AMD Releases Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition: Overlay, App & More for 2017
by Nate Oh on December 12, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAdrenalin Enhancements Part 1: E-Sync, Chill, WattMan & FRTC
When Enhanced Sync was introduced in the mid-year Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.2, AMD finally had an equivalent to NVIDIA’s Fast Sync and Adaptive V-Sync, a combination of technologies that aim to reduce the drawbacks of enabling V-Sync. At framerates above a monitors refresh rate, Enhanced Sync keeps the keeps the frame rate unlocked and displays the most recently completed frame to reduce V-Sync’s latency, or input lag. At framerates below the refresh rate Enhanced Sync simply disables V-Sync to reduce V-Sync stuttering.
With Adrenalin, Enhanced Sync is now supported for all GCN GPUs, as opposed to only Polaris and Vega based GPUs. And beyond that, Enhanced Sync now supports Vulkan applications, notebooks with dGPU-driven displays, multi-GPU (mGPU), and AMD Eyefinity.
Moving onto Radeon Chill, a power saving feature that modulates framerates based on in-game movement, this now supports “countless” games, including ones powered by Vulkan. As far as “countless” goes, the only details disclosed were that this was accomplished via a generic Chill profile.
Radeon WattMan also received custom profile capability. Profiles can be saved, loaded, and shared.
These past three developments are arguably some of the most desired updates, at least according to AMD’s feature voting page: these changes were #1, #2, and #3 respectively of what users voted on most.
Lastly, FRTC now supports Vulkan as well, rounding out this first batch of ‘short and sweet’ Adrenalin improvements.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
42 Comments
View All Comments
MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
I appreciated the detailed look at all the new features in this driver update! Thank you for the well written articleNate Oh - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
You're welcome, thanks for the compliments :)Manch - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
New acronym: AMDRSAE17MFUjjj - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
2017 has been the worst year for GPUs in a long time.Even when excluding the mining turbulence, the way perf per $ has evolved is just really poor. AMD screwed up with Vega, 1 year late and every metric a disaster while Nvidia has no reason to do more. Granted, memory prices are a substantial headwind too.
Worst case scenario, this is the beginning of the end for PC gaming, if there is no competitive pressure, if memory prices don't come down (or alternative solutions are explored), GPU makers might focus more on pushing prices up than on keeping the market alive- kinda like Intel did since Nehalem.
Ofc to be fair the the pC dies soon enough anyway so it doesn't matter all that much how this racket goes.
Flunk - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
Nvidia was never releasing a new card this year, Volta was always scheduled for next year regardless of what AMD did. Vega was about a year late, yes, but hit all the targets. It would only disappoint you if you weren't paying any attention to anything. The topline Vega card was meant to compete with GTX 1080 and it does. GPU prices are up due to altcoin miners buying them up, that's probably just a temporary thing because either that will die down or someone will make an ASIC for whichever algorithm is hottest.As for this being "the end of PC gaming", PC game sales are up even forcing many formerly console-exclusive developers to release games on PC like Bungie, Rockstar and Capcom. I'd say we're probably seeing the begin of the end of console gaming, but PC and mobile are doing better than ever.
jjj - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
Nvidia had a lot of room to lower prices and add more SKU if needed, they got stupid high margins now because AMD has made a mess. The 1070 would be 250$ today if Vega was competitive.As for Vega, it's terrible in perf per W, perf per mm2 and much worse in perf per cost(note that cost and price are 2 different things). Vega 64 and 56 are a disaster for gaming and you are the one that lacks a clue, or objectivity.
I did mention the mining thing and noted that even when excluding that but you are clearly unwilling to be rational.
As for the end of PC gaming, again you seem to hit certain limitations. Folks buy new GPUs because GPU makers have been able to provide 30-50% more perf per $ every year, if that changes, GPU sale tank, PC gaming becomes a less interesting and evolves much slower and so on. The end is near anyway as glasses will kill PCs, phones and much more in the next decade.
BigCapitalist - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
Please don't be an idiot.What about CPUs? AMD just made Intel get off their asses and they have a $15 BILLION R&D vs AMD Market Cap of $10 BILLION.
So quit blaming AMD for crap, they're stretched as is and YOU are the reason PC gaming will die. People like you care about Watts like you live in a 3rd world country. AMD doesn't have the capability money wise to focus on power draw, it's pretty obvious.
They're fighting Nvidia AND Intel and they're actually doing well against Nvidia right now but all you do is look at the majestic 1080ti(which wasn't the goal anyways) and power draw.
I'm for companies that are pro consumer, Intel and Nvidia aren't, hence the crap performance gains of Intel CPUs for he last 5+ years and Nvidia making you pay for $100 Gsync.
Also, I take it you don't pay attention to the developer side of the market. AMD offers WAY more power than Nvidia for Pro cards vs Quadro for HALF THE PRICE. But people like you just keep buying Nvidia because of the name, hurting the competition which is providing better resources. And in terms of development on games, there hasn't been a better time for them with all the new tools and softwares that are out now, coupled with the raw CPU power of Ryzens up to 16 cores and we have machines that can produce AAA level games on a $3,000 PC.
lmcd - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
Look, AMD is an excellent value proposition for certain compute situations within environments where power is not a constraint.It also is a great option to support open source, if that's your thing.
Small cases are in vogue. If I'm picking between a GTX 1070 and a Radeon 56 for my Silverstone SG09 (mATX case that's slightly larger than the original BitFenix ITX), it's pretty easy to pick the GTX 1070 -- it's cheaper, performs very similarly, and is available in ITX-sized cards.
That said, with how the ReLive software is shaping up, I think that streamers should strongly consider AMD cards and using ReLive instead of managing OBS directly.
mkruzel - Thursday, December 14, 2017 - link
AMD does have very power efficient hardware available. My server is running AMD 3950 (15W) CPU and my desktop runs RX560 (40W) which is good enough for my gaming.MamiyaOtaru - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
"People like you care about Watts like you live in a 3rd world country."haha wut. I care about watts because more of them is harder to cool. Fewer of them means a quieter machine.