AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 Amps ASUS ROG Ally X Gaming with a huge increase in FPS

In case you missed it, yesterday we published our in-depth review of the ASUS ROG Ally X portable gaming PC with over 80 games tested. We’re very happy with the machine, as it fixes almost all of the issues with the original ROG Ally system while offering a better gaming experience, thanks largely to the extra 8GB of RAM. However, this is still a case of gaming on integrated graphics, which means you need to keep your expectations of the system’s capabilities modest.

What if there was a way to press a combination of keys and nearly double your frame rate in almost any game? That’s the promise of AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames 2 technology. 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 technology on the Ryzen 7 8700G, using the same Hawk Point chip as the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. But what about real-world mobile devices?

As we noted in our review, ASUS controls the driver distribution on ROG Ally machines. That means you can’t just download and install AMD’s latest Technical Preview driver to try out the frame-stepping feature. However, it is possible to try out AFMF2 on the ROG Ally X—you’ll just have to force-install the driver. It’s a bit of a complicated process, so check out this video from YouTube channel Ally in Hand for a tutorial.

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

The “Active” indicator will only be visible while playing.

Is everything working? You can confirm this by checking if AMD FMF2 is present in Adrenalin. At this point, it is important to remember that AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames is a type of frame generation technology. By inserting additional frames through interpolation, frame generation increases the visual frame rate, resulting in smoother visuals for gameplay. It does not offer any other benefits of increased frame rate, including better control responsiveness, since the actual frame rate of the game engine remains unchanged.

That said, the gains in visual fluidity can be quite large. We tested the third-person action platformer Oneirism 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 areas. It looks pretty decent on the 120Hz Freesync Premium LCD Ally X, but press Alt+Shift+G to enable AFMF2 and you’ll see the frame rate skyrocket into the 80s – impressive results for an integrated GPU, and the visual difference is incredibly obvious.

We were inspired to test FMF2 on the Ally X by a YouTube video from the “ETA PRIME” channel, which emulation and portable console enthusiasts are probably already familiar with. In the video, ETA PRIME tested AFMF2 in several popular games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, Forza Horizon 5, Marvel’s Spider-Man RemasteredAND Horizon Zero Dawn. The results were impressive, showing a significant increase in frames per second rendered, which translates into much smoother gameplay visuals.

However, in our own testing, we found that AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames 2 technology still tends to turn off when the action gets heated. AMD says this happens when there are too many changes between frames, and there’s a risk that the FMF interpolation algorithm will create visual artifacts. Unfortunately, this usually happens exactly when you need the extra frames, such as during combat. We also noticed this during our testing on the Ryzen 7 8700G. Oneirismyou can make AFMF2 turn off by simply running through the landscape, and the frame rate will drop noticeably in the blink of an eye. So in a game like Oneirismit’s not a great game in terms of consistency, but for slower-paced titles like Red Dead Redemption 2It’s an easy shortcut to dramatically improved performance. AMD FMF2 now works in borderless windowed games and supports Vulkan and OpenGL alongside Direct3D 11 and DirectX 12. There seems to be a slight latency penalty, but thanks to the AI ​​optimizations AMD has made in the second iteration of the technology, it’s very small and you probably won’t notice it. AMD doesn’t recommend using AFMF2 for intense competitive gaming, but otherwise it seems like a quick way to get 50-80% frame rate increases in the vast majority of games.