AMD's latest GPU driver aims to boost performance in Black Ops 4

Coinciding with the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, AMD has made available a new Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver release with claims of up to a 6 percent performance bump, depending on your graphics card.

According to AMD's own testing, Radeon RX Vega 64 owners can expect up to a 5 percent performance bump in Black Ops 4 when running the game at 1080p. Likewise, Radeon RX 580 owners can expect up to 6 percent better performance at the same resolution, compared to the previous 18.10.1 driver release.

We haven't tested the new driver package ourselves so we can't validate AMD's claims. However, AMD's performance figures are based on a test bed with a Core i7-7700K processor and 16GB of DDR4-3000 RAM.

The release notes say the new driver package also contains support for the October update for Windows 10, plus a spattering of bug fixes. They include:

  • HDMI Audio Drivers may sometimes not upgrade during Radeon Software installation.
  • Fortnite may experience lighting corruption when effects quality is set to High or Epic.
  • System configurations with 16+ CPU cores may experience a random system reboot during installation when upgrading Radeon Software from a version older than RSAE 18.8.1.
  • Sea of Thieves may experience flickering textures in multi GPU system configurations.

There are a few known issues that AMD is presumably working to resolve, one of which involves a bug with Radeon Overlay on updated Windows 10 systems. Here are the ones outlined in the release notes:

  • When using Radeon Overlay on system configurations with the latest Windows10 October 2018 Update some users may experience intermittent instability or game crashes.
  • Microsoft Office applications may experience lag or stutter when dragging applications.
  • Radeon RX Vega Series graphics products may experience elevated memory clocks during system idle.

Go here to grab AMD's latest GPU driver package.

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).