The US graphics processing unit designer AMD is currently working on a new and exciting new feature that will soon be implemented in its video cards. There’s no need to buy a new AMD-based graphics card, though – according to the information that we have, the new feature, called Dynamic Frame Rate Control, will become possible by simply updating your AMD Catalyst graphics drivers with a future release.
Anyway the information on the new feature comes straight out of AMD’s PR Director Chris Hook, also known as AMD_Chris on certain web forums. In an online post he has stated that not only Dynamic Frame Rate Control is in the works, but also that it will be something like a frame rate limiter that will give you significant power savings when you reduce the frame-rate. There’s no information on how this feature works but most likely the key is hidden in reducing the clock speeds of the AMD video card in question to get the desired frame rates.
This new feature looks like V-Sync a lot but AMD says there’s a slider in the picture that you use to set the level of the desired frame rate speed. There’s more – when you enable V-Sync, your video cards still runs at full speed but the V-Sync feature drops some frames to get you to, say, 60 FPS. Dynamic Frame Rate Control does things a bit different – it will likely reduce the clock speeds of the GPU and the memory to reduce the frame rate to the desired limit and when there’s a demanding 3D scene it will bring the video card back to the necessary speed to get the FPSs that you want.
Interesting, isn’t it? According to Chris Hook the new technology will bring “mind blowing” energy savings, which means we will almost surely see it in mobile AMD graphics solutions too.
Source: Tweaktown.com