The original ASUS ROG Ally was released back in June 2023, after being announced (strangely enough) on April Fools’ Day that year. In any case, it arrived with plenty of praise for its full HD display, 120Hz refresh rate with VRR, and greater performance than the Steam Deck. Poor battery life was a major downside and that’s something that ASUS amended in the upgrade ROG Ally X that arrived just over a year later.
Both devices run on Windows 11, and while people may suggest that Valve’s SteamOS is superior for handheld gaming, one thing Windows unlocks is support for software such as AFMF 2 (AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2). And now, a new driver update for both the Ally and Ally X adds official support for AFMF 2.
Part of AMD’s Adrenalin app on desktop, this driver-level frame generation technology offers support for a wide range of games and it has proven to be a godsend for integrated graphics, including the 780M and 740MiGPUs used by the Z1 Extreme and Z1 chips respectively. On the ROG Ally, AFMF 2 is now directly accessible via the GPU settings in Armoury Crate SE.
ROG Ally and Ally X update adds support for AFMF 2
As detailed in an @ASUS_ROG post on X, iGPU driver support for AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 is now available on both Ally handhelds. You can download this update via Armoury Crate SE. It has previously been available to try out if you used AMD’s Adrenalin software (as demonstrated on the Legion Go), but this new update makes it easy to access in GPU settings for Ally owners; it can also be toggled on in the Command Center.
- Open Armoury Crate SE
- Open Settings
- Go to Performance, then the GPU Settings tab
- Toggle on AMD Fluid Motion Frames
ASUS has put out an entire guide to increasing your FPS using frame-gen technologies such as FSR 3 and AFMF 2. Keep in mind that FSR 3 implementation is on a game-by-game basis, so not every game supports it – and of games that support FSR 3, not all of them support the frame generation aspect specifically. In contrast, AFMF 2 supports any game running on DirectX 11, DirectX 12, OpenGL, or Vulkan graphics APIs – that covers a whole lot of games released in the past decade.
Keep in mind that AFMF has less information to work with, so generally FSR 3 frame gen is preferred if the game supports it. For those titles that don’t, AFMF is there to help boost performance. It’s worth noting that ASUS recommended around 45+ FPS before applying frame generation tech to ensure smooth performance with as low latency and minimal graphical artifacts as possible
