AMD is pushing out a new Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.4 GPU driver, and with it comes a round of optimizations for Warcraft 3: Reforged. Anyone who owns a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card can expect a performance bump of up to 11 percent with the latest driver compared to the previous 20.1.3, according to the release notes.
It's not clear what owners of other Navi cards (like the new 5600 XT) can expect in relation to Warcraft 3, and the same goes for AMD's Vega (Radeon VII, for example) and Polaris (Radeon RX 500/400 series) cards. AMD only offered up a single performance claim.
The 20.1.4 driver is also optimized for Journey to the Savage Planet. In addition, it comes with the usual round of bug fixes, including the ironing out of a couple of glitches associated with the Vulkan API. Here's the full list:
- Red Dead Redemption 2 may experience square or blocky textures on some terrain during gameplay when using Vulkan API.
- Some Vulkan API games may experience a crash or application hang when performing a task switch while Radeon Image Sharpening is enabled.
- Text overflow is observed in toast messages for some languages.
- Radeon ReLive may fail to switch recording to desktop when Radeon Software is open.
- Grand Theft Auto 5 may experience a system hang or black screen at launch, when opening Radeon Overlay while in game, or after performing a task switch while in game.
- Audio may intermittently be missing from Radeon ReLive recordings near the end of recorded clips.
- Integer Scaling option is not showing up or available on some Windows 7 system configurations.
One thing that's encouraging is the number of addressed issues in recent Adrenalin driver releases continues to wane, compared to the initial overhaul introduced at the end of 2019. In theory, this means AMD has made a bit of headway in eliminating a large portion of bugs that lingered into the first few driver releases.
That doesn't mean the work is finished. The release notes list out eight known issues, including a black screen bug affecting 5700 series cards. Here's a look:
- A loss of display with working audio may be experienced on a limited number of displays when performing a mode change on Radeon RX 5000 series graphics products.
- A system crash or hang may occur when running the Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark.
- Integer Scaling may cause some video content to show flicker when the display resolution is set to less than native resolution.
- Multiple games may have very dark or very bright graphics in game when HDR is enabled in Windows.
- Radeon Anti-Lag enable and disable beep notifications may be played in error when individually pressing keys assigned to the hotkey.
- The Radeon Software Overlay hotkey notification may sometimes be displayed during video playback in web browsers or launching some video player applications.
- Radeon Software may open with an inconsistent size or may not keep its previously set size when opened.
- Some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics users may intermittently experience a black screen while gaming or on desktop. A potential temporary workaround is disabling hardware acceleration in applications running in the background such as web browsers or Discord.
You can grab the latest driver through the Radeon Software utility, or follow this link to manually install it. And as always, check out our guide on how to update drivers for tips on best practices.
