Just as expected, AMD is preparing to launch its yearly major driver overhaul. The Radeon Software Crimson Relive Edition driver update is going to be made available from tomorrow. In the meantime though, a number of slides have leaked revealing some juicy details of just what is going to be included. The big headline however, is the performance gains of up to 8% in like-for-like scenarios.
The Radeon Crimson Relive driver is going to be focused around three key tenets - performance, features and stability.
Performance is the most obviously beneficial, and in the slide below you can see gains between 4-8% in some of the most popular titles in recent years. That’s compared to the Crimson 16.6.2 driver however, which released in June. This is almost certainly skewing the results in AMD’s favour, alongside the generous diagrams, but that’s to take nothing away from Team Red’s excellent driver performance improvements over the last 12 months. Consider where they were this time two years ago and it's an impressive turnaround.
Then we have Radeon Chill, a new feature which not only lowers power consumption and keeps heat down, but also lessens the number of wasted frames rendered and quickening response times. It all sounds a bit too good to be true so we'll have to wait and see, but AMD reckon it lowers the average frame time by as much as 32%.
Radeon ReLive isn't just the name of the new driver release but also of a major new feature. Radeon ReLive is a reportedly lightweight piece of game recording software, averaging around 3-4% performance hit when activated. That's a heck of lot better than the likes of FRAPS, and certainly an improvement over the fiddly Raptr tool.
Lastly there's extended WattMan support for a bunch more graphics cards. WattMan is AMD's own form of power management, letting Radeon users tweak GPU voltage, engine clocks, memory clocks, fan speed and temperature. This was previously just the RX 400 series, but support has now been added for R9 Fury, R9 390, R9 380, R9 290, R9 285, R9 260, R7 360 and R7 260 series. There are a couple of oddities however. None of the R9 370, R9 280 or R9 270 series are supported as they are GCN 1.0 products rather than GCN 1.1.
Other touted features for the ReLive software includes HDR 10 support, Dolby Vision support, VP9 decode acceleration, 24% improved click-to-response time while using FreeSync, and DisplayPort HBR3 support.
Of course that’s not all we’re getting from AMD either. Its New Horizon event is taking place on December 13th, live in Texas, where we’re expecting to see the official unveiling of its Zen-based CPUs. We'll have plenty more on that nearer the time.
Source: News - Major AMD Radeon Crimson ReLive Drivers Revealed With 8 Per Cent Performance Gains
The Radeon Crimson Relive driver is going to be focused around three key tenets - performance, features and stability.
Performance is the most obviously beneficial, and in the slide below you can see gains between 4-8% in some of the most popular titles in recent years. That’s compared to the Crimson 16.6.2 driver however, which released in June. This is almost certainly skewing the results in AMD’s favour, alongside the generous diagrams, but that’s to take nothing away from Team Red’s excellent driver performance improvements over the last 12 months. Consider where they were this time two years ago and it's an impressive turnaround.
Of course that’s not all we’re getting from AMD either. Its New Horizon event is taking place on December 13th, live in Texas, where we’re expecting to see the official unveiling of its Zen-based CPUs. We'll have plenty more on that nearer the time.
