Gadgetory

everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and we're talking out and these new Radeon Settings crimson edition software today this is a big deal for AMD for the last couple of reviews now the major thing we've complained about with AMD GPUs has been their driver and software support so if you look back in history for us go to about June for the r9 380 and r9 390 reviews and in that review that joint review we basically condemned the two cards for poor driver support and said we wouldn't recommend it because of flickering screens and other issues driver crashes things like that those were later resolved which changed our stance a bit but we were still kind of iffy on the driver support overall then the fury X came out reviewed that and we said that the drivers hamstrung and these fury X and Fiji architecture so again a Dane against Andy for driver and software support as time went on we reviewed the 390 X in August and for that card we said that the drivers were critically improved and felt a lot more comfortable recommending the device going forward but we were still a little unsure because of some spurious behavior that we saw finally with the 380 X about two weeks ago I wrote in my review that I was confident in recommending and the the website itself gamers Nexus all of our staff were fairly confident in recommending the 380 X on its driver support because it's it's improved a lot so and these taking steps in the right direction and Radeon settings is a furthering of that so we're here to review Radeon settings which is the new software suite this is a utility that is replacing catalyst control center or CCC has been around for quite a while maybe even back to the ATI days and CCC is being retired it will be no more when you install your drivers now you'll have the option to select Radeon settings or select as as it is now the CCC suite I don't know if that'll be continued going forward it seems like they'll kind of phase that out and just only do Radeon settings but for now that's what's present so and these Radeon settings is a minimalistic approach to the driver packaged and it's basic it's not a driver itself it is an application used for accessing and driver information used for cleanly uninstalling drivers there's a new bundled application for that so you don't have to go to used edu which is what we use for our display driver removers in between tests and the big thing here is a performance increase so with CCC the load time was a little bit slower and the install time was certainly slower and these numbers internally project this and then we did some of our own validation and found similar results with the install time alone not that this is too critical because how many times you're really gonna install drivers but it does show that they have cleaned up the packaging a little bit then install time alone we're seeing about 86 seconds for Radeon settings and that is when you include the and the Raptor Gaming evolves software which I'm not a fan of and I've said that publicly a few times now but it's part of it so if you include it then it's 86 seconds if you remove it it's about 15 seconds faster the Radeon settings utility is currently in our press version 1.1 gigabytes and the 15 dot 11.1 drivers without Radeon settings is about 470 mega bytes give or take 1 megabyte the reason for that disparity I'm pretty sure is because the Radeon Settings package we have bundles all of the windows versions support for all the versions support for all the cards so it makes it easier in that you have one thing to download for everything but it makes it larger obviously and I'm not sure how they're gonna differentiate that on the website or if they're just gonna do one package but it is a bit bigger but it installs faster and the boot up time is much faster as well so you now see a boot up time of less than one second when launching radeon settings' it's a really good thing and he's done very well in that department and that makes it a bit faster then CCC depending on how you run the numbers but either way less than a second to boot it up and then other features like I affinity have improved in their speed as well so now I affinity has a one-click quick setup button that you can use to immediately detect locate and setup your multi display device configurations a couple of things here talking about performance metrics that you'll see from AMD other sites today and about the driver support going forward so again Radeon settings is a software suite in terms of driver support this is 15 dot 11.1 beta it is not a new driver package and it's just adding the software to fifteen dot 11.1 replacing ccc that means that when you see charts from AMD claiming a twenty percent performance gain over the previous drivers what they're referring to as 15.7 dot one which is really kind of old at this point and that's a lot different from saying fifteen dot 11.1 which is the one everyone's been using recently especially with battlefront and fallout and black ops three and every other game that's come out recently you need fifty nine 11.1 to get good performance so you probably already have it which means you will see no performance and gain in terms of gaming FPS from installing this crimson software and that's something i really disagree with andy's presentation of data there i disagree that it is a good thing or a realistic thing to say that there's a twenty percent performance improvement because the asterisk cannon next to that number indicates that are talking about fifteen thousand 7.1 which realistically not very many people are using at this point or at least not anyone watching this channel who stays on top of things like hardware news and drivers and things like that this is something that nvidia has done in the past as well so I can't really ding them too hard but I just it's a zero percent performance gain basically as how I would present it but the important thing here that Andy is doing well is they've promised six wickel driver updates per year and that means that they're certified their Microsoft certified for Windows so they're not just beta drivers and that's a lot more than recently they had I think about three this year and that's better still than the previous second half of 14 2014 that first half of 2015 where there were zero driver updates for I think it was like 180 days so Andy's trending in the right direction and this new six week old driver updates per year if they can stick to it through 2016 is going to be a big deal for them especially with improving their game ready Daewon launch driver support something that they've started to catch up with recently but still straggled on some games like four and overall they they are trending in the correct direction for their driver support and frequency of launches so the review part of this content is really just talking about all of the performance data that we've already given you in terms of the boot up time load time stuff like that but we're also here to run through the major updates and items in crimson software or Radeon settings or Radeon software it's it's had a lot of names and to talk about those names the versioning works like this there is first Radeon settings is the name as I understand it now that's the name of the software package then you see crimson edition in this case and crimson edition is it's a shade of red for all crimson andy says they will continue using shades of red different ones for every major iteration of the software effectively at one point of a 2.0 a three point of a type of thing andy says that they want to do one of these per year so you'll have one new shade of red per year and then after that there's a number identifiers like the existing fifteen dot eleven or similar items but it's basically just a year dot month so that's how that words we've got it explained in the article if that went by too quickly the other major things here just checking my notes from our written review would be the test case automation and manual testing andy has added one hundred percent more automated test cases to try and improve the drivers they've added 25 percent more manual test cases and a test case is basically I have a lot of them on the sheet actually for our own testing a test case is when you have a number of steps to run through something that could create a problem so you run through functionality a test engineer designs a test case a technician will execute it and then they try to find where are the problems with the software so Andy's added a lot more of those that's a good thing one thing that I really like is the per game overclocking so you can set profiles per game if you say if you need four fps and fallout 4 so you're heading 56 and you really want 60 but you can't quite get it but maybe an overclock pushes you there because that that is within realistic range of overclocking to get a couple extra yes so you could set a profile to only overclock for Fallout 4 which is a good thing because we generally advise against running permanent long term overclock in profile on your card for everything and idle use and every day is because it really just beats up the silicon and it's not good for the card so you can do per game profiles for overclocking that is a big plus and then there's a global application of game settings if you want to set settings for your games through software rather than through the game for some reason that's not something I really care to do I don't do a GeForce experience and I won't do it with this but you can do that globally or if you install ambe's raptor suites then you can do it per game individually and set all the settings there I really don't like the gaming evolved app it's slow it doesn't work well on high resolutions doesn't scale properly it's it feels kind of bloated and that is the opposite of how I feel about the Crimson edition Radeon settings right now software suite it's the opposite of bloated it's actually very lean and quick and agile and that's something that the gaming evolved app is not so I would opt to not install that on personal computers if I weren't testing it everything significantly faster usability is improved for new users CPU consumption I saw at about 3% max I never saw more than that and that was when actively using the software was closer to 1 or 0 when it was in the background and memory consumption was about 180 megabytes max so overall this is really a pretty good move for AMD the driver is or the software I should say is well designed is well built it is fast it is clean all these things I know that perhaps the major point of criticism won't come from users who are used to CCC and feel like this is a dumbing down of their input as a technical user and that is certainly true there is a bit of it removes a bit of the advanced technical feel when you eliminate all these sort of nested sub menus what actually Heather its but that's an old messy way to do it and the industry is moving away from that CCC is still being sort of adapted into crimson it's still being consumed by it eventually I would expect to see all of the options there but most of them are presently there and what's lacking you can launch a CCC window and access them the old-fashioned way I am pretty happy with this overall I would suggest downloading it if you have AMD if you have problems with it let us know because I didn't really see any major problems but I I tested it on what a hardware configuration and you can read what that was on the website so that's all for this time check the patreon link in the post or video after this video ends and thank you for watching we really enjoy making the content as I've said it's a lot of fun to do this stuff just upgraded to a table and and that's because of the viewership and because you guys are sharing all the content and we much appreciate that so thanks for watching I'll see you all next time