AMD Radeon Software Crimson – Overview and testing

New Features – FreeSync Updates and Crossfire Changes

 

While the performance gains and stability improvements of AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson Driver are very welcome, some of the biggest changes in AMD’s Crimson drivers come with enhanced FreeSync support, allowing it to work in Crossfire with DirectX 9 games, enable Low Framerate compensation and the promise to allow FreeSync to work over HDMI with compatable monitors in the future. 

 

  

 

The biggest update to AMD’s FreeSync is the addition of AMD’s LFC, Low Framerate Compensation, technology, which allows AMD FreeSync to function outside of the monitors traditional FreeSync range, in a similar way to how Nvidia’s G-Sync technology currently functions. 

With this update AMD GPUs now output framerates below a monitors stated minimum refresh by simply allowing the GPU to output the same frame twice, effectively forcing making the monitor display 40Hz when it is supposed to be displaying 20Hz for example.

Let’s consider a monitor with a 40Hz to 144Hz FreeSync limit, when FreeSync was first released there was terrible shuttering when you co below the displays minimum refresh limit, which is in this case 40. Now with AMD’s LFC technology when your GPU outputs a frametate below the monitors minimum refresh, it is able to display the same frame twice, which means that instead of trying to show 39 frames per second, it shows 78 frames per second, which places the shown framerate in the monitors FreeSync limits, while giving showing the user a framerate that is below the FreeSync limits.  

This technology can only work on FreeSync monitors with a wide FreeSync range, with AMD stating that they need a maximum FreeSync refresh rate that is at least 2.5X the minimum refresh rate of the monitor, so not all FreeSync monitors can use AMD’s LFC technology. 

 

  

DirectX 9 Frame Pacing

When AMD first introduce Frame Pacing technology back in 2013 AMD were sadly unable to implement on games running on DirectX 9, which left plenty of popular games with more unstable Crossfire support with higher frame variance.

Now AMD is proud to announce that they have finally got Frame pacing to function on DirectX 9 games, though in reality this is something that AMD really should have implemented long ago, though it is better late than never.