Nvidia's Smooth Motion feature to embrace the RTX 40-series peasants

SomeNorseGuy

Gold Member

Nvidia's new driver update finally brings Smooth Motion to RTX 40-series GPUs, works like AMD's Fluid Motion Frames and claims to double your FPS with a single click in any game
Nvidia announced Smooth Motion back in January, as part of its initial RTX 50-series launch. Now the feature seems to have begun to trickle down to RTX 40-series graphics card owners, via a little Nvidia Profile Inspector tweak discovered by Macer, over at the Guru3D forums.

Much like AMD's Fluid Motion Frames, Nvidia's Smooth Motion claims to double your frame rate by putting one AI-generated frame in between two real ones. This is a driver-level solution so it works in any game, regardless of it being supported or not in any particular software. Upscaling technologies like DLSS or FSR can only shine when they're implemented in the graphics pipeline of the game by the developers, but no such effort is required here.

That's why this is such a prominent feature that can help players get more out of their games. However, Smooth Motion was limited to 50-series cards, a space where it's likely not needed as much. Thankfully, a new driver update has just revealed that it is making its way down to the RTX 40 GPUs, at last.
The GeForce 590.26 Preview Driver finally allows users to enable Smooth Motion on their RTX 40-series GPU. As the name suggests, this "preview" is not a stable, public release, but rather a sort of beta intended for developers or enthusiasts to test out the upcoming driver ahead of time. As such, Macer installed it on their computer running an RTX 4090, and through Nvidia Profile Inspector, were able to toggle Smooth Motion. Please note that it didn't appear in the Nvidia app UI directly. Immediately, the user was able to double their frames in World of Warcraft from 82 to 164 FPS—all without incurring any additional latency—as noted in the performance overlay in the top corner. WoW doesn't natively support DLSS, so this was a long-overdue update, and others have reported similar gains across a multitude of different games as well.

You can also download the preview driver from Nvidia's developer page, but you need a developer account. Once installed, you'll need Nvidia Profile Inspector from GitHub which is fairly easy to install and use as well. We didn't get a chance to try it out on our systems, but it's safe to assume that this solution won't be as good as native DLSS. Expect a bit more artifacting and fluctuations in performance, at least until Nvidia polishes the feature for a public release, soon. It also won't actually upscale the game's resolution (from a lower internal one).

That being said, it's still a heck of a lot better than not having access to the feature. Now, your old games where upscaling tech was never realistically going to reach, can finally enjoy increased frame rates, sometimes with barely any noticeable dip in quality, and without investing in third-party software, such as Lossless Scaling, since your GPU now possesses driver-level chops to achieve the same goal.

Note that this is a preview driver and not readily available yet. You need a developer account to download the driver from Nvidia's developer page and you might need Nvidia Profile Inspector from github aswell.

Good to see those Trillions starting to trickle down to the unwashed masses.

Cries in 3070
 
Great news for 40xx owners. I prefer it over Lossless Scaling, fewer artifacts IMO and the low latency mode feels legit.
Perfect for games games like Spyro Trilogy where the physics go tits up when you go above 120fps. I use it regularly with a bunch of emulators.
 
masters of sex GIF by Showtime
 
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Is there in-depth technical analysis on this on input lag? I only found some YouTube videos that show it worked nothing too technical. This could be amazing for fighting games couple with reflex
 
Great news for 40xx owners. I prefer it over Lossless Scaling, fewer artifacts IMO and the low latency mode feels legit.
Perfect for games games like Spyro Trilogy where the physics go tits up when you go above 120fps. I use it regularly with a bunch of emulators.
You should prefer it. I believe it's still rendering in frame sequence and not relying on post frame rendering.
 
As a 4080 owner who's holding strong, this news makes me a very happy Poo. Now I just need to figure out a good game to try it on and find the time to do so.
 
Can be nice for turn-based games where I don't care about the input latency as much.

What I'm really waiting for is them to release the better nvidia reflex (with the frame warp stuff) to 4000 series GPUs, that would be more of a benefit to performance.
 
* Any NVIDIA App whitelisted game.
Ah, that's why it never worked with anything i tried.

Thanks.


I think that's what the Nvidia Profile Inspector is for, to force Smooth Motion on non-whitelisted games.
Tried it, never worked for me.


Great news for 40xx owners. I prefer it over Lossless Scaling, fewer artifacts IMO and the low latency mode feels legit.
Perfect for games games like Spyro Trilogy where the physics go tits up when you go above 120fps. I use it regularly with a bunch of emulators.
I wish there was a dumb proof tutorial for how to make this work.

Could you suggest a single emulator/game that will surely work because anything i throw at this never works for me?
 
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Tested It last night with Cyberpunk and Clair Obscur and it did work with better smoothing, although I had Cyberpunk 2077 crash when tinkering. Still in preview mode of course but it's legit.

Awesome to have this as a 4090 owner. Truly set for many years to get 4k plus DLSS 4 in insane quality with good fps
 
Ah, that's why it never worked with anything i tried.

Thanks.



Tried it, never worked for me.



I wish there was a dumb proof tutorial for how to make this work.

Could you suggest a single emulator/game that will surely work because anything i throw at this never works for me?

Does your game or emulator not show up in Nvidia profile inspector? If they do, just look for dlss-mfg or smooth motion row and select enable as self explanatory
 
What does this do that current X2 frame gen can't? My RTX 4070 has a love but mostly hate relationship with frame gen.

This is a driver level feature, it's not integrated into a specific game.
This has the advantage of working on every game (as long as nvidia whitelists it) but has the disadvantage of not being as good as Frame Generation integrated into a game.
So it might have more artifacts, worse frame pacing, etc.
 
Tested It last night with Cyberpunk and Clair Obscur and it did work with better smoothing, although I had Cyberpunk 2077 crash when tinkering. Still in preview mode of course but it's legit.

Awesome to have this as a 4090 owner. Truly set for many years to get 4k plus DLSS 4 in insane quality with good fps
Why would you test it in a game that supports NV FG like Cyberpunk though?
 
So I tried this yesterday with my 4070 and even though it works, It's not a versitle as Lossless Scaling and in some cases looks worse.

Also updating to this driver borked RTX HDR for me in Vulkan games and introduced micro stutter that wasn't there before in most of the games I tested, not worth it just to achieve what Lossless Scaling can do anyway.

Just for clarity, I do not use the Nvidia app and was testing this using inspector, so the stutter wasn't being caused by having the Nvidia app installed or the filters/overlay it uses.

So back to 566.36 now. No issues. If it aint broke, don't fix it
 
I'm a 4070 TI Super peasant. I really enjoy the card, but it was too expensive.

As bad as my eyes are I probably won't be able to tell when Smooth Motion is on. As old as my brain is I'll probably forget to turn it on.
 
What exactly is the point of this video?
Testing in a low motion scene like this doesn't even show if it produces artifacts.
Also, what's with the 2% GPU load? :messenger_tears_of_joy:
I think it's a bug lol. It's Star Citizen after all.


I'm just paying attention to the frame counter and it seems to double the frames which is what I needed to know. I'll wait for better benchmarks to see if we get artifacts or not lol.
 
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I wish there was a dumb proof tutorial for how to make this work.

Could you suggest a single emulator/game that will surely work because anything i throw at this never works for me?
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This is as dumb as I can make it.
1 - Click the graphics tab in the Nvidia App.
2 - Click the 3 dots and select 'Add a program', select the exe for the app you want to apply SM to.
3 - Turn on Smooth Motion.

That should be it. I have used it successfully with MAME, PSCSX2, CEMU, RPCS3 & Switch emulators,
With settings done, start the app via Steam so you can view framerate statistics. In this case Citron running Metroid Dread with uncapped framerate (240fps) & x2 smooth motion for an eye-watering 480fps. Time to get a 480hz display.


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This is as dumb as I can make it.
1 - Click the graphics tab in the Nvidia App.
2 - Click the 3 dots and select 'Add a program', select the exe for the app you want to apply SM to.
3 - Turn on Smooth Motion.

That should be it. I have used it successfully with MAME, PSCSX2, CEMU, RPCS3 & Switch emulators,
With settings done, start the app via Steam so you can view framerate statistics. In this case Citron running Metroid Dread with uncapped framerate (240fps) & x2 smooth motion for an eye-watering 480fps. Time to get a 480hz display.


ft5ca3rY2jYaGTIG.jpg
Ok, i think i made it work with CEMU. However, i use RTSS/Afterburner and it still says 60fps on the top left (instead of 120fps) but i can see with my own eyes, the motion is cleaner and it feels smoother.

I need to do more testing.
 
Ok, i think i made it work with CEMU. However, i use RTSS/Afterburner and it still says 60fps on the top left (instead of 120fps) but i can see with my own eyes, the motion is cleaner and it feels smoother.

I need to do more testing.
I don't use RTSS/Afterburner, but Nvidia's own statistics heads up display (alt+z) shows the framerate too, but only up to 240fps for me. Steam's statistics is more correct which is why I used it to show Metroid Dread.
 
This might be actually really useful mainly for older games hard locked at 30. It's just an absolute shite experience these days trying to play anything like that on them fancy OLED monitors.
 
This might be actually really useful mainly for older games hard locked at 30. It's just an absolute shite experience these days trying to play anything like that on them fancy OLED monitors.


30fps locked games is better with LSFG with adaptive or 4X scaling to 120fps if you have HRR monitors. Even better than 2X smooth motion. Games with 30fps cut scene cap would benefit from this though, for example like TN games wo long and both Nioh, the cut scenes are capped to 30fps, while gameplay is unlocked, however the game has some frame pacing issues running at anything other than lock 60fps or 120fps. So you can set the in game frame rate target to 60fps if you can't reach 120fps and turn on smooth motion and get 60fps cut scenes and 120fps gameplay.

One advantage smooth motion should have is quality and performance cost. Since it uses the optical flow accelerator to run this, the performance cost should be minimal. LSFG very noticeable artifacts with modern games due to all the heavy use of post processing
 
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