It’s another packed edition of DF Direct this week, with our latest thoughts on Star Wars Outlaws, impressions on Nobody Wants To Die and the Visions of Mana demo plus a look at how ray tracing is being introduced into the next wave of EA Sports titles. However, the focus for this piece is on the release of a new technical preview for AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames technology – AFMF 2. This is the Radeon team’s second attempt at driver-level frame generation and if you have the means, I highly recommend checking it out.
First of all, it’s worth getting all of the caveats out of the way: driver-level frame generation can never hope to match the quality of Nvidia DLSS 3 frame-gen or AMD’s FSR 3 alternative. These technologies have deep-level integration into game engines that allows for much higher levels of fidelity from generated frames. AFMF is essentially FSR 3 without the additional information given up by the game, so in effect, it works in a similar way to smooth motion interpolation in TVs. The game frame is rendered, then another is held, and then AFMF interpolates an ‘in-betweener’ image to sandwich between the two.
With only screen-space information to work from, AFMF has to make a lot of guesses in only a very short amount of time, so more artefacts and errors will present themselves. However, similar to other frame generation techniques, generated frames are effectively strobing between standard rendered frames. The higher the base frame-rate, the faster the strobing effect and the less noticeable the artefacts will be. AMD typically says that 60fps is a good base-level frame-rate for FSR 3, so it stands to reason that AFMF would require a higher base fps level to better hide its inadequacies.
0:00:00 Introduction0:02:01 News 01: Star Wars Outlaws gameplay preview!0:14:31 News 02: Nobody Wants To Die impresses0:23:05 News 03: EA Sports titles getting RTGI0:38:55 News 04: PS VR2 dramatically discounted0:47:47 News 05: Visions of Mana demo released0:55:47 News 06: ROG Ally X benchmarked!1:03:40 News 07: AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 previewed1:17:45 News 08: Destiny 3 not in development1:25:51 Supporter Q1: Could you compare in-home streaming services like Steam Link?1:33:01 Supporter Q2: Where is the console Minecraft ray tracing update?1:38:56 Supporter Q3: Could upcoming consoles feature more bespoke kinds of hardware?1:46:42 Supporter Q4: Do developers deserve flack for not optimising their games, or are more demanding titles just a consequence of graphics advancement?1:54:37 Supporter Q5: Why wasn’t x86 adopted for earlier consoles?1:58:27 Supporter Q6: Could Microsoft release their backwards compatible Xbox titles on PC?2:03:29 Supporter Q7: Is the M4 iPad Pro’s display good enough for Oliver?
However, the reality is that an acceptable base frame-rate varies according to the content you’re feeding the frame generation tech along with the user’s own perception. I was OK with the FSR 3 implementation in the console versions of Immortals of Aveum where the frame-rate often sat in the mid-40s. And even with AFMF 2, Hellblade is a slower-paced game, so the same mid-40s base frame-rate worked well enough in taking frame-rate up into the high 80s and early 90s. In my testing with an LG CX OLED display with variable refresh rate support, limiting base frame-rate to a max of 57fps-59fps kept me within the VRR window and the results were fine. I could play Control at 1440p, upscaling to 4K at medium settings with all RT features active and the experience was fine.