AMD Radeon Software Crimson – Overview and testing
Performance Improvements and Testing
Most PC gamers update their GPU drivers for one main reason, to improve our performance in today’s games, especially for the latest titles. No big driver release can come without performance benefits, after all If the last driver is stable for you and there is no real performance gain why change it?
With AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson driver, AMD have worked hard to improve the performance of their driver both inside and outside of games, making driver start up up to 10x faster, display initialization up to 3x faster and making the experience with interacting with AMD’s new Radeon control center much snappier.
Inside games AMD has also been working hard to deliver more performance, both while using their Windows drivers and their Linux drivers.
In Linux AMD see a lot more performance, with AMD showing a minimum of 12% improvement in the games that they have tested with their R9 390X. This is great to see, especially singe Steam Machines are currently coming to the market, hopefully AMD can continue to improve their Linux performance with later driver releases.
In Windows AMD seem to have focused mostly on improving their performance on the latest titles and on games using the DirectX 12 API, giving them a nice little bump in performance, though we will have to test and see whether AMD’s Battlefront Improvements are improvements over their Day One Catalyst 15.11.1 driver.
Benchmark Testing vs Catalyst 15.10 Beta Driver
In 3DMARK we see a little boost in performance when using AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson driver, though it isn’t really much to write home about. Any improvement is good to see though, so we can’t really complain here.
Game Testing vs Catalyst 15.10 Beta Driver
All the games here were tested with AMD’s Catalyst 15.10 driver with the exception of Star Wars Battlefront, which was tested with AMD’s optimized Catalyst 15.11.1 driver.
In these tests we can see an almost across the board performance improvement at 4K, with the exception of Hitman Absolution. While all these improvements in performance are fairly minor, it is great to see AMD push a little more out of their hardware, especially in new releases like Star Wars: Battlefront.
Battlefront performance when compared to Nvidia
Game performance in Star Wars Battlefront has been improved greatly with this new driver, not only improving AMD’s average framerate over Nvidia’s, but also greatly improving AMD’s minimum framerate, which is in many ways much more important.
Now in Star Wars Battlefront AMD is not just winning marginally at 4K, but now has a commanding lead at both 1440p and 4K resolutions. Great Work AMD.
New Radeon Software Drivers (Above), Day 1 Catalyst 15.11.1 Driver (Below)
