AMD's Rollercoaster Ride with Video Technology: Here, Gone, and Maybe Back Again!

Written by Boldson on 10 October 2023. Posted in Hardware

AMD seems to have taken lessons from the Cat Matroskin playbook: "Give me five, give me two!" First, they introduced AMD Fluid Motion Video (FMV) to enhance video playback, and then they decided it was too good and removed the feature. However, they didn't release a stable version of the AFMF (Adaptive Frame Rate Management) driver; instead, they offered a separate driver for this feature.

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FMV generated new video frames, making videos smoother and more realistic, especially useful for old video recordings and movies shot at 23-24 FPS. But, alas, it was only available for older Polaris and GCN1 cards, and AMD never extended support for this technology to modern RDNA GPUs.

And here's the surprise twist! It appears that AFMF can be repurposed as AFV. A guide by Reddit user "uncycler825" shows how to use a preview version of the driver to make it work through the Vulkan API. It seems AMD still hasn't decided whether it wants to officially bring back FMV for RDNA1-3 generations.