If you're using a portable gaming PC other than a Steam Deck, there's good news early in the new year: AMD has released a new preview driver that enables software-based frame generation technology on systems with RDNA 3-based integrated graphics chips.

The latest AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) preview driver (via Videocardz) adds the Radeon 700M to the list of supported GPUs, which includes the AMD Z1 family of handheld chips and Ryzen 7 iGPUs at the core of both the 7840U and in almost every handheld PC on the market today.

This means that it will also work in AMD laptops with this chip, such as the Framework 13 with the latest AMD mainboard. However, the driver note states that if you want the AFMF feature to work on a laptop that also has an integrated discrete graphics card, you must make sure that the display is running with integrated graphics.

The AFMF preview driver has been publicly available for some time, gradually increasing its level of support from the Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs at launch, and now encompasses nearly all the latest versions of AMD graphics silicon. the heart of the Steam Deck, the custom APUs, with the exception of.

The Steam Deck's Aerith and Sephiroth APUs (the LCD and Steam Deck OLED versions respectively) still use custom RDNA 2 GPUs and are not currently supported by this Windows Preview Driver.

However, from the Ayaneo Air 1S to the ROG Ally to the Lenovo Legion Go, the new preview driver should be able to provide higher and smoother frame rates on DirectX 11 or 12 titles. [That's because AMD just announced at CES 2024 the release of the Ryzen 8000G APU with the new Zen 4 and RDNA 3. The absolute advantage of these desktop chips is that they have the same 700M iGPU and AFMF available from the start. And that could make them the best fit for budget gaming PCs among the hardware available this year. [It is worth noting, however, that AFMF is not some sort of performance panacea. As with game-based frame generation, some latency may be added, and it will only really start to look good if you already have the right level of performance.

It has been suggested that 60 fps is the goal before AFMF is involved, but handhelds may be happy with less than that performance for their games.

I am now downloading the preview in Framework 13 and also have several new handhelds that will be itching to love AFMF.