AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.4.2 – DirectX 12 Performance Boosted

Introduction

It is still very early days for DirectX 12, with very few games supporting the new API and many of these games coming with lock down feature sets thanks to the Universal Windows Program. 

Last weekend AMD had spoken to us about their newest drivers, asking us on our opinions regarding their changes since the launch of their Radeon Software Crimson driver last year and teasing some improvements that were to come.   

There is no doubt that since the creation of the AMD Radeon Technologies Group last year that AMD has made one thing clear, that AMD was going to become much more committed to releasing regular drivers, which has certainly been the case since they released Radeon Software Crimson back in November 2016. 

In recent months, we have seen much more regular driver updates from AMD, many giving optimizations to newly released games. Right now we see fewer users reporting driver issues, which is another impressive improvement to make. 

Right now AMD claims that right now they have the best GPU drivers, which a lot of people agree with considering Nvidia’s recent issues with their 364.47 WHQL driver. At OC3D we consider the long term when we look at GPU drivers, as these are key pieces of software that most of us update on a monthly basis, if not more often, so we will wait to see how consistent AMD and Nvidia remain with their release schedule in 2016 before we can make any judgement on who has the best GPU drivers.   

 

 

DirectX 12

When speaking to AMD about their GPU drivers they claimed that they were well prepared for DirectX 12, hinting to us that we would see some nice improvements in performance when we were using the new API in the near future.   

Like any good tech enthusiast, we wanted to know what was coming, asking if they were going to make some optimisations that were API wide or just specific optimisations for specific games, to which they responded by giving us an early look at their upcoming Radeon Software Crimson 16.4.2 driver, to which they stated that they had the performance lead when it came to DirectX 12 gaming. 

We all know what this means, we have some testing to do.