There's a new version of AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) to try out, and good news for Radeon GPU owners: it's vastly, almost comically, better than the original. While AMD's initial approach to driver-level frame rendering—the framerate-based rendering trick on which FSR 3 and DLSS 3 are based—was plagued with issues of stuttering, stuttering, and visual artifacts, Fluid Motion Frames 2 is as smooth and good as you could possibly want it to be. Without sacrificing the ability to use it in any DirectX 11 or 12-based game, in theory.
AFMF 2 is the highlight of a new AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition preview driver that's available to download now for Radeon RX 7000 and 6000 graphics cards, promising all sorts of improvements over this buggy first release. Reduced latency! Even higher FPS! More consistent frame timings! These are all welcome changes for discerning Fast Gamers, not to mention the added customization options. Here, you can specify a new “Seek” setting to match your monitor resolution (High is recommended for 1440p and above, Standard is supposedly better for 1080p), or switch to a more tuned, less system-intensive Performance mode for integrated graphics.
For those of us walking the path of the big, fat graphics card, I'll say that these settings are largely the same; on an RX 7700 XT running the game at 1440p, all four possible permutations of Seek and Performance modes look and perform pretty much the same. Instead, it's the frame output itself that marks AFMF 2 as a real step forward, turning a stuttering de-interlacing into a serious DLSS 3 alternative.
Let’s take latency. This is a standard trade-off for frame output, and even DLSS 3 isn’t immune, but the original Fluid Motion Frames were noticeably laggier. AFMF 2 seems to have reduced this latency across the board: the 17-20ms additional latency in Horizon Zero Dawn is now just 10-11ms, exactly the same as Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, which previously clocked in at 47ms. Cyberpunk 2077 also sees a significant improvement, with latency dropping from 51ms in AFMF 1 to a brisk 12-14ms with the new version.
As with any frame rendering technology, the danger of talking about 'feel' is that the numbers can lie, as a boosted 60fps will only have a 30fps responsiveness when half the frames are rendered outside of the usual rendering process. And yet, these latency reductions make AFMF 2 to feel better than before. Inputs are just a little sharper, making the whole endeavor more appealing to shooters, racers, or hardcore platformers.
Then there’s just… how it looks. Honestly, it’s hard to tell if AMD has made improvements to the accuracy of individual frames. But that’s never been an issue for frame rendering systems (aside from games that simply got it wrong, like Immortals of Aveum did at launch), because the raw frames are passed around so quickly that it’s effectively impossible to pick out errors. AFMF 2, however, does a much better job of seamlessly interweaving real and fake frames. When I first tested Fluid Motion Frames in Infinite Wealth, it looked terrible, with constant micro-stuttering that meant the two types of frames were being displayed inconsistently. Now, that juddering is gone entirely, leaving a smooth, fluid type of motion that’s much closer to the frame rate gains you’d get from an upscaler.
AFMF 2 does not correct or improve Each There's not much to like about the original. Despite AMD's claims of faster performance, the overall frame rate numbers are comparable to those of AFMF 1, and it still employs the overly cautious trick of dropping/disabling frame generation if it detects very sudden changes in the on-screen image. This is to prevent production errors caused by a lack of easily accessible reference frames, but as with version 1.0, you're more likely to notice a sudden frame rate drop when you shake a camera than you are to notice a suspicious frame that's only visible for 1/90th of a second.
Ultimately, you’re better off with a proper GPU-based framerate generator like FSR 3.1, or DLSS 3 if you’ve got the right RTX 40-series card. The catch, of course, is that they only work in certain games, unlike the more neutral Fluid Motion Frames. And while version 2.0 isn’t perfect, it’s still an improvement worth using, unlike the first attempt.