AMD's Adrenalin 19.8.2 Driver Is Ready for Control

AMD released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.8.2 driver yesterday to improve performance in Control, the reality-bending action title featuring a secret government agency not-at-all-worryingly called the Federal Bureau of Control, along with some miscellaneous improvements.

Some of those improvements resolve problems in popular games: AMD said that it fixed a stuttering issue in Fortnite, an application hang in Rocket League and "slower than expected performance when performing a task switch" in League of Legends. The company also said it addressed an issue that caused "system instability" on AMD Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs "when performing memory overclocking while a 3D application is running."

But the headlining changes are a 10% performance bump to Control, support for Man of Medna and the addition of HDCP 2.3 support to RX 5700 graphics cards. (Yamaha published an article explaining HDCP 2.3, but the gist is that it's "encryption technology that was designed to prevent illegal copying of 4K Ultra HD content as it’s transmitted via HDMI.") Just remember that performance gains will vary from system to system.

Here are the known issues AMD called out for the Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.8.2 driver:

• Launching RGB Fusion 2.0 may cause a system hang on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products system configurations.
• Stutter may be experienced when Radeon FreeSync is enabled on 240 Hz refresh displays with Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.
• Radeon Performance Metrics may report incorrect VRAM utilization.
• AMD Radeon VII graphics card may experience elevated memory clocks at idle or on desktop.
• Radeon Overlay may intermittently fail to appear when toggled in game.
• Audio for clips captured by Radeon ReLive may be corrupted or garbled when desktop recording is enabled.
• Enabling Enhanced Sync may cause game, application or system crashes on Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.

AMD customers will have to decide for themselves if those issues outweigh the improved performance in Control, the bug fixes affecting Fortnite, Rocket League and League of Legends, or the "system instability" affecting RX 5700 cards. (We suspect the stuttering issue on 240 Hz displays might frustrate people who shelled out for a fast gaming monitor and RX 5700.) More information about the driver can be found in the full release notes on AMD's website.

There are two versions of the driver available: Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 19.8.2 Driver for Windows 10 64-bit and Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 19.8.2 Driver for Windows 7 64-bit.