Radeon Boost

As described earlier, Radeon Boost is a performance enhancement that seeks to improve your in-game graphics performance when you move the mouse or press any key. Since during motion, your eye doesn't pay too much attention to certain in-game details, there's an opportunity to increase performance by dynamically reducing rendering resolution and scaling it back up when you stop moving. Only the 3D scene changes in resolution, your HUD remains crisp at 100% resolution scale. All of this happens automatically when Radeon Boost is enabled in a compatible game.

Availability of the Radeon Boost setting requires game support, and currently a small list of games including "Overwatch," PUBG, "Borderlands 3," "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," "Rise of the Tomb Raider," "Destiny 2," "Grand Theft Auto V," and "Call of Duty: WW2" support it. This list will probably grow with future driver updates. Besides supported games, Radeon Boost requires a Radeon RX 400-series (or later) desktop GPU or "Raven Ridge" or "Picasso" iGPU, Windows 7 or Windows 10. At this time, only DirectX 11 games are supported.


You enable Radeon Boost from the driver's end rather than an in-game setting. Open the Game Center page of your game in Radeon Software and flick the Radeon Boost toggle. You can also specify the minimum resolution limit. This limiter restricts the drop in rendering resolution by Radeon Boost. Lower the limit, the more performance. The default setting is 50%, but you can set it higher. Once in game, Radeon Boost keeps the resolution scale at 100% when you're absolutely still. Depending on the intensity of your character's movement (a combination of the variance of your input, and the intensity of mouse movement, it adjusts the resolution scale in steps of 83%, 66%, and 50%. These grades change with your minimum resolution scale limit setting in Radeon Software.

Below are some performance numbers for Radeon Boost tested in "Borderlands 3."


We observed that the changing of resolution scale is almost linear, but dependent on the game and scene. Ideally, you want a resolution higher than the recommended for your card (for example, 4K UHD for RX 5700 XT, if you have a 4K display) for best results.

Below, we add some interactive comparison images between 100% resolution scale and lower resolution scales, along with the performance differences.

In case you wonder how these screenshots were taken (without movement): in the Adrenalin 2020 press driver Radeon Boost can be activated manually by holding the shift key even without any movement, which simplifies screenshots enormously. Do note the green square indicator in the top-left corner of the image.