Introduction

What do you do when a single company has multiple product announcements and releases in the same week? As a tech media website catering to PC hardware and software enthusiasts, coverage of everything new backed with independent testing is most desirable, but oft not possible in such situations. It is no secret that AMD has Ryzen 3, Vega, and Ryzen Threadripper hardware product launches coming in shortly, and having the right software driver to support the hardware is critical.

AMD has traditionally relied on driver updates to get the hardware performing better with respect to the competition as the months go by. Perhaps it is "Fine Wine Technology" for marketing, but with an emphasis on updating their drivers consistently based on both user feedback and internal testing, they have managed to do a lot better in the past year and a half than before. Today, we preview the new Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.2 VGA driver, which continues on this path and introduces a good number of additions and updates.


Radeon Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.2, or henceforth known simply as Crimson ReLive 17.7.2 to save a mouthful, was considered important enough for AMD to organize a press briefing, and part of this involved bringing to fruition some features their RTG software development team has been working on for a while now. Some of these include user-requested features, like moving some settings options to the main tab directly, whereas others are more novel, including AMD's take on an improved GPU display synchronization on both fixed- and variable-refresh-rate displays - something they call Enhanced Sync. So let us begin the preview with a look at some of the salient features on the next page.

User Interface

AMD conducted market surveys to identify user needs out of the current Crimson driver, and it turns out the most requested feature was to have more global settings in the main tabs as opposed to having them in additional settings (which was another name for the old Catalyst Control Center). This is a simple, but effective update that saves users a few clicks each time, which in turn makes me happy.

Radeon WattMan

It was little over a year ago today that AMD first released WattMan, a first-party GPU overclocking tool as part of the Crimson VGA driver. It took over from OverDrive, which was a fairly basic tool left unused by the masses. WattMan has not been the mainstream overclocking tool of choice yet, with the average end user using the specific AIB's overclocking tool - Sapphire TriXX, Asus GPU Tweak, and MSI Afterburner, for instance. But with tweaks and updates in the past year, AMD has been providing a reliable experience, which has done the job for me whenever I have used it as a part of the driver.

In Crimson ReLive 17.7.2, AMD has added in memory underclocking, which can help in power- or temperature-bottlenecked situations, further aiding GPU core overclocking, or to increase stability of a system not capable of supporting even stock memory frequencies. Rare are the situations where these apply, but a quick Google search reveals multiple discussions on memory underclocking in GPU mining forums, so there you go. Accompanying memory underclocking is the addition of power state controls to the VGA operation, which further helps tune your specific power/stability needs. Note that these are compatible with AMD Polaris and newer GPUs on Windows 7 and 10 only. When asked about this, AMD said and I quote: "With the declining use of Windows 8.1, we have focused our efforts on providing the best experience on the operating systems that the vast majority of our users are now using. Although we no longer officially support Windows 8.1, users can try the Windows 7 driver on an "as-is" basis." Another thing that was unexpected is that memory underclocking is mentioned to be only compatible with the RX 500 series (and newer), but not the older RX 400 series which is based on the same Polaris architecture. We tested it on an RX 480 using this very driver release and were able to confirm that memory underclocking DOES work for the RX 400 series as well.