Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to harbor unboxed today we have a very cool video for you that looks at a new driver update from AMD and it's more exciting than it sounds believe me recently when I went on the search for the best value sub $200 GPU my exploration landed me on AMD's Radeon rx 470 as it was clearly the best choice the new MSRP 170 dollars u.s. makes this a killer deal and it's also the same situation down under I also noted in that review or via comparison rather that AMD was doing an exceptional job with their drivers and since then although it's only been a month since I made that comparison we've already seen a couple of updates from AMD for new games to optimize performance and stuff so that's been great to see with drivers playing such a crucial role it's important for both AMD and NVIDIA to keep on top of their updates delivering optimal performance and the occasional bug fix last year it seemed in video was on top of their game here certainly more so than AMD this year however the rolls seem to reversed and videos had countless driver related issues while AMD has been kicking some serious goals since forming the raid on technologies group AMD's driver team really has been on top of things in fact RTG appears to have been functioning like a well-oiled machine I am constantly receiving notifications of incoming drivers for new games and it's really great to see as of November AMD has released 29 separate driver updates providing improved support and optimization for over 28 games aimday also claims that they've seen over 85 million driver downloads this year so in short they've been busy beavers celebrating that success AMD is preparing to release their annual big software release in 2014 we got catalyst Omega last year we got the crimson edition software and this year marks the arrival of the Crimson Reliv edition this latest version focuses on further improving performance stability and features the initial release includes a huge amount of bug fixes and stability improvements here you can see a slide provided by AMD which outlines some of the top fixes feel free to push pause here if you want to check them all out an interesting new feature that's been added to the advanced display settings and diagnostics provides automatic detection for bad HDMI cables and signal detection in my experience HDMI cables seem to either work or they don't but I'm not an expert here I probably haven't played with enough rubbish cables either way this is a feature that could improve the end users experience as AMD claims vp9 4k 60 Hertz GPU accelerated reaming is supported by the Radeon GC and GPUs as well as the new AMD Stoney Ridge ap use operating system support extends to Windows 7 8.1 and of course 10 for some time now free sync users have been begging AMD to support borderless full screen or borderless window modes as it's often referred to with their free sync technology to date those wanting to use AMD's adaptive sync technology have been forced to run their games in full-screen mode which kind of sucks for those that alt-tab a lot well ask and you shall receive it seems with this new brand of AMD freesync now supports the borderless window mode for fast and easy switching of applications while ingame this feature is now supported on all GCN second gen annual GPUs another new feature is called Radeon chill a power saving feature that just the framerate on the fly depending on the players activity AMD claims that this new feature can reduce power consumption by around 30% which is pretty amazing of course with reduced power consumption comes lower operating temperatures and AMD suggests up to a 13% lower operating temple and amazing enough aim D goes on to claim that raid on chill can also lower the average frame time delivery to display by 32% for a quicker response time the only catch tool has been that this feature is game dependant so your mileage may vary AMD has created a whitelist of titles though and hopefully we'll see that list grow dramatically over the coming months for now it looks like the low-level API such as direct extend Vulcan aren't supported though showing that they care about all their customers even those rockin outdated Hardware albeit just outdated AMD is extended support for their walkman utility to the raid on 300 series select 200 series cards and the fury range so that's kind of even if we do prefer afterburner AMD claims that in certain games the new Crimson relive addition sixteen point twelve driver boosts frame rate performance by up to eight percent I tested two of the games where performance claims were made those games were Deus Ex mankind divided and overwatch I checked Gears of War 4 as well even though performance claims weren't made here the claim was based on performance changes from the oldest 16.6 point to driver whereas the previous driver was the 16 point 11.5 anyway we decided to test the Crimson relive Edition against both previous Crimson drivers testing with overwatch at 1080p we said that AMD has again been making performance improvements with this game from the 16 point six point two driver to the sixteen point eleven point five driver AMD was able to find four percent more performance the Reliv driver increased performance further again albeit only slightly as we see a two percent bump here taking the average frame rate to 162 fps that's a six percent jump from the 16 point six point two driver and it's great to see these kinds of gains being made debut sects mankind divided was consistently faster by 1/2 FPS with the new Reliv driver and although this does fall within the margin of error we ran this test a considerable amount of times and found the margins were always much the same in favour of the new driver finally we have Gears of War 4 and although AMD made no performance claims here the results are interesting the minimum frame rate was consistently higher much higher with the real live driver jumping from 65 fps to 69 FPS this allowed the rx 480 to roughly match the gtx 1060 in this title an impressive result indeed last but not least aimed as something else for us capture customize share oh yeah finally a real competitor for Nvidia shadowplay radio and Reliv allows users to record not just gameplay footage but also the Windows desktop and windows-based applications just as shadowplay does you can also stream gameplay save instant replays and take screenshots additionally users can now modify settings quickly and conveniently with an easy to access in-game toolbar by default radio and Reliv is disabled so to enable that users will have to open up the Radeon settings by default the real live recording feature is disabled so users will have to open up the radion settings to enable it manually once open you'll see the real if tab position in the top middle of the screen from this tab you can customize hotkeys and settings for recording streaming and the overlay this is also where you can able desktop recording which will allow you to capture the overlay which is normally not captured without this feature enabled the radio and real live overlay is a hotkey customizable toggle that allows users direct access to settings when gaming anyway record is the option I'm most interested in and I suspect this will be true for most of you as well as you might imagine record allows you to start recording whatever it is you're currently doing whether that be gaming or using a desktop application there are many tweakable settings available for this feature including quality resolution recording bitrate frame rate encoding type and audio bitrate I should know the maximum support a bit rate right now is 150 megabits per second where a shadow play goes as high as 130 megabits per second and that is the rate I use to show gameplay footage on the channel I ran into a few issues when testing re-live though none of them were terribly critical for whatever reason most of the time the hotkeys didn't seem to work in game forcing me to alt-tab begin recording at the desktop and then jump back in the game another issue I found when testing Gears of War 4 is that when I was recording the game became v synced to the framerate I was recording at so this meant I couldn't exceed 60 fps however this didn't seem to be an issue in other games such as battlefield 1 overwatch titanfall 2 and Far Cry primal for example speaking of Far Cry primal I use this for a quick performance test AMD claims that relives impact on performance is very minimal only taxing a high-end system by about 3 to 4 percent they have data from 5 games to support that claim of course I did my own testing albeit briefly due to time constraints anyway testing with Fire Cry primal using the Rx for ad I found that Reliv reduced the average frame rate by 4.6 percent which is pretty well aligned with AMD's claims meanwhile the minimum frame rate was reduced by 4% compared to the GTX 1060 using shadow play we saw a 3% reduction here so overall pretty similar performance before wrapping things up I had intended to do some benchmarking using the radon chill feature but in the end decided against it honestly I didn't have enough time to explore the impact of this feature to the depth that I wanted to I've done quite a bit of testing but I'm not confident enough in the numbers to show them the big issue here being that radio and chill will have a greater impact when actually gaming rather than benchmarking in short it seems campers have the most a Dane here messing around overwatch for example I found that throughout our benchmark run which sees a constant state of motion and input from the user radio and chill made little to no difference however the second I stopped moving the frame rate on the RX 480 at 40 and 40 P dropped down from around 80 fps to just 40 FPS while extreme movement would boost the frame rate to levels that you would see with radio and chill disabled so around 120 fps this wasn't noticeable in game because the second you start moving again the framerate smoothly climbs back up it reminded me very much of the engine stop start feature in my Volkswagen this is a feature I'll have to look at in a separate video and show you some sort of side by side gameplay footage with the radon chill feature on and off well AMD's driver team have been very very busy impressive stuff here the performance gains were great to see but I was particularly impressed in the minimum frame rates in games such as Gears of War 4 I'm very keen to test other titles oh the new features are also very exciting and I'm very impressed with relive that capture tool hopefully this is something AMD will continue to develop AMD has also released a cool little benchmark tool called open capture and analytics tool or ocat for short which I believe is based on present mon amie has added a user-friendly interface while the application supports DirectX 11 DirectX 12 and the Vulcan API I haven't used this tool much it as was much the case with the real live capture tool I was having issues enabling it in game using the hotkeys with Vega just around the corner this massive driver update is very very well timed this is something that AMD hasn't always been good at doing in the past we've sort of seen massive driver updates come after a big release so yeah it's great to see at a performance but it didn't make the release itself as impactful as it could have in so I feel like they haven't fully capitalized there but this release I think in the timing wise it's really going to strengthen Amy's position I just hope they get the reward they deserve for all their hard work having just recommended the RX 470 is the best sub $200 graphics card last month anyone who purchased this capable graphics card it'll feel a bit like all your Christmases have come at once because now you can look forward to slightly better performance and new features I love what AMD has done here the next few months should be an exciting time for AMD fans well hell really it should be an exciting time for PC gamers on a whole speaking of exciting stuff I finally just purchased my first four gigabyte R X 480 I know about time I've had numerous eight gigabyte models on hand for a while now but for getting a four gigabyte card is just proven difficult I'm not sure why it's been that way ever since release but they have been available at retail for a while now and I just haven't got around to buying one and busy with other things but I pulled the trigger I bought one now and I could finally do that four gig testing you guys have been asking for so the plan is to test all the current generation Nvidia and AMD GPUs and I will be using the new driver but that you've just seen for testing the AMD GPUs I will be testing with pretty much all the big 2016 releases for one huge comparison in total will be 19 games tested and as I said they're all going to be 2016 releases so any big tiles from 2015 unfortunately I will be dropping from this comparison so 19 games 11 GPUs 12 if I end up testing the Titan XP I'm not sure if I'm going to throw that in there just yet two resolutions covering 1080p and 1440p and of course I'll be making three runs per test and taking the average minimum and average framerate result so in total I'll be conducting well over 1200 benchmark runs so be sure to keep an eye out for that it should be pretty epic anyway back to the matter at hand what do you guys think about the crimson real live Edition driver let me know in the comments below if you have any questions put them down there I'll be sure to read them and and yeah that about wraps this one up I will catch you guys next time Oh