Performance Analysis

Radeon Software Crimson Driver December 2016

AMD last week released their new all new AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive driversand as such we'll have a quick peek at driver performance. We'll do so with a Radeon RX 480 and use the first over driver which was released for that card 16.6.2, then we'll advance one month towards 16.7.3, then game realse month October 16.10.3 and we'll finish with the latest batch the 16.12.1 ReLive drivers. In this article we'll fire off eleven games mixed with older, new DX11 and DX12 game titles from the Guru3D benchmark suite to see how the Radeon RX 480 is behaving and how much performance you will really gain (or not).

The December driver obviously is an incremental driver update just as we have seen on roughly a monthly release schedule with lots of zero-day driver releases when games are released. The driver team has put a lot of focus on consumer feedback and tries to deal and adapt towards the demand from you guys. Winter is coming and AMD always cooks up a nice December driver.





You can download (once made available) the driver here. As you guys know, and as we have posted in our news Raptr, the Gaming Evolved APP from AMD was missing from the installation options ever since a few months. Raptr was the Gaming Evolved APP that allows for stuff like monitoring and game optimizations, as well as video recording and overlays.

Performance

AMD claims performance increases of Radeon cards such as the RX 480 see of up to 8% performance increase with Relive. This however are the incremental performance increases over time, and not specific to the 16.6.2 driver in the slide. Later next week we'll follow up on this due to time restrictions right now at the time of writing this article.







To test perforamnce we'll be using the 16.6.2 16.7.3 16.10.3 and 16.12.1 drivers on the RX 480. The release driver was 16.6.2 (the initial driver for this card), we'll end with the ReLive drivers. What you are going to notice is that in the chart above, AMD certainly cherry picked the few titles that showed this much gain. We'll test the card with eleven game titles and three resolutions, Full HD, WQHD and Ultra HD. The games we test are Watch Dogs 2, Mafia III, DisHonored 2, Anno 2205, Deus Ex, Gears of War 4, Tomb Raider, Far Cry Primal, Doom, Hitman and Battlefield 1. Next page please.