Introduction

AMD's Radeon Technology Group (RTG) has not had the best of years when it comes to hardware, with RX Vega perhaps a victim of hype. Some of this fault lies with the audience, but AMD deserves some flak too. Where they do not deserve any and on the contrary merit props galore is with the way their Radeon Software team has gone from strength to strength in the last few years. With the release of Radeon Catalyst Omega in 2014, gone was the dated software that no one really used and in came a more modern user interface and the beginning of an annual release of major updates throughout. In 2015, we saw the Radeon Software Crimson Edition, which then added screen capture with the popular 2016 release titled Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition. We covered a 6-month update to it back in July which introduced one of our favorite features, Enhanced Sync, and a small tease of an on-screen display at the time gave a hint towards what to expect in the 2017 major release. Indeed, AMD also hyped this version themselves by releasing a teaser video a couple of weeks ago which unveiled the name: Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition.


No, that is not a typing error, but neither is it deliberate to merely be able to trademark the word as some originally thought. In AMD's own words,

Named after the vibrant Adrenalin Rose, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition continues AMD's commitment to releasing major driver updates annually. The fully redesigned and supercharged Radeon Software Crimson Edition in 2015 received the highest user satisfaction rating of any AMD software ever, while Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition continued the 90 percent user satisfaction for 12 straight months in a row.

These are strong words, and the use of a rose fits well with the "shade of red" theme AMD and RTG have adopted for their brand. Thus, with high expectations set forth once again, we delve into an overview of the driver release today, which includes some of our own findings and thoughts as well.

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.

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.