's limitations are set, but if we can increase the frame rates associated with game smoothness, it can indeed significantly enhance the gaming experience, which is something that can be immediately felt.
Overall, the AFMF technology currently excels in frame interpolation, but the issue of latency still objectively exists. If a non-FreeSync screen is used, the sense of delay will be more apparent.
Currently, AFMF remains exclusive to AMD. If in the future this technology could be open-sourced and shared like FSR, then those old graphics cards might have a chance to shine again.
Looking ahead, if AMD has a way to disrupt Nvidia's monopoly on exclusive features, consumers will have more reasons to choose Radeon graphics cards.
