AMD says its new GPU driver boosts fps by up to 16% in Borderlands 3

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It's also supposed to make some games look prettier on older graphics cards.

(Image credit: 2K Games)

Borderlands 3 is out (check out our review), and as anticipated, optimized drivers are rolling into view. Nvidia was first with its 436.30 GPU driver, and now AMD is doling out its new 19.9.2 driver release for Radeon graphics cards.

Jarred says he's seen around a 10-13 percent bump in performance with the new driver, so AMD's claim is at least in the ballpark. However, he also found an apparent bug—in his testing the 5700 has an issue with filling a 4K screen when running the game at a lower resolution, in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. This is not an issue he observed with the prior release, nor one that exists on Nvidia cards.

Beyond the Borderlands 3 optimizations, the 19.9.2 driver package introduces support for Radeon Imaging Sharpening to older graphics cards, and specifically the Radeon RX 590, 580, 570, 480, and 470, for DX12 and Vulkan applications.

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AMD describes Image Sharpening as an "intelligent contrast-adaptive sharpening algorithm that produces visuals that look crisp and detailed, with virtually no performance impact." This feature already exists on the 5700 series.

Finally, the 19.9.2 driver package includes a handful of bug fixes. They include:

  • With v-sync enabled FPS may be locked to 30 on some displays set to 75Hz refresh  rates
  • System instability may be experienced on some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics system configurations when watching video content in a web browser
  • Audio for clips captured by Radeon ReLive may be corrupted or garbled when desktop recording is enabled
  • Radeon Settings may list core clocks as not available with some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics system configurations
  • Enabling Enhanced Sync may cause game, application or system crashes on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products

You can grab AMD's latest driver through the Radeon Software utility, or follow this link to download and install manually. Also see our guide on how to update drivers for step-by-step instructions and other tips.

Paul Lilly
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).