AMD Radeon Software Tuning: Anti-Lag, Enhanced Sync, and RSR Explained

AMD Radeon Software ships with a set of performance and latency features that most users either ignore completely or enable without understanding what they do. Some are genuinely useful; a few can cause problems in specific configurations. This guide covers each one in plain terms.

The AMD Radeon Software interface surfaces these features across the Gaming, Display, and Performance tabs. Not all features apply to all cards or games. Where a feature requires specific hardware, driver version, or game support, that is noted below.

Anti-Lag and Anti-Lag+

Anti-Lag reduces the number of CPU render-ahead frames by throttling the CPU submission rate to match the GPU's rendering pace. In a CPU-ahead scenario where the CPU is queuing frames faster than the GPU can render them, the render-ahead queue grows and introduces latency between input and display. Anti-Lag tightens that queue, reducing the gap.

Anti-Lag+ is an updated implementation that works within the game engine rather than at the driver level. It injects timing code directly into the game's DirectX call sequence, synchronizing CPU and GPU at the API level rather than inferring timing from the outside. Anti-Lag+ is listed as compatible with specific games and may cause crashes in games not on the compatibility list—this was the source of reports of Anti-Lag+ triggering anti-cheat systems in early implementations, because the in-process injection was flagged. AMD has since refined the compatibility list and implementation.

When to enable: Anti-Lag is safe to enable in any game and provides a measurable latency reduction (typically 5–15 ms) in GPU-bottlenecked scenarios. Anti-Lag+ provides greater improvement but only in supported titles.

Enhanced Sync

Enhanced Sync is AMD's alternative to V-Sync that attempts to eliminate screen tearing above the monitor's refresh rate while avoiding V-Sync's latency penalty. When frame rate exceeds the refresh rate, Enhanced Sync allows tearing above the V-Sync threshold (removing the latency of waiting for the next scanout window) while using the previous frame to fill the monitor on the next interval without queuing a large backbuffer of old frames.

In practice, Enhanced Sync works well when frame rate is consistently and significantly above the refresh rate. When frame rate occasionally dips below refresh rate, a momentary stutter occurs as the algorithm switches behavior at the threshold. For this reason, Enhanced Sync is best used on systems where the GPU is comfortably above the monitor's refresh rate in a given game.

When to enable: Use with FreeSync disabled, on systems where frame rate is consistently 20 percent or more above the monitor refresh rate. Do not use if frame rate fluctuates around the refresh rate—the threshold stutter will be visible.

Radeon Super Resolution (RSR)

RSR is a driver-level implementation of spatial upscaling that works across all games without game developer integration. The driver renders the game at a reduced resolution and applies FSR 1.0's EASU (edge-adaptive spatial upsampling) algorithm to scale it to the display resolution before presenting. RSR operates at the driver display plane level, not within the game's rendering pipeline, which means it does not receive motion vectors or depth buffer data.

Quality is inferior to in-game FSR 2 or DLSS because RSR is spatial-only (no temporal accumulation). It resembles a high-quality image scaling algorithm rather than a reconstruction method. The use case is games that do not support any upscaling natively and where rendering at native resolution is too expensive for the target frame rate.

When to enable: Use RSR as a fallback for older games without native upscaling support. Prefer in-game FSR 2 or FSR 3 over RSR whenever the game offers it, as the quality difference is substantial.

AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF)

AFMF is a driver-level frame generation feature introduced in late 2023 for RX 7000 series. Like RSR, it works without game support by operating at the display plane level. It uses optical flow to analyze motion between consecutive rendered frames and synthesizes an interpolated frame to double the displayed frame rate.

Because AFMF operates below the game engine level, it does not have access to the game's motion vectors or depth information that game-integrated FSR 3 frame generation uses. This makes AFMF more susceptible to artifacts in complex scenes with multiple independently moving objects and transparency. Fast UI elements and HUD overlays can also exhibit reconstruction errors.

When to enable: AFMF is most effective in cinematic, single-player games where frame rate is currently 40–70 FPS and visual artifacts in complex scenes are tolerable. It adds latency (one frame of holding time), so competitive gaming use is inadvisable.

Radeon Chill

Radeon Chill dynamically reduces GPU frame rate during periods of low in-game activity, such as when the mouse is stationary in a slow scene. When activity increases (mouse movement, fast scene change), the frame rate rises to the configured maximum. The power and heat reduction can be 10 to 20 percent over a full gaming session in games with varied activity levels.

When to enable: Enable in open-world games, RPGs, and any title with activity variation. Disable in multiplayer titles where consistent responsiveness is required, as the ramp-up time from Chill's minimum to maximum frame rate adds a brief latency surge at the start of sudden action.

Feature Summary