AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition

What is AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive?

In late 2015, AMD launched a totally new model of its graphics driver and graphics settings software program. Out was AMD Catalyst and in was AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition. The new driver, and specifically the AMD Settings interface for controlling it, was far faster to load, largely extra intuitive to make use of and simply typically was an enormous enchancment.

Over the final yr AMD has been steadily bettering that software program, including options such because the Wattman overclocking device, however a yr on from launch AMD thought it was time for an additional huge launch, within the form of AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive.

The headline characteristic right here is the addition of in-built recreation seize and streaming, which had beforehand been dealt with by AMD Gaming Evolved that was basically a rebranded model of Raptr’s software program. There are a number of different adjustments too, so let’s take a deeper dive to see what’s new.

The new AMD Radeon Software Crimson driver is free to obtain and is appropriate with all current AMD graphics playing cards so you may go and check out it at present.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive – Radeon Settings

The single greatest new characteristic of the unique Crimson software program launch was the brand new AMD Settings app, which was faster to put in, sooner to load (as much as 10x sooner) and much sleeker trying than the Catalyst Control Center of outdated.

This stays largely unchanged with the ReLive model, by way of total feel and look, however there are many tweaks and new options on this newest replace.

The most visually apparent change is the removing of the superfluous Eyefinity tab – it did nothing except you had a couple of monitor – to get replaced by the ReLive tab. Multi-monitor tweaking is now performed by way of the Display part.

Related: AMD Radeon RX 480

Dive into one of many sections and it fills the entire window – which could be resized and made fullscreen – presenting all the assorted choices. Oddly, although, the principle navigation buttons transfer from the highest to the underside while you enter every part, which we discovered a bit unintuitive.

Helping to maintain issues tidy is that sure choices are saved hidden till wanted, such because the variety of samples utilized in anti-aliasing. If you choose “use application settings” it retains this feature hidden but when you choose to override the appliance settings then the additional choice seems.

This works fairly nicely although isn’t good. For a begin, it may typically be irritating which you can’t discover the setting you’re after since you haven’t turned on the mother or father setting that permits it. Also, the entire grid of rectangles that makes up every choice is dynamic so you may resize the window and so they all shuffle round and restack to suit.

Combined with the brand new blocks showing for in any other case hidden choices and the very fact the blocks are in no apparent order (not alphabetical and so forth) and it may typically take fairly a little bit of scanning forwards and backwards to seek out the choice you’re after.

Some settings are hidden…

…till different settings are turned on.

Still, it’s principally fast and simple to make use of and an enormous enchancment over each Nvidia’s present driver and former AMD drivers. We simply want there was an choice to cease the AMD Settings icon showing on the high of the context menu while you proper click on in a folder or on the desktop.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive – Gaming settings

Hit the Gaming tab and also you’re offered with what initially appears like only a listing of your video games. However, the highest left tile is labelled world settings and its right here which you can setup your most well-liked settings for no matter video games you’re working.

If you then wish to set particular choices for sure video games you may choose the corresponding tile. This is a way more intuitive manner of managing recreation particular settings than the earlier CCC model and the motive force does a very good job of routinely detecting all of the video games you’ve got put in.

Jump into any of the sport settings and also you’re offered with basically the identical listing of choices as the worldwide settings, with issues like anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and tessellation mode on the left tab and the brand new WattMan overlocking settings on the suitable tab.

The latter is AMD’s graphics card overclocking device that replaces AMD Overdrive. As nicely as having a much more clear format, it’s additionally far more granular with a bunch of choices for balancing efficiency, energy consumption, noise and warmth.

WattMan was solely obtainable for RX 480, RX 470 and RX 460 playing cards however with the ReLive launch it’s now obtainable for R9 Fury, R9 390, R9 380, R9 290, R9 285, R9 260, R7 360 and R7 260 playing cards.

One of the options of WattMan is Chill. This is a brand new addition that permits your graphics card to scale back its efficiency throughout instances of low on-screen exercise. I.e. if you happen to’re standing nonetheless or in a loading menu, the cardboard will dynamically scale back its pace, saving energy and decreasing warmth. It’s much less of a priority for desktop customers however might make for significantly better battery life on laptops.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive – Video

Moving onto the Video tab and that is the place you may tweak how your graphics card handles color profiling and a few video results for making any video in your PC look its greatest.

You can shortly select from a choice of presets that load what AMD thinks are the optimum set of options for movies, sports activities and the like or hit Custom and you’ll select for your self which to load.

Most of the settings are ones which have been round for some time on current variations of AMD drivers however one new characteristic is directional scaling, which is actually anti-aliasing for video.

AMD can be highlighting lowered energy consumption with Crimson when taking part in YouTube movies. That’s fairly a particular situation however a helpful one nonetheless and in my assessments I did file round a 20W discount in energy consumption when taking part in the identical Star Wars The Force Awakens trailer AMD utilized in its assessments. To spotlight its particular nature, although, I additionally examined with VLC and noticed no distinction.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive – Relive

The huge new characteristic of this launch is ReLive. This is AMD’s new fully built-in stay streaming and recreation seize facility meaning you are able to do away with secondary software program like AMD’s personal Gaming Evolved app.

It’s a complete setup for a primary outing, with choices for recording your gaming classes manually or simply recording instantaneous replay clips. There are additionally loads of settings for altering the standard of the video, together with setting a particular decision or going with the in-game decision, selecting 30fps or 60fps and altering the bitrate.

At the identical time you may also stream straight to Twitch, YouTube or a customized server. Again you get loads of choices for tweaking high quality and you’ll select whether or not to archive the stream.

AMD claims solely a 3-4% efficiency hit from enabling recreation seize, although this may rely in your actual {hardware} configuration. During our assessments it didn’t noticeably have an effect on our framerate or responsiveness.

You can even add an overlay to your stream or recording that may embody system data, and a digicam feed in addition to embody a customized overlay picture.

All advised, it’s an important addition each for its complete and simple to make use of interface and the truth that it means you’ve got one much less little bit of software program to put in.

It stays to be seen how this may work along with the upcoming recreation seize characteristic that’s being constructed into the Windows 10 Anniversary replace however for now it really works nicely.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson – Display

Under the Display settings tab is a key new characteristic of Radeon Software Crimson, which is the power to make use of customized resolutions and framerates, somewhat than having to select from an inventory of verified supported resolutions.

This can doubtlessly trigger issues to your monitor so AMD makes you comply with a waiver earlier than accessing the choice, however as soon as opened you may choose from a wide variety of monitor choices, even together with detailed timing settings. This characteristic has additionally now been totally up to date to run inside the Crimson interface, the place earlier variations of the software program opened an occasion of CCC to alter these settings.

Otherwise, it’s right here you’ll discover choices for enabling AMD Freesync, digital tremendous decision (this makes every thing on display screen smaller as you attempt to emulate your monitor having a bigger decision), GPU scaling and a brand new color temperature setting. The latter supplies a fast manner of manually tweaking how pink or blue your show appears, with the default choice set to the usual 6500Ok temperature.

If you’ve got a number of screens it’s right here you may set them up with the standard Eyefinity choices.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive – System

The System tab is the place you discover all of the details about your graphics card {hardware} and AMD software program. So if you happen to ever must search for your driver model or learn how a lot graphics reminiscence you’ve got, it’s the place to go.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson – New options

As nicely because the Radeon Settings app, there are some key under-the-hood options in Crimson, one in all which is Shader Cache.

This works by storing the compiled shaders wanted for the sport on the onerous drive. Normally these shaders are compiled on the fly, which may result in pauses in open world video games as you progress across the map, in addition to different micro-stutters and usually longer recreation and degree loading instances. Shader Cache goals to scale back all these points.

Enabled by default it would take at the very least one run of every recreation for the cache to be stuffed and any advantages to be realised however thereafter the sport and ranges ought to load faster, plus there needs to be lowered stutter from CPU overhead and from “map hitching”.

However, in my testing I didn’t discover any distinction in recreation and degree loading instances utilizing Battlefield 4. By its nature this isn’t the best factor to check, although, as it would fluctuate enormously from recreation to recreation and even machine to machine.

However, the characteristic has been obtainable on Nvidia playing cards/drivers for some time now and generally there’s a modest however welcome discount in these points when the setting is enabled so it’s affordable to anticipate the identical enchancment for AMD playing cards.

Another new addition is wider AMD XConnect assist. XConnect is the ThunderBolt-based expertise for connecting a laptop computer of all-in-one PC to an exterior graphics card to spice up graphics perforamnce, and beforehand it was one thing that solely labored with particular {hardware} and particular driver variations.

Now, although, AMD XConnect is supported throughout all Thunderbolt licensed PCs and laptops and exterior graphics options. We’re but to check this out although, so the jury continues to be out on whether or not the holy grail of moveable gaming is really a viable choice but.

AMD can be increasing its Linux assist. Freesync is now supported in addition to all discrete GCN graphics playing cards – that’s mainly every thing for the reason that HD 7000 collection.

Supported Linux distros embody Ubuntu 16.04, RHEL 7.2, RHEL 6.8, Ubuntu 14.04, RHEL 7.3, SLED/SLES 12 SP2 Linux.

Verdict

Overall, AMD seems to have as soon as once more made a major sufficient replace to its driver and software program to justify the fanfare it has tried to whip up round AMD Crimson ReLive. AMD Crimson was an enormous enchancment in pace and ease of use and now the ReLive version provides helpful new performance and additional improves the usability. In the top it’s only a free driver replace however we predict AMD is certainly doing a very good job of constructing it faster and simpler for customers to make the very most of every thing their graphics playing cards has to supply.