AMD is pushing out a new 19.9.3 GPU driver package to Radeon graphics card owners, and with it comes optimized code for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which is due out this Friday.
Now both AMD and Nvidia have optimized drivers for their respective Radeon and GeForce audiences. AMD actually beat Nvidia to the punch by releasing its 19.9.3 driver yesterday, I just didn't see it until today.
In any event, Radeon GPU owners can update if they wish. AMD lists the 19.9.3 release as an "optional" update. There's not a ton going on beyond Ghost Recon Breakpoint tweaks, though there are a couple of additional bits worth mentioning.
One is that it introduces support for AMD's Radeon Image Sharpening to more cards, and specifically the Radeon VII, Vega 64, Vega 56, and Vega Frontier Edition. AMD describes this as "an intelligent contrast-sharpening algorithm" to make images look crisper and more detailed without a performance penalty.
This feature was first introduced to Navi cards in July, then more recently it was ported over to several Polaris-based models.
RIS on its own is moderately interesting as a way to get AMD's FidelityFX sharpening into games that don't natively support the feature. However, it can also work with GPU scaling to render games at a lower resolution and then upscale that to a higher resolution like 4K. It's sort of a cheap way of doing DLSS, without all the machine intelligence training for anti-aliasing. Like any upscaling solution, the results won't be the same as native rendering, but performance would definitely be higher than native 4K.
The other highlight is that the 19.9.3 driver stomps out some bugs. There are two mentioned in the release notes:
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice may exhibit texture corruption during later parts of the game.
- Discord may experience an application hang on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products when HW acceleration is enabled.
We also noticed that the new driver eliminates an issue that was preventing games at non-native resolutions from filling up the screen, so hooray for that.
Follow this link to grab AMD's latest GPU driver. Also check out our guide on how to update drivers for tips on best practices.
