AMD New Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition Experience April 2021

AMD New Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition Experience April 2021

It’s that time again, time for a big update from AMD Radeon with the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 21.4.1 that comes with some great quality of life improvements for Radeon users. One quick mention right up front is there is no inclusion of Radeon FidelityFX Super Resolution so if you were hoping this was the time for it to shine then you’re going to have to wait still, however, Radeon Boost VRS is quite a huge addition from where I stand.

AMD has made a habit of release very large updates in the past with the near-annual release of a massive update to their software suite with solid intervals between delivering more Day Zero drivers than ever in the past and the latest 21.4.1 driver is enhancing many of those features as well as bringing some new changes to the table.

Повышение резкости графики

Графические настройки, такие как сглаживание и виртуальное суперразрешение (подробнее об этом позже), действительно могут сильно снизить частоту кадров. Однако AMD Radeon Image Sharpening — это мини-чудо, заметно улучшающее резкость изображения при очень небольших затратах на производительность.

Щелкните значок настроек> Графика, затем либо выберите игру, для которой вы хотите включить ее, либо щелкните Глобальная графика, чтобы применить ее ко всем. Эффекты особенно заметны, если вы играете в игру с разрешением ниже максимального разрешения вашего монитора. alt=»Как настроить AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition» width=»1″ height=»1″ /> alt=»Как настроить AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition» width=»1″ height=»1″ />

AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 Test Drive: New Features, Refinements Explored

Over the last few years, AMD has made big changes to its Radeon Software control panel on an almost yearly cadence. This time around it’s been a little longer than that, as those updates typically launch around the end of the year, though this specific roll-out was extended to April. What has AMD’s Radeon team been up to all this time? We got an early look at the drivers that are shipping today in order to get a feel for what’s improved and what’s new. Let’s take a look together.

AMD’s New Radeon Software Installer

One of the nicer, yet more unexpected, features of the new Radeon Software is the installer itself. One of the frustrating things about graphics drivers is just how big the installer is and how much software it wants to put on your system. With this release, AMD has added some choices: Full Install, Minimal Install, and Driver Only. The Full option installs exactly what it always has. That includes the driver, control panel, AMD’s ReLive streaming software and various monitoring tools, much of which is new and we’ll talk about later.

New Reporting Tools And Stability Enhancements

While Microsoft seems to be the cause of some of the biggest bugs in Windows lately, unstable driver software is a common problem as well. To that end, AMD has made some changes to its methodology for verifying the stability of its drivers. The company has also added a couple of new tools to Radeon Software that should help get bugs resolved more quickly. The focus is on getting bug reports and crash logs to the development and quality assurance team quicker than in the past, so that issues can be addressed right away, rather than relying on reports on AMD’s community forums or Reddit to get analytics data to the right place and the right AMD team members.

The latest Radeon Software comes bundled with the AMD Bug Report Tool, which captures the system state and launches automatically any time specific errors are detected. The tool can read a lot of information about the system’s current state, including installed software and the PC’s hardware configuration to minimize how much effort users have to make to report an issue. Then it asks users what they were doing at the time of the crash. That report goes off to AMD and «directly» to the engineering and QA teams. This feature has been around for a while as a separate download, but it’s now part of AMD’s drivers to get it into more hands. To launch it manually, click the bug report icon in the top toolbar of the control panel.

On the other hand, crashes are best when they’re avoided entirely. To that end, AMD has created a new Crash Defender tool that will try to preserve in-flight data and keep systems running when they’d otherwise crash or generate a Blue Screen of Death. Rather than allow the system to keel over, Crash Defender will perform a Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) cycle and restart the graphics card mid-load. Those are annoying, especially in the middle of a game when trying to pull off certain maneuvers, but it’s much more preferable to outright crashing and losing progress.

Vivid Gaming: New Image Processing Modes

AMD has its share of image quality enhancement options under a couple of different brands. Responsive Gaming is AMD’s efforts to improve responsiveness and smoothness, and covers things like FreeSync and Radeon Anti-Lag, which now supports DirectX 12. Vivid Visuals covers FidelityFX and Radeon Image Sharpening. New to the Vivid Visuals family are a couple of color calibration modes that come at no performance cost. These new options require a Radeon RX 5000 or 6000 graphics card up to Radeon RX 6900 XT, or an AMD Zen 2 APU with Vega-based Radeon Graphics, like a notebook with a Ryzen 4000 or 5000 series processor.

If you do any color-critical work at all, like photo editing or video production, you’re familiar with monitor calibration. The new Radeon Software control panel exposes controls for adjusting the color temperature, hue, contrast, and saturation manually. The defaults are geared towards a 6500K color temperature, which is pretty close to a «true white» point, with all of the other controls set to 0 indicating no adjustment.

Beneath those options, AMD has added a Color Deficiency Correction section. These is a wonderful addition for gamers who have to live with some form of color blindness. The company has added three sliders to adjust the intensity of corrections for red, blue, and green color blindness. This will adjust colors the user can’t see to other hues to make them easier to discern. Screenshots are not affected with these options turned on, though, so if players want to capture what they’re doing, it won’t adjust the screenshot for the selected color blindness, making it understandable to others who aren’t affected.

New Streaming Features For Content Creators

Everyone and their siblings want to stream their gameplay to Twitch, YouTube, and a host of other services. AMD’s ReLive software has aimed to make that task easier for aspiring gamers, and the company has stepped up its streaming chops in this release. The Recording and Streaming section of the control panel serves as host to a very configurable streaming setup, including separate bitrates for streams and local recordings, supported codecs (including HVEC x.265 support), and one-click streaming to a host of different streaming platforms.

The most interesting option is the addition of an Adaptive Quality for streams. The system will automatically adjust streaming settings based on your internet connection, particularly upload. Lots of cable subscribers are used to having uploads limited to just a few megabits per second, where a high-quality 1080p stream needs around 6-7 mbps just for itself, let alone the game being streamed.

To test out the new features, we took to Twitch and played a little StarCraft: Remastered. Rather than embarrass myself on the competitive ladder, the game was just a four-way Free-For-All featuring three computer opponents. Take a look at the quality of the stream in the trimmed video below.

New AMD Link 4.0 Game Streaming And Sharing

AMD says that over a million people downloaded AMD Link for iOS, tvOS, Android, and Android TV for the first time in the last year. According to AMD, that works out to tripling the AMD Link user base. With all these new users on board, AMD took the opportunity to make some big changes to the streaming and sharing platform, which saw its last update with Adrenaline 2020 a little over a year ago.

First of all, just like the online streaming options, local streaming via AMD Link now has an automatic mode that can increase resolution and framerate based on network conditions using a new automated QoS algorithm. The quality of the video can get pretty intense, too, as 1440p at 144 Hz is supported. Audio didn’t get ignored, either, as AMD Link can now stream 5.1 audio rather than falling back to plain old stereo.

The AMD Link app has been available for iOS and Android for quite a while, and that includes set-top boxes running tvOS and Android TV. New with AMD Link 4.0 is Windows version of the app. It comes bundled with the driver, or can be downloaded separately. AMD says it designed navigation to work with a gamepad on the receiving end, for selecting games and making quality changes. This allows a low-powered notebook to stream games from a more powerful machine in another room. As with all of the local streaming options, this works best when both ends of the connection are using wired Ethernet, but Wi-Fi up to 50 megabits is supported.

We took AMD Link for a spin on an Apple iPad Air with a Bluetooth version of the Xbox One controller tethered. Even though the iPad relies on Wi-Fi, our in-home streaming looked great and had very minimal input lag. While this is not a novel concept — covered by both NVIDIA’s Shield and Steam’s own in-home streaming — the AMD Link software can take more full advantage of AMD Radeon hardware, including HEVC x.265 if supported.

AMD Radeon Software Updates: The Verdict

While many of AMD’s past software features are still a big deal today, the company hasn’t rested on its laurels. We were particularly pleased to see AMD Link for Windows, along with all of the big enhancements to streaming, both locally and online. AMD’s ReLive software has always been pretty simple to use, but stream quality was always a bit of a guessing game. The automated process that handles encodes based on network conditions goes a long way towards fixing that.

Alongside the feature enhancements, a renewed focus on stability and driver quality are always appreciated. While AMD’s drivers typically perform pretty well for us, every vendor occasionally gets a bad rap when something goes awry. We like the idea of feeling directly connected to developers and QA analysts with the Bug Reporting Tool, which isn’t exactly new, but is now built into the driver. We’re also big fans of avoiding crashes whenever possible. While an automatic TDR cycle isn’t ideal, we’d much rather be able to stay in the game when an error occurs than crash to the desktop.

AMD’s software continues to evolve and grow in ways that are both intuitive and powerful. There’s no downside to upgrading, as the latest drivers always have the most recent fixes and performance enhancements. When you’re ready to dive in, head on over to AMD’s driver page and grab the Radeon Software update package. And if you want to chat live with AMD’s Frank Azor to discuss this latest release, be sure to hit our Facebook page or YouTube channel at 9:30AM EST today (4/20). Frank will be joining us live.

AMD has released its first major Radeon Software update of 2021, delivering optimisations for Quake II RTX< up to 10% more performance in Hitman 3 and a long list of minor bug fixes.

With their new 21.1.1 driver, AMD has delivered optimisations for two games and 12 bug fixes to users of Radeon graphics cards on Windows 10. Six known issues are present within this driver, which AMD is actively working to address.

What’s worth noting here is that AMD has updated their game testing procedure to utilise Ryzen 5000 series CPUs for game testing. AMD’s Hitman 3 testing uses a Ryzen 9 5900X processor with a Radeon RX 6800 XT, which now runs with a framerate that’s reported to be 10% higher than before at 4K Ultra settings. Things are looking good for RDNA 2.

Support For

Hitman 3

— Up to 10% increase in performance in Hitman 3, @4K Ultra settings, with Radeon™ Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.1.1 on the 16GB Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card versus the previous driver edition 20.12.1.RS-349

Quake II RTX

Fixed Issues

— The recording and streaming overlay indicator may sometimes reset itself to the default position.
— Performance Metrics Overlay size may intermittently reset or may not match values that are set in Radeon Software after performing a task switch.
— The Radeon Software installer screen can sometimes display the incorrect release date of the Radeon Software version you are installing.
— Performance Metrics Overlay may flicker during video playback on displays with HDR enabled.
— Reflections in Grand Theft Auto V™ may fail to appear when ‘Reflection MSAA’ is enabled in the game settings.
— PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds™ session timer may continue in Radeon Software even after the game has been exited.
— DOOM Eternal™ may experience an application crash while gaming and having Steam™ overlay enabled.
— Recorded content from Radeon Software may appear cropped or recorded at an incorrect resolution on Radeon RX Vega series graphics products.
— The Samsung™ Odyssey G9 C49G95T may experience display or corruption issues when set to [email protected]
— Anisotropic Filtering in Radeon™ Software graphics settings is not taking effect in DirectX®9 applications on RDNA graphics products.
— Some displays such as the Sceptre C series or Samsung™ Odyssey G9 series may experience an intermittent black screen on Radeon RX 6000 series graphics products.
— Oculus Link users may experience intermittent crashes on Polaris and Vega series graphics products.

Known Issues

— Brightness flickering may intermittently occur in some games or applications when Radeon™ FreeSync is enabled, and the game is set to use borderless fullscreen.
— Display flicker or corruption may be experienced when two displays are connected to Radeon RX Vega series graphics products with at least one display set to a high refresh rate.
— Metro Exodus™ may experience intermittent application crashes with DirectX® Raytracing enabled.
— Radeon™ recording and streaming features may fail to enable on AMD Radeon™ HD 7800 series graphics products.
— Screen flickering might be observed when using MSI Afterburner.
— Enhanced Sync may cause a black screen to occur when enabled on some games and system configurations. Any users who may be experiencing issues with Enhanced Sync enabled should disable it as a temporary workaround.

Disclaimer

— Testing conducted by AMD Performance Labs as of Jan 15, 2021 on the 16GB Radeon™ RX 6800 XT, using a test system comprising of AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU (3.7 GHz), 16GB DDR4-3200MHz memory, and Windows 10×64 with Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.1.1 versus the previous driver edition 20.12.1 on Hitman 3 @ 4K Ultra settings. Performance may vary. RS-349.

Desktop GPUs

Radeon Desktop Product Family Compatibility
Radeon RX 6900XT	Radeon RX 6800 Series
Radeon RX Navi 5700/5600 Series	Radeon VII
Radeon RX 5500 Series	RX 5300M (Notebook GPU)
Radeon RX Vega Series	AMD Radeon Pro Duo
Radeon RX 580/590	AMD Radeon RX 570
Radeon RX 560	AMD RX 550
Radeon RX 400 Series Graphics	AMD Radeon R7 300 Series Graphics
AMD Radeon Pro Duo	AMD Radeon R7 200 Series Graphics
AMD Radeon R9 Fury Series Graphics	AMD Radeon R5 300 Series Graphics
AMD Radeon R9 Nano Series Graphics	AMD Radeon R5 200 Series Graphics
AMD Radeon R9 300 Series Graphics	AMD Radeon HD 8500 — HD 8900 Series Graphics
AMD Radeon R9 200 Series Graphics	AMD Radeon HD 7700 — HD 7900 Series Graphics

Supported APUs

Radeon Desktop Product Family Compatibility
AMD Ryzen Mobile Processors with Vega Graphics	AMD Athlon Mobile Processors with Vega Graphics
AMD A-Series and FX Processors with Radeon Graphics	AMD Ryzen pro Mobile Processors with Vega Graphics
AMD Athlon Pro Mobile Processors with Vega Graphics	AMD A-Series Pro Processors with Radeon Graphics

Download Links

— Windows 10 (64-bit)

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 21.1.1 driver on the OC3D Forums.

Трансляция игр Radeon Adrenalin

Для трансляции больше не нужно устанавливать сторонние приложения. Теперь достаточно авторизоваться в стриминговом сервисе перейдя по пути Настройки Radeon > Настройки > Учётные записи. Дополнительные настройки качества, скорости и количества кадров доступны в разделе Общее.

Для начала вещания в разделе Трансляции выбрав потоковую службу и настроив дополнительные параметры нажать кнопку Начать прямую трансляцию.

Radeon Overlay

Brad Chacos/IDG

Meet the Radeon Overlay.

Let’s start with the flashiest features before diving deep into the bountiful quality-of-life updates. Before Adrenalin, adjusting the software options for your Radeon graphics card required exiting your games and diving into the Radeon Settings app. The new Radeon Overlay lets you tune some of your Radeon Settings in-game and constantly monitor your PC’s performance.

Adrenalin is built for Radeon GPUs

AsusROG Strix Radeon RX 570 Gaming OC Edition

Pressing Alt + R with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition installed summons the Radeon Overlay, a slick interface that pops in from the right side of your screen. You’ll see several different settings available: ReLive, Performance, Chill, FRTC, FreeSync, and Color options. Some of these may be missing if you open the Radeon Overlay outside of a game—I didn’t see the Performance or FreeSync options when I opened the Overlay on the Windows desktop, as you can see in the image above.

Let’s go through them one-by-one. (You can click on any image in this article to enlarge it.)

Brad Chacos/IDG

The ReLive tab includes all the options previously found in the ReLive pop-up toolbar. If you want to record, stream, or screenshot your gameplay, this is the place to be. You can also adjust your microphone volume if you’re doing voice-overs. Helpfully, keyboard shortcuts for the tools in the ReLive tab are listed underneath each option, so you can avoid having to navigate through the Radeon Overlay to quickly activate or deactivate ReLive features.

The Performance tab lets you enable a separate performance monitor overlay that shows your system performance, similar to the on-screen displays found in overclocking software like EVGA’s Precision XOC and MSI’s Afterburner. AMD’s version gives you abundant control over how the performance monitor behaves, though. It doesn’t appear in these screenshots for some reason, but it’s a tiny black box with a column of data in a white font.

Brad Chacos/IDG

The Radeon Overlay’s Select Metrics options.

The Select Metrics section of Radeon Overlay’s Performance tab lets you pick and choose which data you’re interested in. FPS (frames per second) is a no-brainer, but you can also track GPU utilization, GPU engine clock, GPU memory clock, GPU temperature, GPU power, GPU fan speed, CPU utilization, and system RAM utilization. Snazzy! You can decide which corner of the screen houses the performance monitor, and the Metrics Options section lets you dictate how often Radeon Software checks for performance information (the default is every two seconds) or even select a file location to log your performance data.

That’s all incredibly useful for PC enthusiasts. While GeForce Experience pumps up the fun with Ansel and ShadowPlay Highlights, Nvidia’s software contains nothing that rivals AMD’s performance monitor. One bummer: The performance monitor disappears every time you exit a game, so you need to reactivate manually every time you load into a game. I’d love to see a future update add an option to keep it persistent.

Brad Chacos/IDG

The Radeon Overlay’s Chill tab.

Next up is the Chill tab, which lets you enable or disable AMD’s power-saving, temperature-lowering Radeon Chill feature. The tab lets you enable Chill globally or just for the game you’re currently playing, as well as set the minimum and maximum frame rates you want Chill to work inside. Try it out, especially if you’ve got a power-hungry Vega 64 graphics card. AMD made some big changes to Chill in Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition, which we’ll address more directly later.

Brad Chacos/IDG

FRTC in Adrenalin’s Radeon Overlay.

Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC) puts a cap on your maximum frame rate to keep your GPU from working harder than it needs to, and thus keep power draw and temperatures lower. Why let your Radeon RX 580 scream at 200 fps when you’re using a 60Hz monitor? The Radeon Overlay lets you activate the feature and specify your FPS cap, though you’ll need to restart your game for it to kick in.

Whether designed by Intel, Nvidia or AMD, the graphics driver is an essential software component in any laptop or desktop PC. Especially for those dedicated to gaming, which embed GeForce GTX and RTX or Radeon RX and soon, Intel models.

It is very important to properly install a graphics driver. And update it regularly as well. Today, as soon as a new version of drivers is available, a notification will notify you either via GeForce Experience for Nvidia either by the channel from Adrenalin for AMD. At Intel, alerts do not exist for integrated controllers. Better to go directly to the founder’s site to see if a new version is present or not.

In which case (s) do we carry out an overhaul and why?

Whether your PC is branded or has been assembled, you may never have reset the graphics driver. And yet, the update interfaces offer it to you with each update, at Nvidia as at AMD. You just have to tick a box. But few users do. ” It takes too much time. I’m afraid of doing wrong. And if I have a problem after … »: There are many pretexts.

We assume that a reset of the graphics driver and a clean and clean reinstallation should only occur in two cases, stability issues aside.

• When you change graphics card. You swap your GeForce for a more recent model, redo an installation. You switch from an AMD card to an Nvidia card or vice versa, do the housework and a clean install and this step-by-step will help you there.
• When pilots switch from one large version to another. At AMD and Nvidia, same logic: 3D chip designers release at least one driver update per month (or more). It all depends on the video game news. The drivers are all registered in the same way, each in their respective teams.

Read also – Nvidia GeForce RTX or AMD Radeon RX: which graphics card to choose?

1. Prepare the ground

Regardless of the situation, you must first download the new driver to your PC. Then, then, uninstall the existing drivers.

To do this, go to Settings, then in Applications and finally in Applications and Features. There, in the list of programs, find your graphics driver.

Usually, it is named after the designer of the chip on your card: AMD Crimson or Adrenalin or Nvidia GeForce Game Ready. You select it, you click Uninstall and there a window opens and asks you what you want to uninstall.

Check everything, without the slightest pity, and start the process.

AS / 01net.com – AMD Crimson Drivers

At the end, you may be asked to restart the PC. Do not do it. Your computer may well work like this for the next few steps.

2. Download the correct cleaning tool

When it comes to cleaning graphics drivers, we’ve sworn by one software for years: DDU or Display Driver Uninstaller. It’s a small, free program that works very well and gets better with the donations that users make to developers. So, if you find yourself using it on a regular basis, consider them.

AS / 01net.com – DDU

The software installs in no time and is not at all complicated to use.

3. Clean up

For DDU to be fully operational, you must restart your PC in Safe Mode. If you don’t know how, we’ll explain it all here.

When you have found your Windows Desktop in Safe Mode, launch DDU.

AS / 01net.com – DDU is free, easy to use and really efficient. He only improves on the basis of donations made to his parents, think about it.

DDU is well configured by default. If you want to see the options offered and not selected, head to the menu Options. But any change is done at your own risk …

On the main interface (above), in the right part, you have two drop-down menus. In the first, choose “GPU”. In the second, inform the designer of your current 3D chip. In our case, “AMD”.

Once that’s done, there are three explicit cleaning options to choose from. Regardless of the situation (cleaning or changing GPUs), we recommend that you select only the first one. And to be patient.

You will then see that the software will explore rather abysmal places on the PC to find and erase a whole bunch of software and driver residues. And this is not over.

4. Sweep up the crumbs

Once DDU has done its job, close it. Next, open a Windows Explorer window and navigate to the root of your primary hard drive. There you will find an AMD or NVIDIA folder. This is where the last residue to be evicted is located, which is the files that store older versions of the drivers.

If you have more than one, keep – as a precaution – the most recent one (refer to the date of modification to find it). Erase the rest, you will recover a lot of space on your disk (between 450 and 500 MB per folder).

AS / 01net.com – The driver archives are always located at the root of the disk … provided you have not changed the destination path when unzipping.

If you are cleaning without changing GPUs, now is the time to restart your PC normally, through the menu To start up and choosing To restart.

If you want to install a new card, choose Stop and you can start editing.

In any case, after restarting, disconnect your PC from the Internet, either by deactivating the Wi-Fi or by unplugging the network cable. Why ? Because there is a risk that Windows will try to download an AMD or Nvidia driver by default, through Windows Update. And everything we have done will have been for nothing!

5. Install the new drivers

We are coming to the end of our adventure. You can now install the freshly downloaded drivers from the AMD or Nvidia site. Launch the executable which will offer you to decompress its files in a folder. The installation will start automatically, right after.

AS / 01net.com – The Adrenalin 2020 Edition embodies the brand new interface for driving AMD graphics cards.

Once the process is complete, it’s good, the pilots are in place, on clean ground. No instability should come to disturb your crazy games of video games.

If you have a problem, redo all the manipulation described above and reinstall the old version of the drivers, stored on your hard drive or to be re-downloaded from the Nvidia or AMD sites.