Nvidia's free speed boost for all PC games is no longer exclusive to its newest GPUs – here's which older cards are about to get it

• Nvidia's Smooth Motion tech is inbound for all RTX 4000 GPUs
• Previously this frame rate-boosting feature was only for RTX 5000 cards
• It's still in beta for RTX 4000 models, but it shouldn't be long before the full release

Nvidia is providing its Smooth Motion tech for boosting frame rates across all PC games to RTX 4000 graphics cards in a new driver.

This is great news for gamers with those GPUs – previously Smooth Motion was only an option for RTX 5000 models – but the catch is that for now, this is still in testing with Nvidia's beta driver.

It shouldn't be too long before the tech makes its way through to a release driver, though.

This development was picked up on X by Huang514613, who pointed to a post on the Guru3D forums, as flagged by VideoCardz (with the tech site verifying that the new beta does indeed carry the feature, and briefly testing it out).

Smooth Motion is essentially the equivalent of frame generation (FG) – adding in extra frames to boost the frames per second count, and make the game run artificially smoother – but it works at the driver level (doubling the frame rate).

What that means is that it can work with any DX11 or DX12 game (in theory) across the board, whereas with frame generation (and DLSS 4), developers must code their game to make use of the tech. That obviously limits the usefulness of the latter considerably.

Analysis: smooth operator – but be patient

Smooth Motion is a big deal because it means that a pile of older PC games, which are never going to be updated for frame generation at this point, can get the benefit of a similar feature.

The catch is that word 'similar', and Smooth Motion won't offer results which are as good as frame generation in terms of image quality (or the frame rate boost). Still, for games that don't have DLSS or FG support, this is clearly a lot better than nothing.

As you may be aware, Smooth Motion is Nvidia's equivalent of AMD's Fluid Motion Frames (which came way before Team Green's take, and was recently improved).

With any luck, Nvidia will bring this feature to RTX GPUs that predate the RTX 4000 lineup in the future.

I'd be wary of trying to get this working on the mentioned beta driver, by the way, as there are reports of crashes or even total PC lock-ups being caused by those experimenting with the tech (which must be enabled via the Nvidia Profile Inspector tool).

If you have an RTX 4000 graphics card, just be happy that Smooth Motion is on the way, and wait for the official release in the finished driver – it shouldn't be too far off at this point.

Early results are (generally) promising for Smooth Motion on RTX 4000 GPUs, by the way, going by reports from the more intrepid gamers who've gone ahead and tested this tech while it was in beta.

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