AMD's FSR3 And Fluid Motion Frames Arrive Today Starting With These Games
People have already argued until they're blue in the face about the merits and demerits of NVIDIA's DLSS frame generation, but in our eyes, that divide is basically split along "people who have used DLSS FG" and "people who haven't used it." In other words, we're pretty fond of DLSS FG around these parts. It's not necessarily applicable to every game, but it's a perfect fit for single-player action experiences.
It makes sense, then, that AMD is debuting its own frame generation technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution 3, with a pair of games that are exactly that. Square Enix's Forspoken may not have been a smash hit, but it's a very pretty game, and it's also extremely demanding on both CPUs and GPUs. That makes it an excellent candidate for accelerating through frame generation.
The other title getting FSR3 support today is Ascendant Studios' Immortals of Aveum. A recent release that sadly went overlooked amid the Baldur's Gate 3 and Armored Core VI hype, Immortals of Aveum is an Unreal Engine 5 FPS with a magical twist. It takes full advantage of UE5's suite of tech tricks, meaning Nanite virtualized geometry as well as Lumen ray-traced global illumination. It's a gorgeous title and likewise extremely resource heavy; the current-gen consoles have to run it at 720p and upscale to 4K with FSR 2.
FSR3 is exactly what you think it is. The technology at its core is known as "Fluid Motion Frames", and it is a frame interpolation technology not unlike the "motion smoothing" features you see in most TVs these days. FSR3 builds on that foundation with game-specific integrations allowing it to avoid some of the serious artifacts we saw with the very first versions of NVIDIA's frame generation technologies.
AMD says that FSR3 FG can raise frame rates as much as double, and that doesn't count gains from FSR3 upscaling, which is still a thing just as DLSS upscaling is still a thing. Using both upscaling and frame generation in concert is how AMD arrived at that "4x framerate" number it was quoting awhile back.
So why did this take so long? Why haven't we been interpolating our game renders for years now? If you've read up on NVIDIA's version of this tech, you already know, but in case you've missed the memo, it's because interpolation necessarily increases input latency by at least one frame. The thing is, if your framerate is high enough, one frame is not very long at all.
AMD's provided a couple of graphs to demonstrate what we're talking about here. They use the term "motion to photon latency," which describes the real time between when you press a button or move the mouse and that change is reflected on screen. If all else is equal, a higher frame rate necessarily means a reduction in motion to photon latency. Make no mistake; most of the latency gains here are from upscaling, and frame generation does increase input lag when it's enabled. However, the end result is still significantly lower-latency than without using FSR at all.
AMD cheekily doesn't present any data on input latency when using frame generation without upscaling, which is a thing you can do on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware. We'll spoil the suspense: it's going to be a little worse than without using frame generation. Whether a tiny bit of extra input lag is worth nearly twice the visual fluidity is going to be a decision you have to make for yourself. Do recall that you can enable Radeon Anti-Lag or NVIDIA's Low-latency Mode to somewhat counteract the effects.
That's right, you can use NVIDIA's Low-Latency Mode to counteract the lag increase from FSR3 FG. That's because, just like FSR2, AMD's new technology is not exclusive to its own graphics cards. AMD recommends a GPU from the Radeon RX 5000 series, GeForce RTX 20 family, or Intel A7 branch to make use of FSR3 FG, but it doesn't sound like the game software will prevent you from enabling it regardless. The company also recommends an average frame rate before FG of 60 FPS to get the best results, though.
As we mentioned before, you can use FSR3 FG without using FSR3 upscaling. However, there's actually a new mode that you may want to consider for the highest visual fidelity, and it's called "Native AA" mode. This really isn't a complex idea; what it does is apply the FSR2 temporal algorithm without performing any upscaling. In other words, the game is rendered at native resolution, and FSR2 serves as a sort of TAA.
This has already been informally available in at least one game—Starfield—and likely at least a few more. Any game that lets you enable FSR2 and then either manually set a resolution scalar or enable dynamic resolution scaling during FSR2 operation could in theory provide "Native AA" mode if performance is high enough. In any case, the new mode should look pretty nice.
Of course, it might be the case that you're not exactly itching to play (or re-play) either of these games. If that's true, then don't be distraught, because there's a list of twenty other games that are supported for AMD's Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) technology in its Technical Preview form. Fluid Motion Frames is, as we noted above, the name AMD has attached to its frame generation technology, but without the FSR3 game-specific integrations, it instead has to be toggled on in the driver.
Actually, despite the list above, you can apparently enable AFMF for any game in the AMD Adrenalin software. There are some limitations, though. You'll have to be playing in fullscreen mode, and you'll have to disable both HDR output and V-Sync. AMD recommends using it along with a FreeSync display for best results. Just like with FSR3 FG, you will want to enable Radeon Anti-Lag to counteract the input latency increase. Curiously, AMD says it recommends AFMF for games running at a minimum of 55 FPS in 1080p, and 70 FPS for higher-resolution displays.
Oh yeah, and there's one other big limitation, too: you'll need to be using a Radeon RX 7000 series graphics card. It's not clear if that will always be the case for this feature or if it's just a "for now" thing for the Technical Preview, but either way, if you want to try out AFMF right now, you'll need to go over here and download this beta driver from AMD. Note that alt-tabbing during AFMF operation may crash your graphics driver (and thus your game), so try to avoid that.
FSR3 is coming to a bunch more games sooner or later. Some of the titles on this list are pretty exciting, like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Crimson Desert, and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II. Notably, the patch notes for Immortals of Aveum remark that FSR3 FG might be coming to consoles, too. If it works well, this could be a real boon for people with marginal performance in games. That is, if it indeed works well. We haven't tested FSR3, but we're planning to give it a shot soon. If you try it out, let us know what you think in the comments.
