AMD’s DirectX 11 Boosting Driver Tested – Great news for classic PC games on Radeon
Radeon’s giving DirectX 11 a performance boost
Hardware and software go hand-in-hand, especially within the world of GPUs. There’s a reason why AMD and Nvidia often release multiple GPU driver updates every month, and a reason why game updates can sometimes deliver staggering performance benefits.
This week, AMD released a May 2022 Preview version of their AMD Software (formerly Radeon Software) suite, and it includes a new DirectX 11 optimisations that can deliver performance improvements in seemingly all games that utilise the API.
A new blogpost from AMD has stated that their Radeon RX 6000 series users could gain up to 10% more performance on average, with some games receiving larger performance benefits. Today, we will be testing AMD’s preview drivers to see if AMD’s claims are legitimate.
With this new driver, AMD is promising API-wide performance benefits. That said, every game uses DirectX differently, and that will result in different results on a game-by-game basis. Some games will react to AMD’s optimisations differently, and some games will perform very differently with AMD’s new software/driver improvements.Â
  DX11 Performance Improvements
AMD is constantly fine tuning our drivers and looking at ways to deliver more performance for our products. Through rigorous testing and development, our preview driver delivers on average, up to 10% increase in performance gains in DX 11-based games on your Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card – with some games reaching even higher than average gains such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – up to 28%, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands – up to 30%, and Grand Theft Auto V – up to 11%.Â
When testing this new driver, we will be looking at a verity of DirectX 11 games. This incudes several older releases and some newer games. While DirectX 12 is becoming increasingly popular, many games are still launched using the DirectX 11 API, and that makes AMD’s performance boosting driver relevant to newly released games and classic titles alike.
ContentsÂ
– 3DMARK
– The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
With our testing, we will be comparing Radeon’s newest AMD Software release, version 22.5.1, and AMD’s new May 2022 Preview driver. Both of these drivers launched on the same day, with AMD’s May 2022 preview being an beta release that contains features from a future Radeon Software release. Both sets of drivers are currently available publically though AMD.Â
Right now, AMD’s DirectX 11 improvements are only available on AMD’s RDNA 2 based RX 6000 series GPUs. Once this feature is integrated into AMD’s mainline AMD Software releases, we their DirectX 11 performance improvements to be available across more Radeon graphics cards.Â
Full Test System Specifications
Below are the full specifications of our game testing system, which we built in mid-2020 to meet the needs of future games. Alongside this system, we will be testing using AMD’s Radeon RX 6800
To help support the website, we have included Amazon affiliate links below should you wish to purchase the same or similar PC parts. You can read more about our games testing system here.
OC3D Game/GPU Test Rig (Affiliate Links Below)
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Processor with Prescision Boost Overdrive
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula (X570) MotherboardÂ
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB Series DDR4 3600MHz (2x8GB) Memory
Corsair RM1000i Power Supply
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT All-in-One Liquid CPU Cooler
Corsair MP600 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Corsiar Obsidian 500D RGB SE Case
Windows 10 x64
