3DCenter.org, a German source, posted an article stating that AMD is working on a new feature in its Catalyst driver called Dynamic Frame Rate Control. They got this information from one of the forum users, who appears to be an AMD employee.
"Earlier this week I got to play with our new Dynamic Frame Rate Control feature in a (coming soon) version of Catalyst and it was AWESOME. Being able to limit your FPS to 60fps on a game where it doesn't matter too much if you're able to get 150FPS. The power savings were mind blowing," posted user AMD-Chris.
Naturally, we checked in with somebody close to AMD. Our source seems to believe that DFRC will indeed help with power savings, therefore also reducing heat and noise output. It therefore seems like a power saving feature.
The feature will likely have a slider to adjust the target frame rate. Add all this information together, and it's clear that DFRC is an extension of the AMD PowerTune feature, which dynamically adjusts the GPU frequency to match temperature, fan speed and power consumption targets.
Say you have a game that runs at 150 FPS under normal circumstances, but you have only a 60 Hz screen; you'll be wasting a lot of these generated frames. Therefore, setting the framerate target to 60 FPS would allow the GPU to run at much lower frequencies, saving power and reducing the heat output.
You may wonder what the point is at 60 Hz because you can just enable V-Sync, but you'd be surprised. Enabling V-Sync doesn't actually make the GPU scale its frequency to what's necessary to achieve 60 FPS, meaning you don't get all of the power savings.
AMD-Chris mentioned that the feature was "coming soon." Funny, you'd expect that this feature would have been included with the Catalyst Omega driver release last week.
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