NVIDIA’s RTX 50 “Blackwell” architecture has been a bit of a bore for us gamers. Apart from Multi Frame Generation, which has limited use-case scenarios, there isn’t much to be excited about. It is achieved using GPU-side Flip Metering. The optical field data is generated using AI models in the Tensor cores, which is likely what powers Smooth Motion: Driver-level frame generation for the RTX 50 series GPUs
NVIDIA Smooth Motion: Better than Fluid Motion?
Smooth Motion is undoubtedly NVIDIA’s answer to AMD Fluid Motion Frames or AFMF. However, while AFMF runs on every Radeon GPU and iGPU, Smooth Motion is exclusive to the RTX 50 graphics cards.
- Fluid and Smooth Motion rely on driver-level optical field data for frame interpolation.
- AMD AFMF uses heuristics (hand-tweaked algorithms and models).
- NVIDIA Smooth Motion uses AI models running on the Tensor Cores to iron out ghosting, artifacting, and other temporal anomalies.
Smooth Motion is more stable than AMD’s Fluid Motion or Lossless Scaling. You’ll still notice some visual artifacts, primarily concerning the terrain, but certain titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 are completely playable with it.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is up to twice as fast using Smooth Motion in CPU-bound scenes. You get up to 70% higher frame rates using the maximum quality graphics settings at 4K.
You’ll experience some visual artifacts that look like patches of pixels bouncing around, mainly affecting the terrain. You can’t do much about it at the moment, but we’re hoping it’s cleaned up with future driver updates.
Rust is the third title we tested with Smooth Motion. Unfortunately, we yielded minimal performance gains. Luckily, the artifacting was less pronounced than in Kingdom Come 2. There was a latency increase which may be detrimental to competitive gameplay.
- Smooth Motion is a welcome addition to the NVIDIA App. Team GeForce is slowly catching up to the feature-rich Radeon (Adrenalin) Graphics Control Panel.
- However, limiting it to the RTX 50 GPUs is a real shame, and will significantly reduce its adoption.
- Smooth Motion should work miracles in the mobility space where CPU bottlenecks are common.
