Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed it is that time of the year again when AMD overhaul their drivers for the most part though this time around things do look much the same we are dealing with the same graphical user interface that was introduced with the Crimson Edition driver back in 2015 last year though we got the Crimson relive Edition and well that added a few swanky new features such as relive that was aimed ease answer - shadow play we also got radio and chill a number of performance improvements for a heap of triple-a tiles that were released in 2016 vicinity of three to four percent depending on the game overall I have to say the Crimson a real live Edition that was a really nice driver update and added some much-needed features and it also gave the RX 480 a shot in the arm and it definitely needed that against the gtx 1060 but it brought things up to a fairly even playing field and all the features though did work flaws i have to say i am they expanded what mans support for example and that really just made it crashed more than ever what meds functionality that has it really improved this year things continue to get pretty dicey with the release of a go anyway making the next step in the evolution of the AMD radeon software is the adrenalin addition sounds exhilarating so what does the gentleman have for us artfully designed meticulously crafted incredibly intuitive utterly beautiful gee guys calm down it's just a driver update and the user interface hasn't even changed with the exception of three new color themes alright so there are 78 slides in the press deck and I'm gonna spare you by skipping over the majority of them there are a few cool features and I want to cover them but I'll do them towards the end of the video I'll start with what I felt were the less exciting things but still worth covering starting with performance games Amy makes a pointless comparison by saying the adrenaline driver offers up to 19 percent gains over the original Crimson relive driver I'd hope so since four of the five games they showed were released after the real live driver was first introduced now moving on we have some reduced latency claims over the more recent hurry live Edition 17-point 11.1 drama so that's kind of neat improvements were noted for csgo pub G titanfall 2 and Rainbow six siege apparently those playing pub G can expect up to an 18 percent reduction in latency and we're talking about an 18 percent improvement and click to response time this really isn't something that I can accurately test at the moment so I focused on fps performance measuring the average one percent and point one percent low results here's a quick look at the results I had also planned to include results for the new Star Wars Battlefront 2 title but the game doesn't detect the new adrenaline driver and therefore refuses to load so we won't get to witness the viewer rage in the comment section for including that one what a shame opportunity missed in addition to the two main games I wanted to check out which was pubsey and csgo I also checked out battlefield one for the testing I used an air called Vega 64 graphics card and found that the average frame rate in csgo was boosted by 7% though the change from the 1 percent and 1 percent low result was minimal the gains for battlefield 1 and pub G were even less and despite basing them on a three run average I'd say that some of the margins seen are still within the margin of error so this time around we don't seem to be seeing any gains with Vega certainly not like what we saw at the RX 480 so that's a bit of a shame moving on the adrenaline Driver offers borderless windowed multi GPU support so that's good for whoever's foolish enough to be using 2 AMD or nvidia gpus in 2017 let's suppose moving on f RTC or frame rate target control now support the vulcan titles all of them apparently you now have support for doom and Wolfenstein dota 2 that adds vulcan support doesn't it oh and it was recently added to ashes of the benchmark so for those games and any I'm possibly forgetting you can now cap frame rates to reduce power draw and GPU operating temperature for me though I'm all about those burning fast fps so this feature just isn't for me you can now set the GPU workload from graphics to compute for enhanced compute performance so when mining AMD says when setting this option to the compute profile it will the RX 570s a theory and minor performance by 15% so it looks like mine is probably stand to gain the most from this driver update at least in terms of performance something kind of cool is the new connection tab it's not mind-blowing or anything but it's a neat little addition the connection tab houses three sub menus gallery account and a resource center the gallery allows gamers to manage their relive captured footage here it's possible to share and upload captures and there's even some basic editing functionality for uploading you can manage accounts in the appropriately named accounts tab access to services such as YouTube twitch Twitter and various other social media platforms exists then finally you can stay in the radio and loop with the Resource Center this is probably more beneficial for AMD's marketing team but who knows you might find some cool stuff in there every now and then Ami's also made some tweaks and improvements to the real live feature the impact on frame rate performance has now been lessened by up to a claimed 84 percent there's now also support for borderless region capture which means you can capture only what you want by selecting a specific window you can now use AMD eyefinity with real life to capture footage across multiple monitors and finally it's also possible record a separate audio track so you can separate your mic input from the game's audio and that's a pretty cool feature and definitely in addition worth having one of the coolest though is the new Radeon overlay feature an in-game pop-up menu that allows you to adjust settings on the fly and monitor performance to enable this feature you simply have to hit Alt + R and it will just fade in from the right of screen this menu system for me is an amazing addition and it really is a must to utilize all the various features now on offer in the Radeon software AMD slide chapter 6 menus though my Vegas 64 setup had just four that's probably because I can't enable certain features like free sync for example still the four I had were very useful if you're not a fan of messing around with hotkeys or maybe they just aren't working for whatever reason in some games and this has been a problem in the past you can start recording from this menu you can also adjust every possible setting imaginable on the fly in-game you can change performance monitoring metrics and even a just the update intervals other features such as radio and chill can be enabled or disabled on the fly and you can even adjust color properties it's a cool feature it seems to work perfectly and it's one that I very much love and appreciate being added complementing the awesome Radeon overlay feature is AMD link AMD link is an app that's available on Android or iOS devices so smartphones and tablets for example and it allows gamers to monitor and use features from their mobile device for example if you had your phone propped up on a dock in front of your monitor you can show a number of performance metrics such as FPS GP usage RAM usage clock speeds and so on you can also enable Radeon relive and control all the settings there obviously this kind of thing is quicker and easier just to do via hot keys on your keyboard but it's nice to have the ability to enable and disable remotely it's a new free added feature so sure why not are the on-screen stats though those can get in the way when you're playing so it's kind of nice to be able to put them upload them to another screen and you can also monitor that again remotely if someone else is gaming on your system and you want to see yeah I don't know where I was going with that one I don't know time will tell how useful that feature is yep moving on you can add multiple pcs to it quite quickly and easily so that's nice so overall it's a neat little addition but I think I'm more impressed with the array on overlay feature that's actually on your screen so that menu that you can pop up in games that's really neat and I like that in conclusion I have to say that it's really nice to see these yearly big updates continue from AMD and while not as impressive as last year's update the adrenaline Edition has some cool new features for Radeon users and I said at the end of the day they're free so pretty hard to complain with that anyway that's it for this one I'm your host Steve see you next time