AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Driver Update, Boost & Performance

[W1zzard]

AMD just released this year's "Adrenalin 2020" Christmas update for their Radeon Graphics Drivers. We take a detailed look at the new features and benchmark "AMD Fine Wine" to see how much performance has improved for Polaris, Vega, and Navi users.

Show full review

 

[Kaotik]

@W1zzard Didn't notice it being mentioned anywhere: are the performance results compared to 18.12.2 (first Adrenalin 2019) / launch driver for RX, or the last Adrenalin 2019 driver?

 

[W1zzard]

Whoops, I forgot to mention that. 19.10.1 WHQL

 

[LDigital82]

You don't seem to have tested this with the Radeon VII card and then draw a conclusion that the 5700 xt is now punching on the same level as Radeon VII and 1080 ti because of these new drivers.
Are you saying that Radeon VII does not benefit from these drivers?
If the improvements are anything like the Vega 64 results, it should in theory be one of the biggest beneficiaries from this new software and maintain or increase its gap

 

[W1zzard]

Are you saying that Radeon VII does not benefit from these drivers?

I'm assuming that Radeon VII sees the same improvement as Vega 64, due to same arch, which seems reasonable.

 

[iAshox]

any info about release date?

 

[LDigital82]

Ah that makes sense. going back to the review, it appears at higher resolutions the expected difference will be pretty small for us Radeon VII owners. Its a solid card at 4k though so it will hold me over until the next gen cards arrive

 

[W1zzard]

any info about release date?

I assumed same as NDA, but apparently it's not posted yet, haven't heard any official word

 

[gridracedriver]

Another marked move forward, honestly for me it was difficult to think of 5 years after what the driver offered and that it will become so complete and full of features.
The Boost is then another killer app, yet another, along with the old ones like the chill for example.
Impressive.

 

[Cheeseball]

Radeon Boost is a great feature, but what they should do to improve it is to implement checkerboard rendering like on consoles, but only on the sections of the screen that are blurred due to being in-motion.

Example (I can't make a screenshot example because I'm at work): When driving in PUBG (FPP), usually 30% of the sides of the screen would be in-motion because of the passing terrain and constant movement. Dynamically lowering the resolution on those parts should see a nice boost.

 

[Sempron Guy]

Just want to clarify. RIS feature now available to GCN cards and above in DX11, while DX9 is available only for Navi?

 

[Jism]

We deliberately chose the RX 590 to represent the "Polaris" generation, because it's just a year old in the market (launched November 2018). It's not good behavior when you "abandon" your product on the software side this soon.

Well this is ongoing for years if you've followed the drivers changelog. They usually develop based on product Y. After release of a new product the focus of drivers is purely for that product (i.e RX580 > Vega > 5700) and the cycle continues on.

This is pretty much "IP" from consoles. And why not. If you have a graphics card that is capable of processing X amount of Tflops why not play around on driver level and in all conditions have the best possible performance?

 

[Recus]

Knowing nVidia AMD this is something they'll turn on by default and be all "LOOK, WE'RE 60% FASTER THAN AMD Nvidia" and your average hardware review site will completely miss it.

 

[mahoney]

Is this supposed to be a joke? Most of the benchamrks just show a margin of error (avg fps 75 vs 75.3 , 101 vs 101.6, 87 vs 87.2... )

 

[gridracedriver]

so, 5700xt in UHD with 50% boost offers the same performance as 2080 in Borderlands 3?

 

[springs113]

Good write up, now when can I get this driver. I've got time to play and no driver lol. Also isn't this the same(boost) that Sapphire offered with the software that comes with the Nitro 5700xt+?

 

[_Flare]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1204422896594145281

 

[Xuper]

AMD sliders is best Sliders among all companies and mostly gorgeous , better than Their promised Feature!

 

[xkm1948]

When DLSS released it offers boosted performance in the cost of lowering rendering scale, everybody hated it.

Now AMD is doing same things: lowering rendering scale in favor of higher FPS, everybody praises it.

Yeah sounds about right. Typical "If I don't have this feature on my GPU then it is a bad feature"


Question for the mighty W1zzard. Would you leave this "boost" off for your future GPU benchmarks? It should would muddy the chart quite a bit if left on by default.

 

[ObscureAngelPT]

@xkm1948 Actually no!
DLSS in many games just does a bad reconstruction, aside from the fact that requires extra software support coming from the drivers/game to support it.
RIS and the sharpening filter inside the nvidia Freestyle are both much better solutions to use in conjunction with a worse resolution scaling.

People are trying to find decent ways to gain extra performance, the use of checkboarding, or lower resolution in spots that we aren't actually look, seems very smart IMO,
Shadow Warrior 2 supports this on Nvidia cards and was widely adopted by the gamers,
not even to mention the own, nvidia shading scaler (or whatever the name they have for it).

Also as logic, all this features don't come enable as default, just like chill, RIS didn't came.

I think this new feature is very good for 4k screen users, for people that want to use 4k native at 60fps, but with some extra optimization that allow them to keep resolution dropping in some stressing points.
This would be very usefull back in the day when I was forced to make the jump from a 720P screen (which died) to a 1080P screen with a mere HD 5770 XD

Cheers

 

[cucker tarlson]

1-2% on Navi cards only.

@xkm1948 Actually no!
DLSS in many games just does a bad reconstruction, aside from the fact that requires extra software support coming from the drivers/game to support it.
RIS and the sharpening filter inside the nvidia Freestyle are both much better solutions to use in conjunction with a worse resolution scaling.

People are trying to find decent ways to gain extra performance, the use of checkboarding, or lower resolution in spots that we aren't actually look, seems very smart IMO,
Shadow Warrior 2 supports this on Nvidia cards and was widely adopted by the gamers,
not even to mention the own, nvidia shading scaler (or whatever the name they have for it).

Also as logic, all this features don't come enable as default, just like chill, RIS didn't came.

I think this new feature is very good for 4k screen users, for people that want to use 4k native at 60fps, but with some extra optimization that allow them to keep resolution dropping in some stressing points.
This would be very usefull back in the day when I was forced to make the jump from a 720P screen (which died) to a 1080P screen with a mere HD 5770 XD

Cheers

actually the best way is to use dlss with sharpening,not res scaling with sharpening.dlss reduces a lot of flickering on objects with heavy aliasing,lowering resolution scaling does the opposite.

 

[ObscureAngelPT]

@cucker tarlson Depends.
DLSS don't have temporal issues, altough DLSS in some games provides a very very bad reconstruction of what it believes to be the image.
It's mostly a matter of a choice, depends on the game also, but again, you can apply sharpening plus a worse resolution scaling in any single game.
Cheers

 

[cucker tarlson]

@cucker tarlson Depends.
DLSS don't have temporal issues, altough DLSS in some games provides a very very bad reconstruction of what it believes to be the image.
It's mostly a matter of a choice, depends on the game also, but again, you can apply sharpening plus a worse resolution scaling in any single game.
Cheers

dlss works very well when it's done right.the problem is incinsistency.
I'd rather have some other method,like VRS,being the standard,cause it's more consistent.
but I'd love the big AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 do DLSS right cause the gains are massive.

 

[Cheeseball]

When DLSS released it offers boosted performance in the cost of lowering rendering scale, everybody hated it.

Now AMD is doing same things: lowering rendering scale in favor of higher FPS, everybody praises it.

The thing is when DLSS was first released, (1) it was limited to a few games, (2) in those same games, people have been reporting noticeable reduced image quality with it enabled. This hampered its adoption.

When this driver is released later today, I'll test whether the reduction in quality is also noticeable with Boost enabled.

@W1zzard BTW, the images on page 3 have the FPS and boost percentage mixed around: Boost 83% (33 FPS)

 

[xkm1948]

Well since I do not have an AMD GPU any more I can't really test anything. Waiting to see your results @Cheeseball I remember you have a 5700XT right?