AMD Radeon drivers have long been considered buggy, but this is not the case. Thanks to Fine Wine the drivers are even really durable and moreover every new AAA title gets a driver update.
AMD graphics card drivers always cause problems – this or something similar is a rumour that has persisted for many years and has nothing to do with reality. Because with the AMD Radeon driver you are always in the best position. Not only do you get driver updates for the current graphics cards, but several generations benefit from them. As a result, even older graphics cards can achieve significant performance gains.
Problems or bugs are very rare with the AMD Radeon drivers, so you can concentrate fully on the respective performance leap.
In addition, the AMD Radeon software Adrenalin 2020 is constantly evolving and offers numerous features for monitoring and increasing performance.
Table of Contents
AMD driver updates on the release of every AAA game
Every time a triple-A game is released, AMD directly releases an update to its drivers so that your Radeon graphics cards work best with the new game. This guarantees that the latest games will run at their strongest on your AMD system.
AMD Radeon Software Features
Besides the basic driver features to make games work with your AMD system, there are some optimisation options for you with the AMD Radeon Software. AMD themselves describe the software as innovative, user-friendly and powerful. That’s no coincidence when you look at the feature list.
- DeepL access to games and graphics settings for each on the home page
- Capture videos, screenshots, animated GIFs and instant replays with one click
- Monitor system status at a glance
- Start the desired game directly from the driver software
- Start the stream of the game from the software
- Monitor and track game performance (FPS, temperature, CPU usage, etc.) directly in the Radeon software
You can also activate or deactivate features such as Radeon Anti-Lag, Radeon Chill, Radeon Image Sharpening and more in the graphics card settings of the AMD Radeon software. Again, you can set this individually for each game.
Use AMD SAM with the right CPU: If you use a combination of an AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU and a Radeon RX 6000 graphics card in your gaming PC, you can benefit from AMD Smart Access Memory. Depending on the game, you can expect strong performance gains. In a separate article, we have already told you everything you need to know about AMD Smart Access Memory.
AMD Fine Wine: Top performance even with older graphics cards
What is Fine Wine all about? There is no special technology or registered trademark behind the term. It is simply a term that originated in the AMD community and has since manifested itself. Fine Wine describes the efficiency of the AMD Radeon drivers and software.
AMD still updates its drivers for older GCN graphics cards (Graphics Core Next). In this way, the available hardware resources are optimised further and further, and accordingly, the community speaks of a well-maturing wine (Fine Wine), which, as is well known, tastes even better after the right maturing time. So you get additional performance for free.
This means that current AMD Radeon driver updates release more performance potential than, for example, the competition from NVIDIA for older graphics cards.
Most recently, the particular strength of the AMD Radeon drivers can be seen in the Radeon RX 6000 series. According to tests in June 2021 (via 3DCenter), the current graphics card generation was able to gain 10 percent performance through driver updates in the course of the first six months, while NVIDIA was only able to gain three percent. This example shows how much AMD drivers can continue to improve the performance of graphics cards over time and thus age particularly well.
AMD FreeSync for smoother gaming
What is AMD FreeSync? It is a technology from AMD that uses standards such as DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync to provide gamers with dynamic refresh rates. AMD FreeSync synchronises the refresh rate of the display with the frame rate of the graphics card.
The result is a smoother gaming experience by reducing or eliminating visual artefacts. Artifacts include input latency, image distortion and judder in gaming and video playback. AMD FreeSync is also used with HDMI connections.
The AMD FreeSync differences at a glance:
AMD Radeon Anti-Lag
In your AMD Radeon software there is an item that you should definitely activate. You can ensure that your input lag is reduced by up to 32 percent. This is made possible by the so-called Radeon Anti-Lag function from AMD. You can activate it as follows:
- Call the AMD Radeon software in the game by pressing ALT + R
- Click on the top line
- Select the supported game
- Now activates Radeon Anti-Lag
You can also see exactly what this looks like in the following video:
AMD Radeon Chill
Under AMD Radeon Chill you can expect a feature of the Radeon software that ensures that your graphics card does not invest more power than necessary. This saves power and also ensures lower temperatures for the graphics card.
AMD Radeon Chill adjusts the performance of your graphics card so that it generates exactly the maximum FPS that your monitor is capable of. This is important because often enough the graphics card offers the maximum performance but generates far more FPS than your monitor can display. It thus invests more power unnecessarily.
How exactly you can activate AMD Radeon Chill can be seen in the following video.
AMD Radeon Boost
More power for a short time: With the AMD Radeon Boost feature, you can get up to 79 percent more power from your AMD Radeon 6000 graphics card for a short time. The Boost can be easily activated in the Radeon software. The Boost makes this possible by briefly reducing the resolution during fast mouse movements without you noticing. This in turn provides more performance and more FPS in the game.
You can see how to activate the boost in the following video.
AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution for the best performance
With AMD FSR you can rely on a scaling technology that ensures better FPS. The graphics card renders the game internally at a lower resolution and then scales the image up to the monitor’s native resolution using software. This results in an increase in performance with almost the same quality. More than 70 games now support this technology. Among them is Anno 1800.
If you want to know more about AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution, then watch the video down below: