Conclusion

The AMD Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.2 driver has been publicly released as of when this article goes live, and you can download it from the TechPowerUp Downloads Page as well. It is of course a free upgrade and is the driver software to make the most of any compatible Radeon GPU.

With the Crimson ReLive Edition in December 2016, AMD aimed to get on par with NVIDIA and their GeForce Experience-based utility tools for screen capture and sharing. Today, we see the next major update with the Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.2 that builds on that base and provides a lot of changes both asked for and surprisingly new. It was nice to see the top two user-requested features added, albeit both were fairly simple changes. Having more settings in the main tab will make use of the available real estate on higher-resolution screens, and saving time is one of the many ways this update aims to improve user experience.

It seems apparent that AMD has been working hard on tackling game animation tearing and reducing input lag. Enhanced Sync is AMD's equivalent to NVIDIA Fast Sync, except that it seems to work flawlessly out of the box whereas Fast Sync had some growing pains. Enhanced Sync also works at lower frame rates and below the native refresh rate of the display, and well in conjunction with FreeSync. As a globally available feature for all displays, this is the one feature I encourage users to try out as soon as possible.

The rest of the updates and new features are all handy in one way or another to both gamers and game developers alike. A lot of the updates are there to bring features on par with the competition or to a more useful state - support for DX12 and Vulkan being a prime example. As such, there are still areas of improvement to the whole think-tank here, and day one driver performance will remain a point of contention if all the consistent driver-to-driver performance updates are any indication. It is likely that the primary goal of releasing this big driver update shortly before RX Vega goes out is to ensure the press media and end users alike are aware of them and try them out with the upcoming hardware launch. That said, they do have my attention and I suspect yours too.

Finally, a word of caution- after the driver was released publicly, there have been multiple reports of users either not being able to install the driver at all even after a full DDU cleanup, or have a buggy install wherein some features including ReLive are not present in the UI. AMD has not responded to this and it is premature to fault anyone at this point, but from a quick look online it appears to be inconsistent in that users with the same hardware and on the same OS have mixed results upon installation. As such, please be aware of this and note that it appears to be hard to pinpoint whether or not you will be affected prior to attempting the install. One potential fix reported is to disable all security components (Antivirus, Malware protection etc) and to use the AMD Web Installer instead (Windows 10 64-bit here, replace 10 with 7 and 64 with 32 in the URL for other options).