Radeon Wattman

Radeon Wattman is one of four core technologies AMD has incorporated in Radeon Software. This is a first-party GPU overclocking tool as part of their VGA driver, and it took over from OverDrive, which was a fairly basic tool left unused by the masses. WattMan isn't the mainstream overclocking tool of choice yet, with the average end user still using the AIB-specific overclocking tool - Sapphire TriXX, Asus GPU Tweak, and MSI Afterburner, for instance. But with the tweaks and updates this past year, AMD has been providing a reliable experience, with yet more features added in this driver release.


Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition brings in the ability to create and share user profiles for Radeon Wattman. In particular, users can create a profile for their particular GPU based on the unique identifier, so any changes made will not adversely affect a different VGA card. Community-sourcing profiles is a great way to get the userbase involved while also offloading some work, and there will be a Reddit thread (presumably on the AMD subreddit) to import and export profiles alike.


Seen above is an XML output from the Radeon Wattman profile save option. Line 2 is where the specific GPU ID is recorded, thus making the profile specific to your particular card model, but this XML file can also be edited with any text editor. As such, one could create profiles by simply editing an existing file if you know the GPU ID (which can be found by the way of our own GPU-Z tool). I am conflicted on this, however, since leaving it open means it can be tampered with, though it does at same time allow for more profiles to be created for different VGA cards without physical access to them.

Radeon Chill

Radeon Chill came out late last year with a promise of dynamically regulating frame rates based on in-game activity, which can potentially lower power consumption and keep GPU temperatures lower than without. At launch, Radeon Chill supported 17 games and also only DX9 and/or DX11 APIs. The July driver update brought in much needed support for DX12 and Vulkan as well, along with an increase in support to 22 titles.


In a pleasant surprise, AMD revealed that Radeon Chill now supports nearly every game, and the whitelist mechanism has been changed to a blacklist wherein games are now supported automatically and only those found to not work well are added to the blacklist (which is empty at this time). Our apprehension with Radeon Chill has always been the limited support, even to where there were a little over 40 titles only when RX Vega was available. Having more than double that number is great to see, and the list includes every major PC title being played today. AMD also provided some more examples of power savings with Radeon Chill, and in our testing, the feature worked flawlessly in every game we tried. Be aware, however, that the inconsistent change in GPU activity means the stock cooler on your VGA card will also respond accordingly. This means having a fan (or more) that speeds up or slows down randomly, which can be irritating. A way around this is to use FRTC, and the two work great in tandem. FRTC also helps keep potential coil whine due to very high frame rates in check.

With this large increase in supported titles, it would have been good to have a place to keep track of every game title that supports Radeon Chill, even if it's just to affirm users curious in the feature. However, AMD themselves have not one, but two different web pages that talk about the feature, and they both not only are inconsistent among themselves, but neither is up to date. This is another item we want to see dealt with, and preferably over a single outlet as well.

Enhanced Sync

Enhanced Sync was possibly the best feature AMD has introduced all year, offering users with fixed refresh rate displays, a core technology that combats the perceived effects of screen tearing and animation stuttering without introducing the input latency of VSync. It is an excellent middle ground between VSync and Adaptive Sync/FreeSync/G-Sync that only work with variable-refresh-rate displays. At the time it was introduced in July of this year, Enhanced Sync only supported DirectX APIs for a single GPU based off the Polaris or Vega microarchitecture, so while it was a great start, there were still things left to be done.


AMD will make a lot of people happy today by allowing everyone with a GCN-based product to be able to experience Enhanced Sync. This means even 5+ year-old AMD GPUs will be able to use this, which perhaps is due to the use of GCN as a microarchitecture for all these years. We tested this successfully with a Radeon HD7970 from nearly six years ago, for example. It also means added support for notebooks with mobile GPUs getting support for Enhanced Sync, in addition to multi-GPU setups. AMD has also added in support for the Vulkan API, as well as allowing EyeFinity-configured multi-monitor displays to experience this. All great news, and Enhanced Sync is another technology we strongly recommend people try now.