Conclusion

The AMD Radeon Software 17.12.1 driver has been publicly released as of when this article goes live, and we will host it on the TechPowerUp AMD Drivers Downloads Page for users to download. It is of course a free upgrade and is compatible with every single GCN GPU. It works officially with Windows 7 and 10, as well as a single suite for Linux distributions. Unofficially, the Windows 7 release (32-bit and 64-bit alike) will work on Windows 8/8.1 (32-bit and 64-bit respectively) for those souls still stuck in purgatory.

This is a named release, the so-called Adrenalin Edition, which was teased and marketed for a few weeks now and had one of the major new features shown off as early as July of this year. AMD has now for the fourth year in a row introduced a major annual release with a new name to identify it uniquely, and this Adrenalin Edition more than deserves the recognition. There are the expected tweaks to performance and click latency as with any driver, but even core technologies have been steadily improved upon. Radeon Wattman, introduced in the half-yearly major release in 2016, is now better than ever with community-sourced user profiles. Radeon Chill, introduced last December, also get a much needed increase to which game titles are supported thanks to the shift from whitelist-based to blacklist-based support. Enhanced Sync, which came in this year's summer driver release, has quickly become the most popular Radeon Software feature, and with today's driver release, it gets even better. AMD Radeon GPU owners from every GCN microarchitecture now get to enjoy an implementation towards a reduction in screen tearing without added input lag, even on a non-FreeSync display. Vulkan API support and Eyefinity display support are just more icings on this sweet cake.

Radeon ReLive, despite not being among the top three most voted features by users, continues its journey towards being a free, first-party software utility that pushes the need for dedicated screen capture hardware and software further away. With separate audio track controls and Chroma keying, we fully expect to see this being adopted more by mainstream streamers and video content creators. The Connect tab allowing for quick organization, editing, and sharing of media files is welcome, although parts of it have the potential to be intrusive. Going further in bringing easier access to the core technologies is the new Radeon Overlay that allows, via hotkeys, the ability to quickly display and control items on screen without having to visit the driver separately. Indeed, once set up, we were able to use the performance-monitoring overlay to good use in games already. ReLive, FreeSync, Chill, and FRTC controls at your fingertips are all handy too.

The story of Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition goes beyond the PC for the first time with the announcement of AMD Link. Using the smartphone, or tablet, as a second screen seems such a logical extension of things today and yet it took this long to get a first-party core product brand to release one. AMD Link, while not yet publicly out at the time of the driver's release, will be available for both iOS and Android devices and is more than just a monitoring tool. Once connected to a PC on the same WiFi network, users can log performance metrics over time to get real-time data on how driver tweaks affected performance without needing to have two windows open in Windows, for example. More useful to content creators is Radeon ReLive on your smart device, which is now a remote control to quickly capture content, begin streaming, or share media all from the palm of your hands.

There are a few things that need to be mentioned here. We do not yet know what the extent of data transfer is with AMD Link, and despite the addition of a security pin that needs to be input with time, users are recommended to keep track of connected devices on both the PC and your phone/tablet. There are multiple, minor cosmetic and usability bugs in the driver as of the press version we were provided, but they are all easy to fix, and we expect them to be taken care of sooner rather than later. AMD added in dedicated compute profiles for GPUs that, in their tests, show over a 14% increase in the Ethereum mining hash rate, but this is a double-edged sword assuming it works as intended with cryptocurrency, dividing the user base in more ways than one. However, our own testing reveals no change in the mining hash rate with compute profiles relative to the standard gaming profile. Similarly, performance changes here compared to the previous driver release from November are minimal, so do not expect to see gains here. This is not a game-ready driver, but, rather, a feature driver. Be sure to take advantage of the features here, and let us know how they fare for you in the comments section below.