Placing users front and center
AMD’s new Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers have been available for download since late November. AMD’s decision to ditch its Catalyst drivers and go for a complete rebranding with the new Crimson Edition drivers was motivated primarily by its goal of pushing software as a product in its own right. No longer will software take a backseat to hardware, and AMD wants to create the slickest and most stable software solution possible that will bring out the best in its Graphics Core Next (GCN) graphics cards.
From this point forward, all new major driver versions to come under the Radeon Software label will be branded a shade of red. But Crimson hasn’t been without its hitches. For instance, reports emerged in early December about a bug that caused erratic issues with fan speeds that resulted in users’ GPUs overheating in some cases. AMD has since released a hotfix for the problem, but that might have been enough to lead you to hold off on updating your drivers.
Nevertheless, Crimson is touting enhancements in four key areas – stability, user experience, performance, and power efficiency. Here’s a broad overview of some of the highlights of AMD’s newest driver package (hopefully, it’ll help you decide if you want to upgrade, if you haven’t already).
A renewed focus on stability
AMD has placed a strong emphasis on stability in its Crimson Edition drivers. It essentially comprises the foundation of the new drivers on which all the other improvements are built.
According to AMD, Radeon Software Crimson Edition has undergone far more rigorous quality and stability testing than any of the previous Catalyst drivers. This is to the tune of twice the number of automated test cases, 25% manual test cases and 15% more test system configurations. AMD has also tested the new drivers with all the latest technology and hardware to minimize hiccups with even the newest systems.
AMD says it is taking a more rigorous approach to stability testing with Crimson.
What this all means is that AMD has covered more scenarios and system configurations in testing than before, which translates into a higher chance of identifying and stamping out more bugs and instabilities.
AMD didn’t do all this work in a bubble though, and it also reached out to the user community to gather feedback on the problems they’d most like to see fixed. The result was a list of the top 10 problems that were plaguing users, which AMD promptly set out to address. In Radeon Software Crimson Edition, the company says it has solved every single issue on the list, which you can see for yourself below:
AMD has made an effort to listen to the community.
Reworking the user experience
The new Game Manager allows users to set up custom graphics settings for individual games.
AMD has also worked to bring about significant user experience improvements with a more responsive and intuitive user interface. Compared to the older Catalyst software suite, Radeon Software Crimson Edition can start up under 0.6 seconds, versus an average of 8 seconds for Catalyst. In addition, AMD has made the display initialization time about 3x quicker, which means that you should find that the new Radeon Settings interface – which replaces the Catalyst Control Center – responds to your clicks and commands more quickly because the monitor is now displaying the image faster.
However, the most notable change is probably the completely revamped user interface, which has been built from the ground up with Qt, a software development framework that supports cross-platform work.
But other than additions like Game Manager and a user interface that is easier to navigate, the improvements extend to how users experience their games overall. The improvements take place across the board, encompassing areas including virtual reality, gaming, display, and video.
Liquid VR
Crimson is the first publically available driver to enable all of Liquid VR’s features, including affinity multi-GPU, which makes use of multiple GPUs to render each eye in a VR headset in parallel. Then there’s the use of asynchronous shaders on GCN-based graphics cards, which in a nutshell, enables parallel computing workloads, brings about lower latency, and a consequently more responsive VR experience.
The use of asynchronous shaders allows complex workloads to be broken up into multiple parallel tasks.
On top of that, Liquid VR also includes technologies for implementing efficient time warping (generating intermediate frames in low framerate scenarios to reduce judder) to further reduce latency, and features a series of OS and driver optimizations that allow VR games to bypass parts of the OS to cut down rendering time.
The immediate consequences of this are small, but the hope is that this will help enable a more seamless adoption of VR as headsets make their way onto the market over the course of the year.
If some of these enhcancements sound familiar, it's because NVIDIA first addressed these concerns and more with the their suite of VR improvement dubbed NVIDIA VR Direct.
Low framerate compensation (LFC)
More importantly, AMD has worked to address some limitations of FreeSync compared to NVIDIA’s G-Sync, where the former would sometimes display tearing or stuttering when the graphics card fails to push out frame rates above the minimum refresh rate, depending on whether V-Sync was on or not. It has introduced something called low framerate compensation (LFC), which automatically adjusts the GPU’s output and the panel’s refresh rate to provide smoother gameplay when frame rates fall below the minimum refresh rate.
LFC only kicks in when frame rates drop below the minimum refresh rate.
Like NVIDIA, AMD has not disclosed the details behind the “adaptive algorithm” it is using, but it is likely that it is employing some sort of frame repeating to keep gameplay fluid. For instance, if frame rates fall to 25fps, each frame would be repeated twice to feed 50fps to the display. There’s just one caveat – you’ll need a monitor which has a maximum refresh rate that is at least 2.5x greater than the minimum refresh rate to take advantage of LFC. That is, a monitor with a range of 30Hz to 75Hz will work fine, but one with a range of 48Hz to 75Hz will not. The greater range is probably required because AMD needs a large enough refresh range to run at a multiple of the lower framerates.
Frame pacing
Moving on, Crimson also now supports frame pacing for DirectX 9, a feature that was previously introduced for DirectX 10 and 11 in Catalyst Omega. Frame pacing does pretty much what its name suggests, ensuring that frames are put out at a steady rate for a more consistent gaming experience.
Frame pacing helps keep framerates steady.
Custom resolutions
On top of that, users gain greater control over their display settings with the ability to create custom display resolutions and set the timings, refresh rates and pixel clock for their monitor. This finally puts it on par with NVIDIA, which has had the ability to set custom resolutions for years now.
Users can even use virtual super resolution (VSR) to take advantage of Windows 10’s support for higher DPI display panels. This means that VSR now has applications outside of games and can be used to create higher resolution desktops and workspaces for greater productivity.
Better looking video
On top of that, Crimson introduces something called directional scaling, which is essentially anti-aliasing for video content. A new adaptive directional filtering algorithm helps improve the scaling of 1080p content to 4K resolutions, reducing the appearance of jagged edges and lines. This is no doubt in response to the trend toward high-resolution displays, and the glaring lack of corresponding high-resolution content. However, this feature is only supported on AMD's Fiji-based GPUs, which includes the Radeon R9 Nano, Fury, and Fury X cards.
Directional scaling is only available on the Radeon R9 Nano, Fury, and Fury X cards.
AMD has also updated Crimson's dynamic contrast algorithm. It can now adjust the contrast on a per-video basis for the best experience with individual videos. Because different clips likely have vastly different contrast ratios, the new algorithm's ability to adapt can help to better maintain the contrast between light and dark areas of the scene and preserve detail.
More performance, less power
You can expect better performance on DirectX 12 titles on Crimson as compared to the older Catalyst drivers.
The prospect of better performance through a simple driver update is arguably the most compelling reason for users to upgrade. As it turns out, AMD is claiming a handful of performance improvements like faster game loading and optimizations for all the latest titles.
Shader caching
Part of the performance boost can be attributed to something called shader caching, a new feature on Crimson. This allows AMD’s drivers to cache compiled game shader routines and reuse them each time they are used, instead of having to recompile them every time.
The problem before was that DirectX lacks a universal, built-in shader caching solution. And as games became more graphically demanding, shaders have become more complex as well, which increased the time and resources needed to compile them.
Crimson allows shader caching, which improves performance because the shaders don't have to be recompiled each time they are used.
As a result, GPU vendors have had to implement shader caching at the driver level to handle games that made poor use of shaders in order to avoid performance bottlenecks. NVIDIA actually already enables this, so this is more a case of AMD finally catching up.
Games that extensively pre-load shader compilations can thus now skip that step and reduce their overall load times. This is especially useful if you have an older and slower CPU because shader compilation is a CPU operation. Similarly, games that compile shaders regularly on-the-fly can run into stuttering issues if the compilation process holds up the render of the next frame. After the first compilation, caching helps resolve stuttering by eliminating the need to recompile the shaders each time they are used.
Optimizations for the latest games
NVIDIA is in the habit of releasing driver updates with optimizations for new titles as they are released, and AMD will be doubling down on this approach with Crimson.
For instance, at the time of launch, AMD was already citing improvements for games like Fable Legends, Ashes of the Singularity, and Star Wars Battlefront.
Crimson will actively support optimizations for all the latest game titles.
Reduced flip queue size
AMD also says that it has reduced the size of the DirectX flip queue, the data structure that stores rendered frames before they are displayed by the monitor. You may also know this as the frame buffer, which queues successive frames before they are delivered to ensure steady frame delivery and smoother gameplay.
Naturally, a short flip queue means that a steady frame pacing is more easily disrupted by a sudden break in the rhythm, when one frame takes longer than usual to load for instance. On the other hand, a longer queue increases latency because more resources are being channeled into rendering frames beforehand.
According to AMD, it made the change with players of MOBA games like Dota 2 in mind as they require a maximally response experience.
Greater power efficiency
To cap it all off, AMD highlighted that Crimson can increase performance per watt by up to 23%.
It also improved its frame rate target control (FRTC) feature that we first saw on the Radeon R7 370 and R9 380. FRTC support has now been extended to DirectX 9, 10, and 11 games, and users can now play with a wider range of frame rate targets, ranging from 30 to 200fps.
In a nutshell, FRTC is especially useful on laptops where battery life is at stake. By dispensing with the need to render additional frames that do not contribute to a better gameplay experience, users are able to reduce power consumption, noise, and heat.
FRTC will come in especially handy on laptops where battery life is an issue.
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