Radeon Overlay

If the main talking point of the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition was, well, ReLive, the equivalent for the Adrenalin Edition has to be Radeon Overlay. This was teased during AMD's Capsaicin at SIGGRAPH 2017 where RX Vega and Threadripper took over the show, but now allows Radeon Software to finally be on par, if not better, than a lot of AIB tools. A simple hotkey combination toggles the overlay on or off, and the driver provides control over monitoring and recording of system parameters and performance during GPU load - be it gaming or any professional activity. This is done via direct control over the core technologies we went through, including ReLive, Chill, FRTC, and FreeSync.


Most of our time was spent navigating the performance-monitoring options that can be accessed directly in the overlay or via a dedicated menu in the driver as seen above. Indeed, nearly every option consists of a simple toggle, making this user friendly, and once set up, you should not have to do anything beyond enabling or disabling the monitoring overlay. Here, you have the option to view average FPS, GPU utilization (%), GPU shader clock frequency (MHz), GPU memory clock frequency (MHz), GPU temperature (°C), GPU power draw (W), GPU fan speed (RPM), CPU utilization (%), GPU VRAM utilization (GB), and system RAM utilization (GB).


The performance-monitoring overlay works great, with the numbers matching those from other third-party tools we use. You can choose the sampling interval from the overlay itself, as well as whether to log the numbers to a file or not. What you have no control over at the moment is the opacity of both the overlay text and background, nor the color of the two. Similarly, the size of the overlay is currently fixed, so on higher resolutions, it will appear tiny. We also noticed a quirk wherein if you Alt-Tab out of the program being run, say a game, the overlay gets hidden to where you have to re-enable it to view it again. Finally, the overlay does not work with OpenGL, so don't plan on seeing this with, say, FurMark. There is support for DirectX and Vulkan APIs out of the gate, so perhaps we will see AMD address the other things in upcoming driver releases.


The other overlay menus pertain to the core technologies and are mostly self-explanatory. For example, the ReLive menu points you to hotkey combinations for specific actions, including saving a screenshot, an instant replay you can set the duration for in the settings, and recording a video. The Radeon Chill overlay gives you options depending on whether the game being run is supported or not, with the former case giving you quick toggles to configure settings on the fly. FreeSync and FRTC overlay settings are single options each, with a toggle for the former and a slider for the latter.


The final overlay menu pertains to the display color settings, and this is a weird one to have here since the driver allows more control and the simpler ones seen here can be just as easily done via the OS or even hardware/OSD controls for the display itself. There is also no information provided on whether these settings work with 10-bit/HDR displays or whether we will see individual RGBY channel controls as well. As such, this feels like a middle-of-nowhere solution added in just to tick some boxes on the feature list rather than a cohesive addition as with the general Overlay feature set.