AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 Amps ASUS ROG Ally X Gaming With A Huge FPS Lift

In case you missed it, just yesterday we published our in-depth review of the ASUS ROG Ally X gaming handheld with over 80 games tested. We're very fond of the machine, as it resolves nearly all of the problems with the original ROG Ally system while offering a superior gaming experience thanks mostly to an extra 8GB of RAM. It's still a matter of gaming on integrated graphics, though, which means you have to keep your expectations of the system's capabilities modest.

What if there were a way to press a key combination and nearly double your frame rate in just about any game? That's the promise of AMD's Fluid Motion Frames 2. Just four days ago, AMD released a preview driver that enables the feature on RDNA 2 discrete GPUs and all RDNA 3 GPUs—including those built into CPUs. We tested AMD's FMF2 on a Ryzen 7 8700G, in fact, using the same Hawk Point silicon as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. But what about actual handhelds?

As we noted in our review, ASUS controls driver distribution on the ROG Ally machines. That means you can't simply download and install the latest Technical Preview driver from AMD to try out the frame generation function. However, it is possible to try AFMF2 on the ROG Ally X—you'll just have to force-install the driver. This is a slightly tricky process, so check out this video from YouTube channel "Ally in Hand" for a tutorial.

If you're in a hurry and familiar with forcing drivers, there are basically three things you need to know: uninstall the AMD software before you do any of this, select specifically the "Radeon (TM) 780M Graphics" option when forcing the driver via the "Have disk..." method, and then install the AMD Adrenalin software using the "ccc2_install" executable in the \Drivers\Display\WT6A_INF\B405374 directory. After you've done that, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme's integrated GPU will show up in Device Manager and AMD Adrenalin as "Radeon (TM) 780M Graphics."


Got it all working? You can make sure by checking if the AMD FMF2 option is present in Adrenalin. At this point, it's important to keep in mind that AMD's Fluid Motion Frames is a type of frame generation technology. By inserting extra frames through interpolation, frame generation increases the visual frame rate, resulting in smoother gameplay visuals. This does not offer any other benefits of increased frame rate, including improved control responsiveness, since the actual game engine's frame rate remains unchanged.


With that said, the gains in visual fluidity can be quite large. We tested the indie third-person action platformer Onirism on the ROG Ally X and, using 1280×720 resolution in this surprisingly-heavy Unity title, we can achieve around 45 FPS in the game's huge open world areas. This looks pretty decent on the Ally X's 120-Hz Freesync Premium LCD, but hit Alt+Shift+G to enable AFMF2 and you'll see frame rates skyrocketing all the way up into the 80s—impressive results, for an integrated GPU, and the visual difference is extremely obvious.

We were inspired to test FMF2 on the Ally X by a YouTube video from the channel "ETA PRIME," with whom emulation and handheld enthusiasts will no doubt already be familiar. In the video, ETA PRIME tested AFMF2 in several high-profile games including Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, Forza Horizon 5, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn. The results were impressive, showing substantial increases in the rendered frame rate, which translates to much smoother gameplay visuals.


In our own testing, though, we found that AMD's Fluid Motion Frames 2 does still have a tendency to disable itself when the action gets heated. AMD says that this happens when there is too much change from frame to frame and there's a risk of the FMF interpolation algorithm creating visual artifacts. Unfortunately, this usually happens exactly when you would want extra frames, such as during combat. We also noticed this in our testing on the Ryzen 7 8700G. In Onirism, it's possible to make AFMF2 flick off by simply sprinting across the landscape, the framerate visibly dropping in an instant.

So in a game like Onirism, it's not great for consistency, but in a slower-paced title like Red Dead Redemption 2, it's an easy shortcut to radically improved performance. AMD FMF2 works in borderless-windowed games now, and it supports Vulkan and OpenGL alongside Direct3D 11 and DirectX 12. There does appear to be a small latency penalty, but thanks to the AI optimizations made by AMD for the second revision of the technology, it's very small and you probably won't notice it. AMD doesn't recommend using AFMF2 for intense competitive games, but aside from that, it appears to be a quick route to a 50-80% increase in frame rate in the vast majority of games.