Frame Generation for Every Game - AMD Fluid Motion Frames Analyzed

[Music] welcome back to hard Bron box today we're taking look at amd's fluid motion frames technology otherwise known as ammf this is a driver-based implementation of frame generation that allows you to use the technology with any game you like it simply takes the current and previous frames as output from the game and interpolates a new frame between them without any interaction from the game itself thus ensuring broad compatibility with many games that haven't integrated frame generation already through FSR 3 or de S3 without game integration though ammf is presented with a few challenges compared to amd's FSR 3 frame generation technology it can't use motion vectors to determine where various elements will be in the next frame and it can't decouple the UI rendering loop from the frame generation Loop essentially with ammf everything you see on screen is put into an optical flow interpolation algorithm which makes it much more difficult to prod produce a clean output relative to FSR 3 as it simply has less data to go off today's sponsor spot is brought to you by Zab board the world's first hackable single board server for creators starting at just $120 us it's created by people who grew tired of reoccurring fees unfriendly presets and isolated systems so they set out to make the home digital experience more attractive and more affordable Zab board has the expandability of an x86 SBC with the power of a micr server it allows you to set up a 4 T terb personal cloud in 5 minutes configure a secure VPN to protect your digital footprint tune your network with open wrt and pfSense build a 4K media server that runs with Plex share and collaborate with team members on your files or upgrade your smart projects across different systems so for more information please check the link in the video description ammf is currently available as a preview through a special driver AMD have made available for Radon RX 7000 and RX X 6000 series graphics card owners so unlike FSR 3 which is integrated into games as a full stable release version right now ammf is being presented as more of a beta version which is absolutely the right move when you look at the list of known issues and caveats for a start ammf only works with DirectX 11 and 12 titles which does encompass most PC games but won't work with Vulcan for example so hopefully that will be added in later crucially though it requires a very specific spefic configuration to work the game must be run in a full screen mode with HDR disabled and vsync disabled for now no HDR support is a huge bummer given the emergence of PC HDR gaming over the last few years and no vsync support means you will experience screen tearing if the final output frame rate exceeds your monitor's refresh rate or if you don't have a variable refresh rate display these are significant drawbacks that AMD are aware of and it's likely why this is being released as only a preview technology right now now you also have to download this specific preview driver to access ammf as it hasn't made it across to the main driver Branch yet it's very much something for an enthusiasts that want to try it out ahead of a full release later on when it comes to the quality of fluid motion frames there are several issues to go over like with FSR 3 frame generation that's integrated into games themselves ammf has issues with frame pacing even when used with the configuration that AMD recommends feing disabled to see this in action I captured some footage using an external capture card at 1440p 120 FPS with the game running at a render frame rate of 75 FPS leading to an output frame rate of 150 FPS after frame generation what we end up seeing on screen is an issue where the generated frames appear for too long with each real frame only briefly flickering on screen this is visible when stepping through each frame from the captured footage in this example we start with a mostly blurry generated frame the next frame has the top portion of the screen blurry indicating that it is still a generated frame the middle section after the screen tear is clearer that's a real frame and then towards the bottom it's blurry again a generated frame this shows that only for a short period of the refresh cycle is the real frame being displayed It's Quickly shown here then replaced by the next generated frame as the refresh cycle continues what should be happening is the real frame should be displayed for a much longer period of time increasing the area of the screen between tears that is from a clear real frame pacing out these frames in a more consistent fashion as we continue to move through the footage this is a consistent issue and it's not just from this game it happened in every game that I assessed on amd's Flagship radon RX 7900 XTX the end result is that when the game's frame rate exceeds your monitor's refresh rate and tearing occurs because ammf only supports feyn off the vast majority of the time you were seeing only generated frames and this makes Visual artifacts significantly more visible than they otherwise should be what's very interesting here is that this issue is not present when capturing footage locally using amd's built-in relive capture utility as relive captures every full frame once they are complete we end up with locally captured footage that is largely paced correctly though there are occasions where realive fails to capture the generated frame so it too is an inaccurate reflection of how the technology should properly work when viewing capture card footage what you actually see on the screen side by side with locally captured footage from relive the differences are very clear I only noticed this because the relive footage had noticeably fewer artifacts than what I was actually seeing on screen so this is just something to be aware of if you want to share footage of ammf if you're capturing it locally it may not be representative of the real experience you were seeing on screen when running ammf on a variable refresh rate display inside the monitor's refresh rate range say 120 FPS on a 160 HZ monitor you end up with a similar experience but with no screen tearing each frame is paced radically to the display causing large refresh rate fluctuations as each generated frame is typically displayed for a longer period of time than each real frame there is usually a mismatch between monitor refresh rate and output frame rate as we saw with FSR 3 so it seems that AMD have a lot of work to do with frame pacing not just for FSR 3 but ammf as well this poor frame pacing significantly affects the experience because the output image quality ends up looking awful you aren't supposed to see Genera frames all or most of the time you are supposed to have generated frames interlaced between normally rendered frames this reduces the time each generated frame is being shown making artifacts less visible the faster this interlacing occurs the more your brain is fooled into not noticing any issues this is why higher output frame rates are preferable for frame generation because of this Frame pacing problem my experience with ammf was generally blurry garbled jittery and unpleasant to use with screen tearing as well if the frame rate exceeded my Max refresh rate when viewing my local captures that show what I assume ammf is supposed to look like it's a mixed bag the issues with generated frames are less noticeable when frame pacing works as intended although as I said some frames are clearly missing from these captured outputs so there's no real way to show the ideal ammf output right now but with proper frame pacing ammf looks better than its current state however that's not to say AFM looks good because the quality of generated frames is pretty terrible without motion vectors telling the algorithm where each element on screen is moving to in the next frame the entirety of each frame is put through an optical flow system unless the amount of motion between each frame is small this interpolation process creates an output frame of poor quality fine details are significantly blurred in motion and occasionally you see almost a Double Image type of effect where it looks like the previous and next frames are shown on top of each other with a transparency to blend them we do see this sort of blurring and reduction to detail and motion in FSR 3 generated frames as well but typically it's localized just to areas of the screen that cannot be interpolated through motion Vector data alone with ammf it's the entire frame every single time this is very noticeable when comparing the output of ammf with FSR 3 frame generation side by side in a game like for spoken as I talked about in my FSR 3 video the actual quality of FSR 3 generated frames is acceptable usually they're pretty clear and free of issues unless we look at specific pain points for the interpolation Tech the quality of AFM frames is noticeably worse it's much blurrier lacks any areas of clean image generation in motion the experience you get at the end of the day I would describe as half rate motion blur when motion blur is disabled in the game ammf is slotting blurry generated frames between clean real frames so when playing the game in motion you get this pattern of clear frame blurry frame clear frame blurry frame that looks like a weird lowquality motion blur effect I say lowquality because typically motion blur in a game especially with modern techniques looks pretty good in how it implements the blur I personally don't like motion blur and I turn it off but the actual blur quality is respectable blur from Optical flow frame interpolation is of a lower quality as it's unintentional it's more a byproduct of what the algorithm is attempting to do aside from the typical low quality of each generated frame ammf really struggles with UI elements and this leads to obvious garbling and interpolation issues similar to what we saw with early dss3 frame generation implementations if not worse in many instances ammf simply has no idea what is a UI element or text element on screen it has no idea if you in a game menu or not so it's constantly generating frames and trying to Optical flow interpolate UI elements even when it shouldn't be depending on the type of game you are playing this ranges from mildly annoying to a real distraction games with crosshairs can be especially problematic as the Crosshair element can cause garbling around it in generated frames I also had plenty of issues with in-game menus especially those with clean text and Fine Lines such as the Starfield UI when combined with the lowquality blurry nature of AFM frames the UI generated issues undermine the overall quality of the game's presentation AMD mitigate some of these issues by disabling frame generation during fast motion which appears to mean whenever there is significant mouse or controller input however this introduces its own set of issues and is very inconsistent between games some titles will rarely disable frame generation even with fast motion and significant Mouse input other games have almost a hair trigger and will disable frame generation even from relatively minor movement the DPI setting on your mouse can also have a big impact on how often frame generation is disabled with a lower DPI more often triggering the dynamic system and thus disabling frame genen I can see why AMD has implemented this system the larger the difference between frames the more likely the optical flow system will generate a garbage frame and as larger differences are caused by faster motion disabling frame generation when the difference between a frame is large will prevent those frames from being shown that's the idea at least in practice I don't like how this makes games feel the whole point of frame generation is to increase a game smoothness when you have frame generation turning itself off whenever there's fast motion there's no increase to smoothness when you most need it the game also ends up fluctuating between enhanced smoothness and reduced smoothness as frame generation turns on and off which can be jarring and just doesn't feel very good especially when the base frame rate was around 70 FPS the minimum AMD suggest for 1440p displays jumping from 140 FPS down to 70 FPS when I pan around the camera felt very noticeable the final issue with ammf is input latency typically using this feature will increase input latency relative to not using it which cannot be mitigated by using anti-ag Plus in a models of AVM using the FSR 3 quality upscaling mode I went from 71 FPS with FMF off to 120 FPS with FMF on however this increased latency from 122 to 146 milliseconds using anti-ag plus only brought that down to 134 milliseconds of latency compared to 89 milliseconds using anti-ag Plus without fluid motion frames the game's built-in FSR 3 implementation had a noticeable latency Advantage delivering roughly the same output frame rate but at 107 milliseconds of latency compared to 134 milliseconds comparing best case versus best case this means Gamers wanting to use ammf will have to sacrifice some latency to add in the generated frames which does make sense as there is a performance cost to using AFM which reduces the native render rate of the game and the latency we see with frame generation enabled is linked to the native render rate however this latency increas is larger than what we see when FSR 3 is used as FSR 3 has some built-in latency reducing Tech whereas AFM does not AMD acknowledged that ammf can introduce additional latency and says it won't be optimal for fast-paced competitive titles which I definitely agree with overall it's fair to say that I haven't been impressed by amd's fluid motion frames technology in its current implementation there's actually very little I like about how this works and I can't see myself using it to play games under any circumstance having now played a dozen games with driver side frame generation enabled I just simply did not prefer the AFM experience compared to the native experience and this is not a replacement for integrating FSR 3 frame generation into games themselves there are already issues with frame generation that limit its Effectiveness that we've described in detail previously you need a relatively High base frame rate to minimize artifacts and as generated frames do not factor in game input frame generation does not improve latency in the way a high native render rate does this makes frame generation a technology that's only capable of improving the visual quality of a game not its overall performance with FSR 3 and dss3 frame generation the visual improvements would get a twofold as more frames are being presented on your display the smoothness of the presentation improves proves and as the quality of these generated frames is typically quite reasonable with relatively clear details thanks to the data provided by motion vectors frame generation can actually deliver a clearer overall experience in motion and help alleviate the blur associated with sample and hold displays these are the typical visual benefits we see from any increase to game frame rate and while frame generation isn't as good as natively rendering a higher frame rate the improvements are noticeable over running at a lower frame rate in a recent podcast episode we described this benefit as reverse motion blur historically games have used motion blur to smear the image and increase its apparent smoothness hiding the fact the game is being run at a low frame rate with frame generation it's possible to hide a game's lowest frame rate without just making the presentation blurry we almost get the opposite effect where we increase smoothness and Clarity hence reverse motion blow the problem with ammf is that these generated frames do not increased Clarity in motion because the quality of these frames is quite bad it's often blurry or garbled and has major issues with game UI this largely defeats the purpose of frame generation in my opinion yes you get improved smoothness but what's the point when it noticeably reduces visual quality to do so given you already need to start at 55 to 70 FPS according to AMD and ammf actually hurts latency when it's enabled you would be better off just using motion blur to improve the app parent smoothness of the game and in-game motion blur preserves UI quality as it's not applied to the entire frame on top of this ammf also defeats the purpose of frame Generation by switching off dynamically during fast motion which is actually where you're most likely to want to have the additional smoothness of frame generation there are all sorts of other issues as well with the current implementation like frame pacing issues and a lack of compatibility with Fey sync and HDR now AMD has some leeway here because this is clearly labeled as a preview technology and right now AMD are not using ammf to Market graphics cards you aren't being sold a new radon GPU based on the promise that ammf delivers an excellent experience that's worth paying for it's not even available in the main driver branch and they are clearly planning to resolve some of the issues with configuration compatibility but the biggest issue with AFM to me is the quality of interpolated frames can AMD improve the quality to the the point where it isn't so blurry and handles UI correctly I have my doubts and without a significant Improvement to these areas I just can't see myself ever using it I'm not interested in pumping up my FPS counter and getting lowquality crappy frames every second frame in return that's not the experience that I want while gaming it's now over to AMD to improve the feature and I'll be interested to see where it ends up after it exits preview status I don't have particularly High Hopes and would rather see resources put into improving FSR 3 frame generation and FSR upscaling but AMD might be able to surprise me if the long list of issues can be resolved anyway that's it for this look at amd's fluid motion frames technology if you do appreciate these looks into this and also FSR 3 which we covered on the channel previously then please do consider supporting us directly via our patreon or FL plan accounts links to those are in the description below you'll get access to some cool B benefits and bonuses as well like our Discord community and monthly live stream so thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next [Music] [Music] one

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 105,007

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: NzYvudM9BmI

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023