AMD Releases New Version Of Radeon Driver To Support Destiny 2 Beta; Here's What It Does

Destiny 2's PC beta is right around the corner, running from August 28-31 (or 29-31 for those who don't pre-order). In anticipation of its launch, AMD has released a new edition of its Radeon Crimson ReLive driver and software suite for optimal performance of its video cards. Version 17.8.2 also provides a measurable performance boost in both F1 2017 and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, and addresses a few existing issues.

AMD's tests were conducted using the recently released RX Vega 64 graphics card on a system consisting of an Intel Core i7-7700K (4.2GHz) and 16 GB of RAM in dual-channel on Windows 10 64-bit. With a 4K resolution, AMD determined that the new driver will provide an improvement of around 18% in framerate for Playerunknown's Battlegrounds compared to the previous driver (from 28.5 FPS to 33.6 FPS). As for F1 2017, AMD users should expect about a 4% performance boost (from 54 FPS to 56 FPS).

Outside of performance optimizations, the new AMD graphics driver addressed the following issues from previous versions:

• Display may blank or go black after install upgrade with Radeon RX Vega Series graphics products.
• Random corruption may appear in Microsoft desktop productivity applications on Radeon RX Vega series graphics products.
• The "Reset" option in Radeon Settings Gaming tab may enable the "HBCC Memory Segment" feature instead of setting it to the default disabled state.
• Radeon WattMan may not reach applied overclock states on Radeon RX Vega series graphics.
• Unable to create Eyefinity configurations through the Eyefinity Advanced Setup option.

Known bugs and issues are par for the course with any new driver. Here are the ones to look out for:

• Mouse stuttering may be observed on some Radeon RX graphics products when Radeon WattMan is open and running in the background or other third party GPU information polling apps are running in the background.
• GPU Scaling may fail to work on some DirectX 11 applications.
• Windows Media Player may experience an application hang during video playback if Radeon ReLive is actively recording desktop.
• Secondary displays may show corruption or green screen when the display/system enters sleep or hibernate with content playing.
• After resuming from sleep and playing back video content the system may become unresponsive on Radeon RX Vega series graphics products.
• Bezel compensation in mixed mode Eyefinity cannot be applied.

AMD has made a comeback in the high-end graphics card space with the Vega series that released earlier this month; check out our review of the RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56. You can view the full release notes of Radeon Crimson ReLive version 17.8.2 on AMD's website. If you're equipped with any of Nvidia's graphics cards, take a look at our coverage of the latest GeForce driver.