Performance

AMD made sure to let us know that they do not hold back performance gains for major releases, with optimizations continually happening throughout the year, and their primary target is full support for new games on day one (or even before, in some cases). The performance gains shown here are provided by AMD, with these particular results being for older hardware (RX 480), and the percentage gains here for 17.12.1 Adrenalin is being compared to the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition driver 16.12.1 for a year-to-year comparison.


Of course, all those footnotes were strong caveats indeed, and we decided to test the performance change with this driver compared to the previous 17.11.4 release using our standard game test suite for GPUs, with different resolutions tested for the games as well, which means there were simply too many items to be marked on the X-axis here. We can see that for both the RX Vega 64 and RX 580, the new Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver brings minimal performance gains. If anything, we see a small decrease in performance here in some cases, although all are within error margins. As such, we are inclined to accept AMD's words on no preferential holding back of performance gains for major releases here.


It was very interesting thus when the very next slide had some responsiveness improvement results, which AMD said they did work on for this release. Putting aside the Occam's razor, any improvement in game latency is always appreciated, and though these numbers may not appear vastly different, it must be noted that these results came in a little over a month's time and for some of the most popular online games today, where the slightest of improvements on your end can have a major impact on the game. The 18% decrease in click latency in PUBG will especially be appreciated with the game releasing out of early access next week.


There are three other tweaks for performance introduced here, with the first being borderless windowed support for multi-GPU systems. AMD demonstrates a particular example here using two RX 580 GPUs with Far Cry Primal in said mode, and be aware that borderless windowed mode has a slight performance and latency deficit relative to fullscreen mode with the advantage being a seamless transition between active programs. With mGPU systems going out of fashion, we still appreciate AMD adding this in as an option for those who want it.


The second addition is Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC), which now supports the Vulkan API. Arguably, this should have been included earlier given some major releases, such as Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, only support Vulkan and not DX11/12. There is a growing list of games with Vulkan support, be it exclusively or otherwise, which can now take advantage of this power-saving feature that will also result in a cooler card. Another potential benefit to locking frame rates is reduced coil whine at extremely high FPS, so do make use of this feature appropriately.


The final performance edit with this driver has to do with everyone's favorite controversial topic - cryptocurrency mining. AMD does not even bother pretending that the compute performance benefits with this driver will be predominantly used to mine Ethereum or equivalent cryptocoins, and this driver release brings with it dedicated compute profiles for their supported GPUs. As an example, AMD's internal testing numbers show an increase of 14.3% (24.8 MH/s vs. 21.7 MH/s) using the compute profile for the RX 570 relative to the standard gaming profile. It must be pointed out that dedicated compute profiles came in with a previous beta driver release, so the new addition here is that this is the first official release with the feature added.

However, this is where our own results differed from expectations. There is no dedicated compute profile for RX Vega, which is a shame, but AMD mentions that. As such, we tested the gaming vs. compute profiles for the RX 580 with Ethereum mining using the same testing methodology as in every recent GPU review. We noticed no change in the mining hash rate with the compute profile relative to the gaming profile here, even after doing a system reboot to ensure the profile was indeed applied. We have contacted AMD about this and will update this section accordingly based on their response.