AMD’s newest GPU driver touts big performance gains for Vega in World War Z

AMD is pushing out a new Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition driver package, version 19.4.2, and according to the release notes it delivers sizeable performance gains to owners of certain Vega-based graphics cards.

Specifically, AMD is touting up to 24 percent faster performance in World War Z when installing the driver package on a system Radeon VII graphics card, and up to 19 percent faster performance for Radeon RX Vega 64 owners, in the same game.

Those are bigger performance claims than what we typically see when a GPU driver package drops. Double-digit gains are not unheard of, but 19 percent and 24 percent are definitely up there.

There is no mention of what Radeon RX Vega 56 owners can expect, though considering that card is also based on AMD's Vega GPU architecture, it's reasonable to assume the 19.4.2 driver package offers a boost there as well.

As for owners of Polaris-generation cards, like the Radeon RX 590, 580, 570, and so forth, AMD did not provide any performance claims.

The 19.4.2 driver release is also optimized for Anno 1800. Both Anno 1800 and World War Z came out today.

Interestingly, there are no apparent bug fixes in this driver release. However, AMD does not a handful of known issues that have so far eluded its driver team. They include:

  • AMD Radeon VII may experience screen flicker in multi display setups on desktop or while applications are running.
  • Netflix Windows Store application may experience display flicker during video playback on some HDR enabled displays.
  • Performance metrics overlay and Radeon WattMan gauges may experience inaccurate fluctuating readings on AMD Radeon VII.
  • Performance metrics overlay may experience intermittent flicker when playing back protected content with this feature enabled.
  • System instability may be experienced on Asus TUF Gaming FX504 laptop when a wireless display is connected.

Follow this link to manually download and install the newest driver.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

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