Item: Fine Wine: AMD’s Latest Radeon Driver Significantly Boosts RX 6000 Series Performance
Rating: 0
Author: Low Boon Shen

Fine Wine: AMD’s Latest Radeon Driver Significantly Boosts RX 6000 Series Performance

The Fine Wine keeps delivering.

AMD’s latest Adrenalin Driver numbered 23.2.1 has brought sizeable performance boosts to RX 6000 series GPUs in particular – the line of which previously got users worried as the product line stopped getting updates for a few months. Internal testing has show generally a +15% improvement on games with the RX 6900 XT over its initial Windows 11 release driver, though the products down the stack will get similar improvements as well.

Radeon Driver — Oct 2021 driver vs Nov 2022 driver. Image: AMD

AMD didn’t give precise numbers right away when comparing against its previous driver – launched in November 2022, but we can work the numbers out. The improvements across two most recent drivers (Nov 2022 vs Feb 2023) are as follows:

Cyberpunk 2077 = +2.8%
F1 2022 = +16.5%
God of War = +2.7%
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy = 6.1%
Hitman 3 = +3.5%
Sniper Elite 5 = +2.8%
WoW: Shadowlands = +0.8%

Fine Wine: AMD's Latest Radeon Driver Significantly Boosts RX 6000 Series Performance — Oct 2021 vs Nov 2022 vs Feb 2023 drivers. Image: AMD

So depending on the games you can either get miniscule boost like WoW, or you get a big boost in the case of F1 2022. In any case, AMD has also conveniently brought a chart for improvements to expect across the RX 6000 product stack (numbers averaged from 7 games):

Fine Wine: AMD's Latest Radeon Driver Significantly Boosts RX 6000 Series Performance - 21 — Image: AMD

Previously available for RX 7900 series GPUs, the new optimizations for H.264 and H.265 encoders are expected to improve stream quality, and AMD Link should now improve connectivity allowing for gameplay on the go. Also new is OBS support for new hardware encoders:

Fine Wine: AMD's Latest Radeon Driver Significantly Boosts RX 6000 Series Performance - 23 — Image: AMD

RX 7900 Series GPUs will have all three options available (H.264, H.265 and AV1), while RX 6000 users have H.264 and H.265 as their encoder of choice. Make sure to update to OBS 29.0.0 to enable support for AMD’s hardware encoders. For more details, read the blog post here.