AMD just released a new Crimson ReLive driver package (17.4.1) that will be of interest to anyone who owns an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset—and an AMD graphics card, of course.
The main thing that AMD's newest driver brings to the table is support for Oculus's Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW) technology on Radeon R9, 390, and 290 series graphics cards. What this does is lessen the burden on hardware for smoother framerates. The net effect for gamers is that it almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output from the same content. It also results in fewer dropped frames.
How ASW achieves this is it compares previously rendered frames and detects the motion between them, then uses that information to extrapolate the position of the scene components to create a new synthetic frame.
The new driver release also adds support for SteamVR Asynchronous Reprojection on Radeon RX 480 and 470 graphics cards running on Windows 10 systems. It's similar to ASW in that it reduces judder for an overall smoother VR experience, but it's for HTC's Vive headset.
Beyond a couple of VR goodies, ReLive 17.4.1 is a friendly driver for cutting edge displays. To that end, it adds support for the following:
- DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3
- 8K 60Hz (dual cable)
- 8K 30Hz (single cable)
Finally, AMD's newest driver fixes a handful of issues. They include:
- Display flickering may be experienced on some AMD FreeSync displays when running applications in windowed borderless fullscreen.
- Radeon Settings install may become stuck or unresponsive when doing a driver upgrade through Radeon Settings.
- Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands may experience poor Multi GPU scaling on some Multi GPU enabled system configurations.
- Surprise unplug of an AMD XConnect technology system after Radeon Software installation may cause a system hang.
If any of this applies to you, go here to grab the driver.
