Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware box another day another set of testing to be done this time we're looking at the very first set of official rise and mobile GPO drivers to come from AMD themselves owners of Ryze mobile app drops everywhere have been waiting for this day for months and months now so the fact these drivers are finally here is great news for the small growing community of rising laptop early adopters so let's backtrack for a moment to tell the full story of rise and mobile laptops the first devices to use rise in mobile launched at the tail end of 2017 and while performance in some cases was pretty good thanks to the powerful integrated GPU it quickly became apparent that work needed to be done on the software side GPU accelerated productivity apps either crashed frequently or didn't work at all there were issues playing some games than the laptop despite having enough GPU horsepower plus there were plenty of odds and ends that needed tidying up with new drivers the hard way was there just wasn't very polished and there was a quintessential early adopter feel to the platform over time it became apparent that AMD and the OEMs weren't going to patch these problems in a timely fashion aim he blamed the OEMs for being extremely slack and pushing out software updates and that's true to an extent but realistically the platform needed proper drivers available through AMD calm throughout 2018 many users discovered that hacking aimed these newer apu drivers to work on their reisender laptops delivered a more stable experience with better performance but this was an unofficial hack to get a solution rather than AMD or or ems directly addressing the problems through official update streams those who had bought rise in mobile laptops for the fast integrated GPU and a portable form factor quickly became frustrated users became annoyed at the lack of day one driver optimizations for new games which were available for APU and discrete GPU owners that annoyed screw into anger as some systems hadn't received a single GPU update for a year while those within video even Intel GPUs received reasonably regular updates plus with that proper drivers rise and robot owners Werft without a lot of the cool driver features available for discrete GPU owners thankfully Amy listen to all the complaints and as of this week has finally launched official rise in mobile GPU drivers you can download through AMD calm these drivers can be installed on any rising mobile device whether that's a new system or one of the original rise and laptops it's not locked down by OEMs it's designed to work as a generic updated driver for all it may have taken over a year but at least the drivers are now available naturally I wanted to test these new drivers and compare them to the original drivers that shipped with rise in mobile laptops and that ones that didn't get updated for ages and that's what this video is all about I still have my original HP Envy x-360 15 inch with the risin 5 2500 you inside so when the new drivers were available I installed them updated a whole bunch of other things like windows the BIOS and other utilities that had received updates since I reviewed the system and put the updates through their paces so the driver version I'm testing here is Randy on software version 19 2.3 the latest version isn't filming I'm going to go through our usual suite of laptop benchmarks to see how the HP Envy x-360 performs now compared to how it launched back in 2017 there's also going to be some game testing later with direct before and after comparisons focusing on improvements from just the drivers alone I'm not going to bore you with the results from our CPU limited workloads like PC mark 10 video encoding MATLAB 7-zip and so on there's really no difference in performance between the original launch state of rise and mobile and today with the updated drivers this makes sense the drivers are GPU drivers and many of the apps we benchmark don't use the cheap you at all so if you're expecting a few more Cinebench points from updating windows installing a new bios and grabbing Radeon Software 19.2 2.3 well pretty much think again where the benefits start to come in is in GPU accelerated productivity workloads blender is a prime example I reviewed the envy x-360 I could only get blender to successfully complete our benchmark render once every other time it crashed or stalled was pretty much a complete disaster the app was unusable for anyone that actually was going to go and do any creative work in it since these driver updates with that updating the blender application itself the benchmark now completes every single time so that's a massive stability improvement performance is also improved our blender benchmark which runs entirely on the EU was 17% faster after all of these updates that's a pretty handy improvement placing Amy's integrated GPU around the mark of Intel's latest Core i7 85 65 you in a 25 volt configuration running the workload on the CPU given this is comparing a verizon 5 APU to a generally much faster Intel Core i7 that's a pretty good result purely from software tweaks and GPU acceleration even better is the ability to run some benchmarks that didn't work at all previously Adobe Photoshop for example had problems with acceleration with the initial set of drivers now it does work allowing the Rison 5 2500 you to slightly outperform the Core i5 8250 you in our iris blur test Compu bench is another workload I had a lot of problems with originally half the test didn't work at all the other half would frequently crash to the tune of about 10 crashes for every one workin benchmark run with the latest drivers there were still a few crashes but they are pretty infrequent and generally it's now possible for the entire benchmark suite to run with that issue performance isn't improved but better stability is certainly welcome I still had issues with Adobe Premiere though even with all the latest updates horizon 5 2500 is still unable to GPU accelerate the crucial de mettre color effect in premiere with 4k footage limit trees are widely used affect among creators for color correction and while applying this to 4k footage might seem intensive it can easily be GPU accelerated on intel's integrated graphics and all of invidious recent discrete GPUs the effect not working with rising mobile is a definite outlier although lumetri is bizarre is still compatible with 1080p footage and below with this processor many other GPU accelerated effects also work however our premier benchmark uses 4k footage and lumetri color effects this means even today rice and mobile gets destroyed by a mere Intel Core i5 8250 you taking over 30 minutes to render on the CPU alone without luma tree effects the risin fire of 2500 U is faster I have flagged this issue to aim B again so hopefully their driver team will look into it or at least provide an explanation as to why this GPU accelerated effect is incompatible with rise of mobile cheap if it turns out it's not possible to fix moving on to games and once again here I want to stress how much better this new drivers with regards to stability crashes and other technical issues previously I had all sorts of problems with rising mobile gaming sometimes I've learned a game and the GPU had under clocked itself massively compared to the previous load sometimes a game would only work in full screen mode and present artifacts when using borderless windowed mode sometimes a game would have vsync forced on despite the option being disabled everywhere there are also generic crashes and system reboots it was pretty much a disaster even in lightweight games like fortnight with the latest drivers I haven't experienced any of these issues all the games that I previously had trouble with now work fine crashes have gone basic functionality works it's like the system has gone from a pre-release set of software in an alpha stage to a proper finalized driver that's been tested by more than two people so it's pretty great in terms of performance amy has claimed this is where users should see big improvements over the launch drivers specifically 17% average performance gains in eSports titles when comparing driver versions 17.4 to 19.2 3 however all my previous testing was done with version 17.7 not the older 17.4 so let's see how the difference is compared there with 49 I recorded a 5% improvement to average frame rates and no improvement to 1% was with my 17.7 driver data coming from runs where the game did not randomly underclock the GPU a 5% improvement is good it's nothing to complain about but it's certainly not a huge update the big improvement is that you're now going to get maximum performance every time you boot the game and not a random water of varying performance and the GPU still provides a good experience at 1080p with low settings when testing csgo there was no difference in performance before and after the driver update this is another game that runs well on the rise and 520 500 you but don't expect a performance improvement performance is much better in Civilization 6 increasing by 15% which is certainly up there with only 17 percent improvement claims for a game that I think is well suited to a laptop form factor getting up near the 60 FPS mark in intensive scenarios at native 1080p is a pretty good result with GTA 5 are so no difference in average before it's but a handy increase in 1% low performance that allows the game to run slightly smoother in general while you will still have to play on the lower settings performance is respectable from a low-power APU Metro last light is the most punishing game I tested despite being an older game at this point it's also the final game that we use for our ultrabook game testing sweet average perform is decreased by around 9% which was disappointing to see however this was compensated for with a large improvement to 1% Louis allowing the game to run more smoothly battery life is another thing I want to mention Verizon mobile was never amazing from a battery life perspective an early system is tended to have a strange idle clock behavior such as idling too high on the GPU but that's now been resolved which in a few battery benchmarks resulted in up to a 7% improvement nothing amazing but I was surprised to see an improvement at all over all these drivers definitely do bring a number of improvements before words is probably the least exciting improvement here most steps in games either saw zero improvements are only minor gains there were a few outliers notably blender and Civilization six that saw gains around 15% but I don't think it's reasonable to expect games like that in general a small improvement is still an improvement though the more important improvements come in the form of stability and bug fixes almost every show I had with rise in mobile whether that was crashes incompatibilities or other problems has now been resolved apps that didn't work previously now work games are much more stable and deliver more consistent performance it's not perfect there are still issues with things like lamenting premiere and a few apps still do hang or crash more often than I would expect but overall this has been a significant step forward one thing I haven't mentioned yet is support for some of ambe's driver features that are accessible on discrete GPU such as Reliv unfortunately that's not available yet which will disappoint a few people however these drivers are still a work in progress and it seems AMD spent most of their efforts here on stability and performance with features to come later and I guess that's part of the beauty of this new driver ecosystem for rising mobile we won't have to wait months for a new GPU driver for their laptop abused we should expect monthly updates in line with their desktop cards like with their discreet GPUs over time I expect bugs to be patched features to get added and performance to improve of course the sudden you promise at this stage but we'll have to wait and see how this all plays out and I am expecting things to definitely improve over the coming months sure you have taken Amy this long to get their act together on rise and mobile drivers definitely not but at least they have and as the rise in mobile platform grows this shouldn't be as much of an issue as it was for early adopters that's it for this one an X update on rising mobile will hopefully be checking out new 3000 series laptops in the next few months I'm not expecting to see massive performance improvements but it will be interesting to see how the minor speck bump stacks up against Intel of course you can subscribe for more reviews consider supporting us on patreon and I'll catch you in the next one