AMD’s Crimson Drivers Are Out Now, But Don’t Expect Magic Gains

I wrote yesterday how AMD’s Crimson drivers would be fixing a whole suite of problems and adding a tonne of performance fixes that Team Red fans should undoubtedly get excited about. Well, now you can go one further and just download the drivers yourself.

The drivers are available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, although the release notes stresses that you’ll need Service Pack 1 of Windows 7 at a minimum (which everyone should have). Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, though, here are the benefits:

  • ​Radeon Settings
  • ​New Install UI
  • ​Liquid VR
  • ​Asynchronous Shaders
  • ​Shader Cache
  • ​Optimized Flip Queue Size
  • Freesync™ Enhancements
  • ​Custom Resolution Support
  • ​Frame Pacing Enhancements
  • ​Frame Rate Target Control Enhancements
  • ​Updated Video Feature support for ‘Carrizo’ products
  • ​Power Optimization
  • ​Directional Scaling
  • ​Dynamic Contrast Update
  • ​DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0 support

Anandtech has gone over the drivers quickly and found that the performance gains against the Catalyst 15.11.1 drivers aren’t quite as spectacular as users might have hoped for, though. Running at 1440p, the tech hub found that the R9 Fury only performed marginally better — about 2-3% — under the Crimson drivers, with negligible gains in games including The Talos Principle, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Crysis 3 and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

Those sufficiently excited by the prospect of better performance can find everything they need over at the AMD page.


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