A new feature for AMD’s Radeon graphics cards is being developed, known as ‘Dynamic Frame Rate Control’ (DFRC). The feature, which will be enabled by an coming Catalyst driver update, is able lower GPU power usage by limiting in-game framerates. These framerates are manually set by the user, which (as far as we know) has not been seen before.
While VSync already acts as a framerate limiter, the technique has some issues. For example, the power consumption of the GPU is not affected in any significant way; the device is still running at high framerate clock speeds.
Chris Hook, AMD’s PR head, did not reveal any details about the feature when he informally announced it online in late December, but there is already plenty of speculation. The most prominent theory is that the framerate control will come from under/overvolting the GPU while increasing or decreasing clock speed.
