Modders have managed to port Nvidia Smooth Motion to GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs, proving there is no technical reason stopping Nvidia from officially supporting it on older hardware. Although it’s not a perfect implementation, this first step potentially gives owners of Ampere GPUs a way to improve performance.
Hot on the heels of the DLSS Frame Gen for RTX 20 Series mod, another group has taken interest in Nvidia’s Smooth Motion technology. For those unfamiliar with it, Smooth Motion is a driver-level frame generation (FG) technology, similar to AMD’s AFMF, that allows you to generate an additional frame between two rendered ones (like traditional FG), but independent of game support. In other words, this allows you to improve motion in all your games, including those that don’t include a built-in frame generation setting.
This makes it highly valuable for players running old games, especially those locked at 30fps or using frame-rate-dependent physics engines. The latter, like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, can suffer from bugs when unlocking the base frame rate beyond 60fps, so enabling Smooth Motion gives you a way to improve smoothness without breaking the game.
Despite its value, Nvidia doesn’t seem interested in bringing Smooth Motion to older generations of its GPUs, only officially supporting it on RTX 50 and RTX 40 Series cards. That’s where these unofficial mods can help, with two separate ones available to enable Nvidia Smooth Motion on RTX 30 Series GPUs.
The first comes from pipotoufikxyz-lgtm on GitHub, which expands the dlssg_for_sm86 project – used to enable DLSS FG and MFG on RTX 30 Series – to add Smooth Motion. User reports indicate that the mod is working with Batman: Arkham Knight, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and Dead Space Remake.
The second mod comes from ItsAdeline on GitHub, and uses Nvidia’s NvPresent64.dll Smooth Motion path on SM86 hardware. ItsAdeline says the project currently works by dynamically locating and patching the relevant NvPresent capability/architecture checks, initialising Nvidia’s presentation layer, and intercepting the CUDA module-loading path, so the required GPU code can run on SM86/Ampere. To put it simply, NVSmooth30 works by intercepting and modifying how GPU drivers handle specific frame-generation features, enabling the Smooth Motion path originally locked to newer graphics cards.
User reports indicate that this mod is running on RTX 3050 Mobile and desktop RTX 3070 GPUs in games such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Its creator also indicated that they’re working on an experimental DX11-to-DX12 presentation bridge, which should expand the mod’s capability to more games.
While enabling frame generation on old or unsupported hardware is nothing new, by showing that nothing is blocking Smooth Motion’s support, there’s a chance this could force Nvidia to officially support it on RTX 30 and older GPUs. Either way, at least players with older hardware at least have another option open to them.
