Features

AMD is referring to the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 16.12.1 as its biggest software release ever. The company is also releasing the Radeon Pro Software ReLive Edition alongside these drivers for users of its new range of Radeon Pro graphics cards; an improved Linux versions of both the Crimson and Pro drivers that adds features to the existing open-source codebase.

The list of new features is indeed exhaustive, but let us first get the list of bug-fixes out of the way. AMD has addressed a plethora of recent and long-overdue bugs and feature requests from the community. They're listed as the following:



The number of new software features being introduced with this release far outweigh the performance improvements (of the kind Catalyst Omega introduced). AMD has been making gradual performance improvements over each WHQL, Beta, and Hotfix release. Below are AMD's claims. Later on in the article, we are putting these claims to the test. AMD also introduced a neat tool within Radeon Settings that lets you send feedback, bug reports, and feature requests directly to AMD's driver team, and you can also participate in user surveys.



With this release, AMD worked with a 3rd party to develop a benchmarking utility called Open Capture and Analysis Tool, a vendor-neutral FCAT alternative that lets you study frame-time. It also introduced through GPUOpen its new TressFX 4.0 tessellated hair-drawing feature. The company also added Advanced Media Framework (AMF) 1.4 support, which adds H.265 encoding.

LiquidVR Improvements

AMD expanded the feature set of LiquidVR, its all-encompassing VR-enablement platform. It begins with GPU affinity in multi-GPU setups. This lets you set each of the two viewing planes of your VR HMD to be processed by each individual GPU. The company also introduced VR MultiView, which treats each of the view planes as two display heads and reduces rendering overhead, and there is VR MultiRes rendering, which renders different portions of your frame at different resolutions - the portions with the most detail are rendered at higher resolutions and those with fewer details at lower resolutions, thereby improving performance. The company also optimized TrueAudio to the VR HMD generation with TrueAudio Next, which uses GPU compute to process how sounds react to different surfaces in a 3D scene.

AMD FreeSync Update

AMD FreeSync is the more popular adaptive-sync technology (in terms of displays supported) thanks to its close compliance with open standards and the fact that it's both royalty-free and inexpensive to implement by display manufacturers (compared to NVIDIA G-SYNC). The company added features to FreeSync. You can now enable FreeSync on applications with borderless fullscreen (aka pseudo-fullscreen, windowed-maximized). This display mode allows you to quickly switch between your game and other apps. The driver also lowers click-to-response time with FreeSync enabled in this display mode, by up to 24 percent.

New Display Features

AMD introduced new display hardware-specific features that add support for new technology and help you troubleshoot problems. To begin with, the company added a feature that lets you diagnose HDMI cable problems. When it detects that an HDMI display isn't working as it should, the driver constantly lowers display resolution and refresh rate until the display can pick up a signal, enough to display a message that your cable is broken and needs to be replaced.



AMD added the much awaited VP9 decode acceleration for 4K Ultra HD at 60 Hz. This isn't the same as hardware-acceleration, but rather GPGPU-powered software acceleration. The company added support for both the HDR 10 and Dolby Vision HDR features. Lastly, it added DisplayPort HBR3 support, which enables 8K displays to work on "Polaris" GPUs (and later). AMD's XConnect external GPU box feature is formally launched as a stable product.