Competition from NVIDIA’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS is prompting AMD to rethink its strategy.
While NVIDIA still dominates the graphics card market by a wide margin, AMD is never far behind, and Intel is positioning itself as a credible contender, even though it focuses primarily on integrated solutions. Beyond the chips themselves, all three companies share a common goal: to continually push the boundaries of software support with image-enhancement technologies and other solutions designed to offload some of the computational load from the GPU in order to boost performance. In this race, NVIDIA’s DLSS has a significant lead, and even Intel’s XeSS is outperforming FSR, AMD’s in-house technology.
In fact, DLSS and XeSS now have a formidable weapon at their disposal: multi-frame generation. Simply put, this involves using artificial intelligence to generate one, two, or even three intermediate frames based on two rendered images, A and B. When done right, not only is visual quality preserved, but frame rates are also significantly boosted. Unfortunately for owners of Radeon graphics cards, AMD doesn’t offer anything like this… yet. In fact, the American company realized it was lagging behind in this area several months ago, and its engineers are now working to close the gap with the competition.
Two new profiles related to multi-frame generation have been spotted in AMD drivers © RadeonTuner
The latest example is the presence of profiles in the source code of the latest Radeon Adrenalin graphics drivers. The creator of the RadeonTuner software was the one who noticed this. This comes as no surprise, as the software specializes in uncovering hidden settings in AMD’s drivers to give the most demanding users all the tools they need. In this case, profiles named MfgOverride and MfgRatio were spotted. Those of you familiar with the terminology will have realized that these are for enabling and adjusting multi-frame generation —with options going as high as x8. Let’s temper our enthusiasm, though, because for now, enabling these profiles doesn’t do anything. There’s no performance improvement and no visual impact, but these two profiles confirm that AMD is working on it.
Dumbie, the programmer behind RadeonTuner, explains that this is a common practice for AMD:“AMD sometimes adds configuration options to drivers that hint at upcoming features—without actually implementing the feature itself (the code needed to make it work)—several months before the official release, as is the case here with MFG.” Multi-frame generation is therefore currently in development at AMD and could arrive soon.
