Celebrate 20 years of regular AMD driver updates with this new driver update

(Image credit: Gigabyte)

Welcome to 2022, a year that loves to make many of us feel very old by cashing in or just celebrating nostalgia. We’ve seen these ‘90’s kids PCs rebuild like they’re ancient relics, Grand Theft Auto 5 playing on a GameBoy, and this range of 1980’s kids coding books released as free PDFs. Now, in our own efforts to feel very old, we’d like to wish a very special happy 20th birthday to AMD’s regular driver updates.

AMD’s Sr. Director of user experience engineering Terry Makedon tweeted in celebration about the new fabulously numbered Adrenalin 22.2.2 AMD update for 5000 and 6000 series cards like the Radeon RX 6600 and RX 5700. Makedon makes special note that this marks 20 years since regular updates started coming to AMD drivers. Makedon also specifically references AMD Catalyst, presumably the older version of the control centre offered to further tweak settings with AMD hardware.

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There are some great replies with screenshotted images of the old software, reminding us how far we’ve come. However, I personally did not remember the old AMD Catalyst, so Googled it to find out more. One of the first results was informing me that I should uninstall it so it certainly has an online legacy.

Adrenalin 22.2.2 is out now - what a cool version number. Also it has been 20 years since we started posting regular updates (who remembers Catalyst?)February 16, 2022

Back in the present day, the new Adrenalin 22.2.2 release update has a list of upgrades for many popular PC games. The first is support for Total War: Warhammer III, while others include upgrades to performance for titles like Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and even Cyberpunk 2077 which also just received its own significant update. These games should look and run far better than before on AMD hardware, all receiving between a 10% and 24% increase in performance at their more demanding settings.

As with any update there are a few known issues, but none of them seem too egregious. Those still running Windows 10 may not have transparency effects work quite right and indoor areas in Cyberpunk 2077 may show as darker than they should. Enhanced Sync may also have some issues with games, and AMD advises people to try turning it off as a workaround in the meantime if experiencing problems.

Hopefully we can look forward to more fixes in the next regular AMD driver update.

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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

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