Does AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition Q2 2018 driver improve APU performance?

Conclusion

We have been asking AMD to merge their APU drivers with their mainline Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition graphics drivers for quite some time, moving Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G users away from their almost second-class driver stack. It is nice to see that APU users now sit at equal pegging with other Radeon users, even if their iGPUs are considered weak by most gamers. 

Like most driver releases, the upgrade from AMD’s Raven Ridge Ryzen+Vega release date driver to Radeon Software Adrenaline Q2 2018 Edition has not delivered a game-changing performance increase to our Ryzen 5 2400G, though it has provided us with some noteworthy performance boosts.   

I will start by noting that this new driver release coincides closely with the launch of AMD’s Ryzen PRO series of APUs for enterprise-class systems, making it easy to guess why we can see a boost in our 2400G’s performance in PCMARK 10. The 4% boost in the benchmark’s content creation test suite shows that AMD’s latest driver has increased the compute-focused capabilities of our 2400G’s integrated Vega GPU, an improvement that translates well into Ryzen PRO.

On the gaming side, we have a mixed bag when it comes to performance improvements, with a mixture of margin of error performance changes with a few noteworthy boosts, with Rainbow Six: Seige coming out well with a 3-5% performance gain. We found no cases of performance regression, which is a positive thing to note, though don’t expect this driver to offer game-changing performance benefits.  The highest performance boost this driver achieved in our testing was 4-5%.  

It is undeniable that AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers are better than what AMD’s Ryzen 2400G and 2200G owners had previously. While the direct improvements offered by this new driver are limited, the primary benefit of AMD’s merged dedicated and integrated driver stack is that Raven Ridge APU should now be able to take advantage of the new features, game optimisations and bug fixes that provided with each new release of Radeon Software Adrenalin. 

With AMD’s new unified driver stack, no Radeon users will need to make do with outdated graphics drivers, giving Ryzen+Vega APU users the ability to upgrade their drivers with every new release of Radeon Software Adrenalin.

Update – 15/06/18 – AMD has confirmed that their Ryzen+Vega APUs will receive driver updates every three months with WHQL Radeon Software releases. 

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