PhyriadFG

PhyriadFG is an experimental Windows tool that makes games appear to run at a higher frame rate by generating extra frames in between the real ones. Unlike similar features built into graphics card drivers or game engines, this tool works entirely from outside the game: it captures whatever the monitor is displaying, figures out how things moved between frames, creates a synthetic in-between frame, and displays it.

Because it only sees the final image and has no access to the game's internal data, it works with any game on any engine. The trade-off is that guessing motion from pixels alone is harder than having the game provide motion hints directly. Newly revealed areas of the screen, such as when a character moves and uncovers the background, are the trickiest situations for this approach.

The tool is designed to use multiple graphics cards at once. On a machine with a dedicated GPU and an integrated GPU, the integrated one handles the initial screen capture and conversion, a second GPU handles the motion analysis, and the main GPU handles the final frame blending and display. On a single-GPU machine, the same pipeline runs on one card, which is slower but still functional.

Generating extra frames comes with a cost: there is added delay before each synthetic frame appears on screen. The tool reports this delay live while it is running. This kind of frame generation is better suited to making games feel smoother during exploration or story sequences than for situations where reaction time matters.

PhyriadFG is a student-built, experimental project currently at version 0.4.0. It runs on Windows and requires a Vulkan SDK and Microsoft build tools to compile from source. A launcher with a simple graphical interface is included for picking which game window to target. The project is open-source under the MIT License.