Conclusion

AMD has done it once again with its year-end software bonanza. The Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition (16.12.1) gives your AMD Radeon hardware a huge boost in features and functionality, breathing a new lease of life into the 2-3 year old high-end hardware some of you are still holding on to. There's only a few percent in the way of performance improvements, but that's hardly a complaint from us. The new features add tremendously to the overall value proposition of AMD's Radeon brand.

The most striking new feature, in our opinion, isn't ReLive, but Radeon Chill. How this thing lowers temperatures and power draw without noticeably affecting gameplay is amazing. I'd like to think of myself as a serious enough gamer to know if my hardware isn't behaving well enough to my gameplay and am happy to report that while the feature could do with a little more polishing on how to enable and control it, it does simply work, and we have the data to show for it. Something like this right alongside this year's "Polaris" hardware launches could have helped AMD in a big way. It's never too late, though.

AMD ReLive is another surprise. NVIDIA has had a huge headstart in maintaining a feature like this, although AMD's implementation is reasonably functional. We're particularly impressed at just how little performance is affected when you're gaming at a high resolution and with juiced-up details, and while you're recording/streaming at a different resolution (or even the same resolution). With performance costs well under 5% in most cases, AMD has made streaming/recording of gameplay practically free (of overhead). Here, just like with Chill, the feature still seems a little buggy and unpolished UI wise. Several times during our testing, we had to clean the drivers using DDU because the ReLive options would not show up in Radeon Settings, or they would, but recording would not start. DDU helped, AMD clean uninstall did not.

The new drivers don't particularly offer significant performance gains over previous drivers; however, AMD's 4-6 % performance gain claims over the 16.7 drivers its Polaris 10 hardware launched with do appear to hold true. Performance isn't really the focus of this release, and they seem to have fixed a few game-specific bugs, so this isn't a major area of concern for us.

The new display and LiquidVR features are a great addition. Support for new VP9 decode acceleration, HDR 10, and DisplayPort HBR3 (enablement of 8K displays) tick off big checkboxes in the features we expected from AMD in this round of graphics solutions. It certainly gives them feature-set parity (and in some areas even superiority) over NVIDIA.

AMD appears to have invested big in the way its software comes across to its users. The efforts begin at the user interface. There is great uniformity in UI design right from the installer and up to Radeon Settings, and ReLive overlays and its user-feedback tool.

Overall, we recommend everyone with AMD Radeon hardware to update to these drivers. It significantly expands your hardware's feature set with things gamers actually use or care about. The implementation is a little buggy, but we're sure AMD will iron out the kinks over 2017, which promises to be a huge year for the company.