AMD has made available a new Radeon Crimson driver (16.7.3) that comes with a few perks for Radeon RX 480 graphics card owners, the biggest being an up to 10 percent performance gain in Rise of the Tomb Raider. In AMD's testing on a system equipped with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor and 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, the Radeon RX 480 scored 78.73 fps on the previous Crimson driver (16.7.2) to 86.53 fps on the latest driver release, both running the game at 1920x1080.
Other benefits for Radeon RX 480 graphics card owners include a couple of bug fixes specific to their setups. AMD says it tracked down and squashed a bug that caused Overwatch to crash on some Radeon RX 480 configurations when using Crossfire mode, and also got rid of a minor flickering issue affecting RX 480 owners when Freesync is enabled when launching or exiting a game.
Here's a look at the rest of the bug fixes:
- Vulkan information in the Radeon Settings software information tab may display an incorrect version.
- Radeon WattMan may retain settings of an overclock after it has failed. If you have failed an overclock with a system hang or reboot.
- Hitman may experience graphical corruption when the game is set to use DirectX12 API and using zoom with weapons.
- Total War: Warhammer may experience minor graphical corruption in some map textures on AMD Radeon R9 380.
- Flickering may be observed in Rise of the Tomb Raider on some AMD Crossfire configurations using the DirectX11 API.
- Changing settings in Dragon Age Inquisition with the Mantle API may result in an application crash or driver recovery.
- DiRT Rally may experience flickering terrain in some races when the advanced blending option is enabled in the games settings page.
- Shadows may experience rendering issues in DOTA2 when using the Vulkan API.
- Textures may experience holes or gaps in DOOM when using the OpenGL API and three display AMD Eyefinity configurations.
- Need for Speed may experience flickering on some light sources in AMD Crossfire mode.
- Performing a task switch with two cloned displays during full screen gaming may cause flickering on the extended display.
The number of known issues that remain outnumber the baker's dozen that AMD fixed with its Crimson 16.7.3 release. That includes a few that are specific to Radeon RX 480 setups—there's a low frame rate and stuttering issue in Wolftenstein: The Old Blood, a flickering issue in the SteamVR benchmark when running multiple Radeon RX 480 cards in Crossfire, and intermittent stuttering in The Division when high game settings are used and vSync is enabled.
You can download the latest Crimson driver here.
