AMD Significantly Improves OpenGL Performance in Windows with Upcoming 22H2 Driver

[HisDivineOrder]

That's very good news, it doesn't matter if it's 10 years or whatever late, it shows the good work that the AMD's s/w engineers are doing and how they're evolving their game!

It does matter because what happens the next time they have a serious performance degradation that should be fixed rapidly? Are they going to sit on it for a decade then, too? Why would anyone buy a product where the performance is being degraded because the company is not serious about optimizing their driver? Why not buy the company that's had a great OpenGL driver for all the years OpenGL was relevant?

Think of all the cards that came and went with subpar OpenGL performance that didn't have to have it. It's absurd to ignore AMD's lazy way of handling their drivers just because they decided to catch up now. I hope they keep it up, but this is precisely why people say AMD's drivers were inferior. Every time AMD announces that they finally got around to fixing their big problems, it highlights how people saying, "AMD drivers are fine," were in fantasy land.

"Look guys, we finally got around to fixing DX11 performance!"
"Look guys, we finally got around to fixing OpenGL performance!"

I'm glad they finally did it. Congrats. But this is like thanking AMD for allowing people at the end of Ryzen 5000 series to put them into X370/B350 boards as if they were doing everyone a favor when they could have done it two years ago.

"Thanks for the bare minimum," and so late a lot of people that could have benefited, they've long moved on.

 

[SpittinFax]

Minecraft Java, which is a game that a few people play, uses OGL for the display engine and this should be a great help as MC is noticeably faster on Nvidia GPUs compared to similar speed AMD GPUs. ie: GTX 1080 vs. RX 5600XT.

Can confirm. OpenGL on Radeon is so bad that going from my GTX 1060 to the RX 6600 was actually a big downgrade in Minecraft, especially modded. The 1060 was smooth like butter but the 6600 suffers from frequent framerate drops below 60fps every few seconds. You can tune it to be less severe by using Optifine and combing through the settings but it never completely goes away.

Sounds like this fix will be Windows 11 only. It would be a real crying shame if it's not available for Windows 10.

 

[Deleted member 185088]

Seems they finally managed to have enough money to spend on drivers. Hopefully this means their cards perform well at launch and gives us even more competition.

 

[chrcoluk]

OpenGL (and Vulkan) is often used on community projects so its not a wasted improvement, I am glad to see these results.

WDDM 3.1 I wasnt able to find a changelog for, but I expect the opengl improvement isnt linked to that so shouldnt be exclusive to Windows 11. Its probably just that its only been publicly tested on Windows 11.

 

[ModEl4]

@HisDivineOrder

It does matter because what happens the next time they have a serious performance degradation that should be fixed rapidly? Are they going to sit on it for a decade then, too? Why would anyone buy a product where the performance is being degraded because the company is not serious about optimizing their driver? Why not buy the company that's had a great OpenGL driver for all the years OpenGL was relevant?
Think of all the cards that came and went with subpar OpenGL performance that didn't have to have it. It's absurd to ignore AMD's lazy way of handling their drivers just because they decided to catch up now. I hope they keep it up, but this is precisely why people say AMD's drivers were inferior. Every time AMD announces that they finally got around to fixing their big problems, it highlights how people saying, "AMD drivers are fine," were in fantasy land.
"Look guys, we finally got around to fixing DX11 performance!"
"Look guys, we finally got around to fixing OpenGL performance!"
I'm glad they finally did it. Congrats. But this is like thanking AMD for allowing people at the end of Ryzen 5000 series to put them into X370/B350 boards as if they were doing everyone a favor when they could have done it two years ago.
"Thanks for the bare minimum," and so late a lot of people that could have benefited, they've long moved on.

I was trying to be nice, but you are being a little harsh i think.
I can he harsher saying that the first thought that came to my mind is that these ancient DX11 & OpenGL advantages that they suddenly attain is based on data mining of the Nvidia leak...
But anyway i try to see the positive side, so i don't necessarily see the delay that they had as an indication of "next time".
Also AMD before 6-10 years was straggling for survival and i don't think "having a lazy way" represents the state of things in a struggling company, they just didn't have the financial and the personnel resources.
But Nvidia is a very tough opponent with talented software engineers, so although AMD is 10 years late, i don't think being close to Nvidia's performance is the "bare minimum".

 

[Valantar]

@HisDivineOrder

I was trying to be nice, but you are being a little harsh i think.
I can he harsher saying that the first thought that came to my mind is that these ancient DX11 & OpenGL advantages that they suddenly attain is based on data mining of the Nvidia leak...
But anyway i try to see the positive side, so i don't necessarily see the delay that they had as an indication of "next time".
Also AMD before 6-10 years was straggling for survival and i don't think "having a lazy way" represents the state of things in a struggling company, they just didn't have the financial and the personnel resources.
But Nvidia is a very tough opponent with talented software engineers, so although AMD is 10 years late, i don't think being close to Nvidia's performance is the "bare minimum".

Exactly this. When you have a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy half a decade ago, which has only managed to rebound due to its resurgent cpu division and has only really managed to get their gpu division truly competitive in the past 2-3 years, calling that "lazy" is arrather extreme twisting of reality imo. Could they have done more previously? Sure. But when you're barely getting by, you target the highest profile things first, and focus your limited resources rather than spreading them out too broadly. Given the barest minimum of context, it is quite understandable that this hasn't been rectified earlier. That being said, it's also very gold that now that they're doing better, they're actually spending the resources to improve long-standing problems like this even if the overall impact of them is somewhat limited.

 

[RadeonProVega]

Improved my opengl performance in games with my card, which had trouble before.

 

[Mussels]

Wow they finally fixed the openGL performance!

it's always been weird, with how good their vulkan performance was

 

[LifeOnMars]

Well done AMD, couldn't stand Open GL performance in the past as I have a lot of older games which use it. I'll consider you next time when I get a new card, other than bad DX11 performance as well (which I believe they have fixed/improved) AMD cards I have used in the past were lovely. (5870,7850 and 5700XT)

 

[Mussels]

I woke up last night with a thought about this i'm too lazy to research: did MS fix multi threading for AMD's openGL? Nvidia always had at least two working threads while AMD was stuck single threaded (hence the irony that AMD GPU's worked better with intel CPU's)

And, does this help intels openGL implementations as well? Is this coming out right before intels GPU's as a convenient "yeah we fixed it for you daddy intel, but sorry it helped AMD as well?" situation?

Also: WTF is going on with my dreams when they provide tech support.

 

[Makaveli]

Also: WTF is going on with my dreams when they provide tech support.

 

[The King]

The latest AMD driver Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-22-7-1?utm_source=pardot&utm_content=&utm_campaign=2022-07-26_Driver_Alert-Radeon_Software-Release22.7.1-jul-en-email&utm_medium=email&utm_term=

This release also contains stability improvements and adds updated support for:

OpenGL® Optimizations
Radeon™ Super Resolution
Radeon™ Boost VRS

View the release notes for details on updates and fixes.

My RX 480 seems to be getting a higher score in R15 OpenGL tests.