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.

Radeon Chill

Radeon Chill came out late last year with a promise of dynamically regulating frame rates based on in-game activity, which can potentially lower power consumption and keep GPU temperatures lower than without. At launch, Radeon Chill supported all of 17 games and also only DX9 and/or DX11 APIs. The update today brings about support for DX12 and Vulkan APIs, which is great to see, and there is the increased support for a total of 22 titles, including most of the popular games played today. AMD's internal testing using one game on each of the four supported APIs reveals decent power savings, especially on non-taxing games.

Helping further is added support also for laptops, as well as multi-GPUs on desktops and XConnect external GPUs. Radeon Chill settings on the main tab for game profiles also help to quickly set the user-specified min and max FPS values so the driver does not take frame rates past desired, optimal settings. These were the features that, at launch, would have made Radeon Chill a much more user-friendly feature, but better late than never.

FRTC

Radeon Chill being game-specific and thus limited by the number of supported titles, there had to be something on a more global scale to complement it. FRTC, or Frame Rate Target Control, is not new to Radeon Catalyst or Crimson drivers, but new in this update is the added support for the DX12 and Vulkan APIs, which is nice since games designed around those have generally shown a big FPS boost for the same hardware, so end users with a 60 Hz, fixed refresh-rate display can now choose to cap those at 60 FPS to save a tangible amount of GPU power.