Value and Conclusion

2019 has been an important year for AMD as it introduced a graphics hardware lineup that made huge strides to catch up with NVIDIA's offerings in not just performance, but also energy efficiency. The "Navi" family of GPUs is small, but will grow in the coming weeks or months. With consumer interest in these cards on the rise, the year's annual Radeon Software Adrenalin release grows in prominence. AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 added or improved an impressive 20 features, while also improving performance across the board for the Radeon "Navi" family of GPUs.

Performance increments through driver updates alone are a rarity as both AMD and NVIDIA release drivers to coincide with game launches for the best performance, and yet we noticed some broad-spectrum performance improvements. On the flipside, only "Navi" seems to truly benefit from these improvements. We weren't expecting much for the RX 500 "Polaris" family, but even RX Vega series are excluded from performance benefits. We deliberately chose the RX 590 to represent the "Polaris" generation because it's just a year old in the market (launched November 2018). It's not good behavior when you "abandon" your product on the software side this soon.

On average, at 1080p resolution, Polaris (RX 590) saw no performance improvement (below 1%). Our 22-game-strong test suite showed FPS increases for only very few titles: Devil May Cry 5 sees a solid 5% improvement, and we could also spot tiny upticks in Tomb Raider and Gear 5 at 1080p, but all the other titles are just as fast as before; at least there is no performance loss with the new drivers. Things look a bit better for Radeon Vega owners. Here, we measured the same improvements in Devil May Cry 5, Gears 5 and Tomb Raider, but also spotted a noticeable FPS uplift in Control.

AMD's latest Navi architecture seems to be the focus of optimization nowadays, showing substantial gains in a lot of titles—a surprisingly long list: Anno 1800 (+5%), Civilization VI (+3%), Devil May Cry 5 (+12%), F1 2019 (+2%), Gears 5 1080p (+6%), Hitman 2 (+7%), Rage 2 (+7%), Tomb Raider (+1%), The Surge 2 (+3%), and Witcher 3 (+2%). Overall, these improvements add up to an average of +4.8%—pretty impressive. When averaging over our whole test suite, including games that saw no improvement, the gains are still a very respectable 2.5%, which is enough for the Radeon RX 5700 XT to finally beat NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti at 1080p and trade blows with it and the Radeon VII. This 4% performance improvement helps it close in on the 25%-pricier RTX 2070 Super. The RTX 2070 Super is now only 5% faster than the RX 5700 XT.

No feature addition is without purpose or relevance to gamers in Adrenalin 2020. The new installer looks and works amazingly, although we wish they would have gotten rid of the NSIS container unpacking ugliness. The installer has a groovy animated background we like. Custom install and clean install are easy enough. At this time, clean install doesn't properly clean if additional non-present Radeon cards are installed in Device Manager; we notified AMD of this bug and expect it to get fixed soon. The User Profiles are great to get people started, although for most people we'll have to recommend the "Standard" setting, in which no AMD-recommended settings besides FreeSync are applied. The "Gaming" profile enables a few AMD-recommended settings globally. This was a problem when we freshly installed GTA V to try out Radeon Boost. The game refused to start with a D3D error because "out of the box," the game has a DirectX 10 renderer, which probably isn't compatible with some AMD features, like RIS, Radeon Boost, etc. Using the "standard" profile, we were able to get it up and running. Of course, it's easy to switch between these profiles, and there's a "skip this" option for enthusiasts, who know what they're doing.

Radeon Boost fascinates us. It provides tangible performance gains when enabled and more or less lives up to AMD's underlying hypothesis for Boost. They claim that when you're in the heat of the battle, you don't pay too much attention to the aesthetic of the game, and your eye won't see all the fine details anyway, so reducing rendering resolution helps improve frame rates. But that begs a philosophical question: if you want 100% resolution scale only when not moving (i.e., not actually playing the game), then why do you need Radeon Boost? Why not just use the in-game resolution-scale slider at something like 80% and call it a day? Even the slightest movement triggers the resolution scale to drop by a notch. Perhaps AMD can improve the input logic such that there is some leeway given to 100% resolution scale before the first notch kicks in. Also, I'm wondering if reduced resolution during aiming movement will hinder your aim, because aiming for the head, which turned into a blob of pixels, becomes more difficult? Currently, Radeon Boost is limited to DirectX 11 and very few titles. We suspect this is just a test run to explore the technology, and if successful, AMD will add support for all the major game engines. What would be extremely nice is if they could fine-grain the resolution change across the viewport, so that center portions you focus on are still rendered at full resolution.

The Radeon Software app does a good job of not looking like the UI car crash that was the AMD Gaming Evolved app by Raptr. This is AMD's second stab at GeForce Experience, and it ends up looking less cluttered than NVIDIA's app. The home-screen has everything you need. Game Center does a nice job of aggregating all your games across the eleventy launchers in the market these days and is a nice place to configure your graphics software specifically to the games you're playing. The Media&Capture and System Status panes look well organized and should help e-sports streamers a great deal. The in-game view of Radeon Software works flawlessly, either as a sidebar or a fullscreen overlay. This helps as quite a few settings can be adjusted on-the-fly without needing to restart the game. Quick access to streaming, recording, or screengrabbing is welcome as well.

Radeon Tuning is a different story. While it does a decent job as a monitoring app, it seems to complicate things with overclocking. If you've used to tools like MSI Afterburner or Sapphire TRIXX, you'll know that overclocking should be as simple as dragging 2-3 sliders across and hitting apply. With the Tuning tab, you first have to pass the disclaimer gate, then select between some performance presets, or click on the "manual" button, and enable each toggle before you can use it. It seems AMD made no change to the underlying functionality, as they just changed the UI around. While I'm extremely grateful that I won't have to resize the window every single time I start Wattman, it's still quite complicated, which might scare away less experienced overclockers. AMD tried to separate the functionality into multiple stages that unveil more and more dials, but overall, the experience isn't as simple as it should be. These UI changes also introduced several minor bugs that aren't surprising for a first release. No improvements have been made to the fan control either, and it's no longer possible to drag the clock sliders together to minimize the clock frequency range the overclocked card will run at. GPU memory clocks are still limited by what AMD considers a reasonable maximum—most cards will simply end up maxing out the slider range, losing some memory overclocking potential in the process.

The other feature additions are very welcome, too, starting with integer scaling, which should bring cheer to the emulator community. Radeon Image Scaling now finally supports DirectX 11 and the vast majority of games released this decade. Anti-Lag being extended to pre-"Navi" GPUs and DirectX 9 games is a nice addition, too. The in-app web browser is kinda gimmicky and pushing it a bit far. Its only real use is spawning it in-game to look up walkthroughs or secrets, saving an alt-tab action. Depending on the in-game FPS, the browser sometimes renders quite laggy. I'm perfectly fine heading to my main browser to access websites with my logins. Although Chromium-based, I doubt this browser can keep up with Google Chrome in security updates.

All in all, Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 is a solid end to AMD's 2019, and we recommend the download for all AMD Radeon graphics card owners.

Radeon Adrenalin 2020 can be downloaded here: www.techpowerup.com/download/amd-radeon-graphics-drivers/