AMD released GPU drivers optimized for Sea of Thieves and Final Fantasy XII

AMD has a new Adrenalin driver available for Radeon graphics card owners, and with it comes some hefty performance boosts, according to the driver's release notes (PDF).

The new Adrenalin 18.2.3 driver release contains optimizations for Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and Sea of Thieves. In both games, AMD's internal testing has seen double-digit percentage performance gains, topping out at 39 percent better performance in Sea of Thieves.

Starting with Final Fantasy XII, AMD makes the following claims:

  • Up to 13 percent faster performance using Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 on the Radeon RX Vega 56 (8GB) graphics card than with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 at 2560x1440.
  • Up to 20 percent faster performance using Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 on the Radeon RX 580 (8GB) graphics card than with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 at 2560x1440p. 

And in Sea of Thieves, AMD reports the following performance bumps:

  • Up to 29 percent faster performance using Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 on the Radeon RX Vega 64 (8GB) graphics card than with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 at 3840x2160.
  • Up to 39 percent faster performance using Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 on the Radeon RX 580 (8GB) graphics card than with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.2.3 at 1920x1080.

The newest driver release is also optimized for Brass Tactics, though AMD did not share any performance metrics.

AMD's software team managed to squash some bugs as well. They include:

  • Radeon FreeSync may intermittently incorrectly engage during Chrome video playback resulting in playback flicker.
  • Radeon FreeSync may rapidly change between min and max range when enabled causing stutter in fullscreen games on multi display system configurations.
  • Flickering may be observed on the performance metrics overlay when Enhanced Sync is enabled on some Radeon FreeSync connected displays.
  • Radeon Overlay may exhibit minor flickering when enabled while playing games using the Vulkan API.
  • Fortnite may experience lighting or fog corruption on some graphics quality presets.
  • Radeon ReLive instant replay clips may intermittently contain small amounts of audio distortion.
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of War may experience an application crash when launched as a Universal Windows Application.
  • For Honor may experience an intermittent application crash on launch.

Follow this link to manually grab and install AMD's latest GPU driver.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

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