AMD introduces a free Frame Latency Meter tool to measure mouse response time — works with all GPUs, no high-speed camera or manual frame-counting needed

AMD's FLM Tool at work, in Sponza
(Image credit: AMD)

AMD just released its Frame Latency Meter (FLM) via GPUOpen. It's a software utility for Windows 10 and later that allows for users to measure mouse button to pixel latency without the need for any specialized sensors, high-speed cameras, or frame-counting based on muzzle flash. The utility apparently works on any AMD, Nvidia, or Intel GPU that supports DirectX 11 or newer and DXGI codec capturing, though AMD GPUs will instead use the hardware-native AMF capture codec.

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Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

  • Makaveli
    Tool looks good when will THG incorporate it into your reviews? :cool:
    Reply
  • DougMcC
    Physical reality constrains this to be a measure of mouse to ouput frame, right? You can't know how long from there to the result is reflected on the screen?
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    DougMcC said:
    Physical reality constrains this to be a measure of mouse to ouput frame, right? You can't know how long from there to the result is reflected on the screen?
    Yeah, without a sensor on the display, you don't know for certain when it shows up. So this is really more of a tool to determine if drivers or whatever are adding latency AFAICT. Because some displays (especially older monitors) would add one or even two frames of processing latency. I remember testing this back in the day.
    Makaveli said:
    Tool looks good when will THG incorporate it into your reviews? :cool:
    Honestly, with FrameView already capturing similar data on some games, I think we're fine. I average the latency over all frames of the benchmark runs that I run, and it doesn't require a separate workload that takes additional time and effort to generate a number that may or may not be fully accurate. And since it's in software, we're basically only looking at latency measurements not counting the display (which is actually good unless you're doing a monitor review).
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Yeah, without a sensor on the display, you don't know for certain when it shows up. So this is really more of a tool to determine if drivers or whatever are adding latency AFAICT. Because some displays (especially older monitors) would add one or even two frames of processing latency. I remember testing this back in the day.

    Honestly, with FrameView already capturing similar data on some games, I think we're fine. I average the latency over all frames of the benchmark runs that I run, and it doesn't require a separate workload that takes additional time and effort to generate a number that may or may not be fully accurate. And since it's in software, we're basically only looking at latency measurements not counting the display (which is actually good unless you're doing a monitor review).
    Thank you for the quick response.

    Will you guys post an article about

    AMD Announces Full Support For Llama 3.1 AI Models Across EPYC CPUs, Instinct Accelerators, Ryzen AI NPUs & Radeon GPUs
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    Makaveli said:
    AMD Announces Full Support For Llama 3.1 AI Models Across EPYC CPUs, Instinct Accelerators, Ryzen AI NPUs & Radeon GPUs
    I pitched it as a news story, it got turned down. Not really surprising, as stuff about AI and LLMs and such really doesn't do much traffic for us. Feels like unless it's a Really Big Deal (or something really funny or surprising), people are getting tired of hearing about AI. That Stack Overflow ban of OpenAI? That did a lot of traffic. Most other AI stories are about 2~5 percent of what that one article did. :-\
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    I pitched it as a news story, it got turned down. Not really surprising, as stuff about AI and LLMs and such really doesn't do much traffic for us. Feels like unless it's a Really Big Deal (or something really funny or surprising), people are getting tired of hearing about AI. That Stack Overflow ban of OpenAI? That did a lot of traffic. Most other AI stories are about 2~5 percent of what that one article did. :-\
    lol I had no idea thanks for the insight.

    On a side note I just got it up and running on my Radeon 7900XTX.

    Reply
  • hotaru251
    any chance to do a side by side comparison and see if its accurate vs the hardware alternative?
    Reply