AMD's latest GPU driver aims to boost performance in Strange Brigade

AMD is pushing out a new driver package for Radeon graphics card owners. The new Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.8.2. release coincides with the launch of Strange Brigade, with claims of up to a 5 percent performance boost for Radeon RX Vega 64 owners in that specific game.

That's when running the game at 4K. AMD provided one other performance metric, a 3 percent bump for Radeon RX 580 8GB owners when playing Strange Brigade at 1440p. We haven't tested the new driver package ourselves, so we can't say if the performance claims are accurate or not.

The 18.8.2 release is also optimized for F1 2018, which came out last week. Plus there are a handful of bug fixes, two of which address issues in Far Cry 5. They include:

  • Some games may experience instability or stutter when playing with FRTC and Instant Replay enabled.
  • Upgrade Advisor may not appear in Radeon Settings game manager.
  • Far Cry 5 may experience dimmed or grey images with HDR10 enabled on some system configurations.
  • Far Cry 5 may experience an application hang when changing video settings on some system configurations.
  • Radeon Chill min and max values may not sync on multi GPU system configurations.
  • Radeon FreeSync may fail to enable when playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Strange Brigade is one of three games you can get for free if you buy an AMD RX Vega, 580, or 570 graphics card from select etailers. (The other two games are Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Star Control: Origins, when they're launched.) Strange Brigade is a 1930s pulp fiction take on Left 4 Dead style gameplay, using Rebellion's Sniper Elite engine. Or if you prefer, it's a bit of a sequel to Rebellion's Nazi Zombie Army trilogy. We're working on a review of the game, but performance is quite good on the GPUs we've looked at.

Go here to grab the new 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).