It's good to see AMD is keeping up the steady flow of driver updates, optimisations and bug fixes now it has embarked upon the Radeon Software Crimson Edition driver program. The latest Crimson Edition driver is version 16.2, released just yesterday. Highlights of the new driver software include optimisations for Ashes of the Singularity – Benchmark 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider, new CrossFire profiles for The Division and XCOM2, and a host of bug fixes for Fallout 4 players.
Benchmark optimisations feature prominently in this driver update. Optimisations are present for Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity - Benchmark 2, as mentioned in the intro, making the best use of your AMD hardware for tasks like Asynchronous Compute, multi-GPU and multi-threaded command buffer Re-ordering. The new Steam VR Performance Test also shows "significant performance uplift over a single GPU" thanks to AMD affinity multi-GPU optimisations. Looking at games performance, Rise of the Tomb Raider receives performance and quality improvements, while The Division and XCOM 2 benefit from Crossfire profile driven performance boosts.
Another important feature for a driver update is the bug fixes it brings along. AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.2 drivers bring lots of such fixes for issues present in Fallout 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (five quality issues fixed, each). Other significant fixes are for; the black screen/TDR error may be encountered when booting a system with Intel & AMD graphics and an HDMI monitor connected, a fix for choppy performance when AMD Freesync and AMD Crossfire are simulataneously enabled, an idle system screen corruption issue, an AMD Overdrive memory clock slider problem, and World of Warcraft's slow performance using quad crossfire configurations at high resolutions.
As with any driver update, not all known bugs have been fixed, but if any remain for you - hopefully AMD's faster update cycle will fix your issues next month. To read more details about the new driver please refer to the release notes. As usual the newest AMD drivers are available direct.
