AMD Radeon Software Crimson – Overview and testing

AMD Radeon Software Crimson

 

When AMD announced their new Radeon Software drivers we knew big changes were coming, AMD didn’t just promise us that they would be delivering us a new and improved user interface, but also that they would improving the stability of their drivers, the performance of their drivers and will be continuing to add more and more useful features to their software.

AMD considers their new drivers not just to be mere drivers, but a full on Radeon Software suite, which will deliver users a greater experience than they have ever had previously with AMD, or ATI products.   

  

  

 

With the first release of AMD’s Radeon Software, AMD Crimson, AMD planned to tackle not just performance, efficiency,the aging UI of their drivers or simply add more features, but take a 4 pronged approach that will endeavor to do all this at once in a since, stable driver release. 

In effect what AMD’s Radeon Software is a massive redesign for AMD’s graphics drivers, leaving the ageing Catalyst name behind in order to bring users something which is not just new, but massively improved for AMD Radeon. 

One example of the many improvements can be seen as soon as your system is booted, offering a greatly reduced boot time when compared to AMD old catalyst drivers with AMD stating a reduction in boot time from 8 seconds to a mere 0.6 seconds. 

AMD’s first iteration of their Radeon Software will be called AMD Crimson Edition 15.11, with all major revision getting a new name and all minor version will get the usual AMD Year/month naming scheme. 

 

        

 

When it comes to stability both AMD and Nvidia get a lot of flak from from enthusiasts from both sides, especially when it comes to playing some of the latest games.   

AMD want to tackle the issue of software stability in their drivers and plan to achieve this by conducting more testing on their new drivers and listening to the problems which consumers face while using their drivers. AMD will be conduction 100% more Automated testing and 25% more manual testing with their Radeon Software drivers and on top of that plan on using 15% more test system configurations during this test. 

Hopefully these improvements in AMD’s testing suite and methodology will result in increasingly stable drivers for AMD’s Radeon Software Group, as driver instability is something which often turns people off PC gaming. 

 

  

 

Over 2015 many AMD users were very disappointing in the frequency of AMD’s GPU drivers, especially when it came to WHQL, non-beta, driver, as there were only 3 releases in the whole year of 2015. 

AMD plans on delivering us more major Radeon Software update next year, promising up to 6 major WHQL releases and additional Beta releases and Day 1 game drivers. 

 

  

 

One of the best sources for information on what bugs and issues need to be addressed in drivers often comes from the community, after all they are the people who use these drivers day after day and over a wider variety of games than AMD could possibly test.

With Last years AMD Catalyst Omega driver AMD had fixed the 10 biggest issues that AMD Catalyst users had requested to be fixed, and now around a year later AMD has some so again, fixing many of the issues that their end users have been facing over the past year. Below are 10 of the most requested fixes for AMD, but they assure us that this driver has had plenty more bugs and problems fixed.