AMD’s Radeon Software 19.9.1 driver turbocharges AMD’s Gears 5 performance

AMD’s has officially released its Radeon Software 19.9.1 driver, bring in support for new Vulkan API extensions while also offering users up to an 8% performance boost in Gears 5. 

Users of Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion software will also be glad to know that these drivers now offer a fix for an incompatibility issue which could cause AMD’s RX 5700 series graphics cards to hang systems in certain product configurations.   

  

Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.9.1 Highlights

Support For

Gears 5

  – Up to 8% performance improvement in Gears of War 5 running DirectX® 12 on Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition version 19.9.1 vs. 19.8.2.RS-310

Added Vulkan Support

– VK_AMD_device_coherent_memory
– This extension adds device coherent and device uncached memory types. Device coherent and uncached memory are expected to have lower performance for general access than non-device coherent memory but can be useful in certain scenarios particularly so for debugging.

– VK_EXT_calibrated_timestamps
– This extension provides an interface to query calibrated timestamps obtained quasi simultaneously from two time domains such as host and device time domains.

– VK_EXT_line_rasterization
– This extension adds some line rasterization features that are commonly used in CAD applications and that are supported in other APIs like OpenGL. These features include Bresenham-style line rasterization, smooth rectangular lines (coverage to alpha) and stippled lines for all three line rasterization modes.

– VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation
– This extension adds Vulkan support for the SPV_EXT_demote_to_helper_invocation SPIR-V extension. The SPIR-V extension provides a new instruction that allows shaders to “demote” a fragment shader invocation to behave like a helper invocation for its duration. The demoted invocation will have no further side effects and will not output to the framebuffer but remains active and can participate in computing derivatives and in subgroup operations. This is a better match for the “discard” instruction in HLSL.

Fixed Issues

– Launching RGB Fusion 2.0 may cause a system hang on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products system configurations.

Known Issues

– Gears 5 may experience an application hang on loading screen with APU only (Ryzen) based desktop system configurations.
– HDMI overscan and underscan options may be missing from Radeon Settings on AMD Radeon VII system configurations when the primary display is set to 60hz.
– Stutter may be experienced when Radeon FreeSync is enabled on 240hz refresh displays with Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.
– Radeon Performance Metrics may report incorrect VRAM utilization.
– AMD Radeon VII may experience elevated memory clocks at idle or on desktop.
– Radeon Overlay may intermittently fail to appear when toggled in game.
– Audio for clips captured by Radeon ReLive may be corrupted or garbled when desktop recording is enabled.
– Enabling Enhanced Sync may cause game, application or system crashes on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.

Footnotes

– RS-310 – Testing conducted by AMD Performance Labs as of August 30th, 2019 on Gears of War 5 (DirectX® 12 at Ultra Presets) at 4K resolution, measured on the Radeonâ„¢ RX 5700 XT running Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.8.2 and 19.9.1 drivers. Results on 19.9.1 showed up to 8% performance gain over the previous driver. Performance may vary based on resolution and settings.

Supported Desktop GPUs