The topic Nvidia’s most slept-on RTX feature doubled my framerate, and it isn’t what you think is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
When someone tells you an Nvidia feature doubled their framerate, you probably immediately think of DLSS Multi Frame Generation or maybe the upscaler using the transformer model. Those features can be useful, but when it comes to fast-paced games where visual clarity and low latency are crucial, they’re better left disabled. When I first heard of Nvidia’s Smooth Motion toggle, I thought the same thing. Another frame generation setting that would add a ton of latency and not much else, so I ignored it until someone mentioned trying it on one of my favorite games, and it honestly blew me away. It doubled my framerate with next to no visual artifacting, and it actually lowered end-to-end latency. It doesn’t work flawlessly in every game, but in the games that it does, it’s really effective.
It works like magic, but won’t renew your old 8GB card’s lease on life
Smooth Motion is driver-level frame generation. It interpolates synthetic frames between rendered frames and inserts them into the output, the same basic idea as DLSS Frame Generation. The critical difference is that it doesn’t require native support, and can be enabled on virtually every DirectX 11, DirectX 12, or Vulkan title with no developer support needed. It’s found in the Nvidia App, available on any RTX 40 or 50 series card and can be toggled on or off on a per-game basis. When toggling it on, it does force Low Latency Mode to the Ultra setting.
When trying DLSS MFG for the first time, I was pretty disappointed. In situations where my framerate was low and wanted to boost it to playable levels, it added unplayable levels of latency. In scenarios where I had enough frames to make a game playable, but wanted to push the framerate a bit higher, it still added too much, so when I saw Smooth Motion was just game-agnostic frame generation, I wasn’t convinced. That was only until I actually tried it for myself, and the results were really impressive.
For a “conservative” OC tool, the NVIDIA App gave me remarkable results
Escape From Tarkov is the clearest case I’ve tested. Tarkov’s optimization has been a running joke for years, and there’s a hard ceiling on how much you can claw back through settings adjustments alone. It’s exactly the kind of game where you’ve done everything you can and you’re still not where you want to be. My rig runs the game quite well at 4K, at least relatively speaking. It’s a CPU-bound title primarily, so my Ryzen 7 7800X3D handles the most performance-intensive map in the game, Streets of Tarkov, to an acceptable level.
When I turned Smooth Motion on, “blown away” would be an understatement. I saw double my original framerate in raid, and more importantly, the game felt buttery smooth at 4K. There was no perceivable increase in latency and no level of visual artifacting that took me out of the environment, even when DLSS upscaling was enabled. Looking through magnified scopes in the game is something that tanks average FPS because you’re actually rendering a picture-in-picture image, and with Smooth Motion that’s still there, but it’s not nearly as noticeable of a drop due to the increase in average framerate.
Battlefield 6 didn’t provide the same experience when I tested Smooth Motion in an online conquest game. It did increase my framerate by a bit, and was mostly harmless in regard to the visual quality of the game at 4K, but it didn’t provide anywhere near the same performance boost that we saw in Escape From Tarkov.
I wanted to test a less-modern title to see how it would tolerate it, and I chose Arma Reforger, a milsim game that is relatively heavy to run, even on my rig. Smooth Motion did double my framerate when looking at the FPS counter, but it also made the frametimes way more unpredictable. Also, it behaved very oddly when recording the data. The 459 FPS figure you see in the bar chart isn’t accurate to what I was experiencing. The game didn’t feel completely unplayable with these frametime fluctuations, but it was a noticeably worse experience than with Smooth Motion disabled. Overall, I’d say Smooth Motion is pretty hit or miss depending on the game.
Even pixel peepers would struggle to justify native rendering at this point
When Smooth Motion does work, it’s truly transformative, so I’d give it a whirl in any game where you’d like an FPS gain. It’s not true MFG and doesn’t seem like it always comes with the added latency, but your mileage may vary.
As is the case with most Nvidia App settings, per-game toggles are always the way to go as opposed to enabling the feature globally. A global toggle will cause tons of issues with games that don’t tolerate the setting well. It’s also worth testing DLSS MFG in a supported title instead of Smooth Motion, because logically the experience should be better with the extra engine data it has access to, but this isn’t always the case.
For better or worse, rasterization continues to be buried, and it won’t be long until games are unrecognizable
It’s not a cure-all, and won’t magically take your unplayable framerate to playable levels, but Smooth Motion truly elevates the experience of one of my favorite games at 4K, so it’s absolutely worth trying in yours. It’s not a replacement for MFG if you’re already using it, and if Smooth Motion doesn’t help your framerate on its own, it’s worth trying an upscaler, especially if you’re in a GPU-bound scenario.