Get your AMD graphics card ready for Destiny 2

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New drivers prepare the way for next week's Destiny 2 open beta and improve PUBG performance as well.

If it seems like just yesterday that AMD put out its latest 17.8.1 drivers, well… it was. Somewhat surprising was that those drivers made no mention of Destiny 2, a game that will be available for open beta / early access play next week, though the full game won't launch on PC until October. AMD has rectified the situation with its new 17.8.2 drivers.

Along with preparing for Destiny 2, the new drivers also contain improvements and optimizations for F1 2017 and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. AMD only specifically mentions improved performance on its RX Vega 64 cards, but hopefully the drivers help all of AMD's cards in PUBG, since it has over eight million players and when we last looked at PUBG performance AMD GPUs were far behind their Nvidia counterparts. In AMD's internal testing, PUBG performance improved by up to 18 percent, and F1 2017 performance improved by four percent, compared to AMD's 17.8.1 drivers.

AMD also lists other fixes for the new drivers, mostly centered around Vega 64:

  • Display may blank or go black after install upgrade with Radeon RX Vega Series graphics products.
  • Random corruption may appear in Microsoft desktop productivity applications on Radeon RX Vega series graphics products.
  • The "Reset" option in Radeon Settings Gaming tab may enable the "HBCC Memory Segment" feature instead of setting it to the default disabled state.
  • Radeon WattMan may not reach applied overclock states on Radeon RX Vega series graphics.
  • Unable to create Eyefinity configurations through the Eyefinity Advanced Setup option.

Not surprisingly, considering the announcements coming from Nvidia about Destiny 2 running in 4K on 1080 Ti SLI, Nvidia also has new 385.41 Game Ready drivers for Destiny 2.

The Destiny 2 beta is set to begin on Monday, August 28, and run through September 1. We're planning on doing a full preview of Destiny 2 performance next week, with benchmarks from as many GPUs and CPUs as we can get our hands on during the beta. So if you see me running laps in the game, please, be kind and don't take the headshot.

Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred's love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2.3 PC and he left his C-64 behind. He eventually built his first custom PC in 1990 with a 286 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance. 

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