AMD's New Adrenalin Drivers Add Gears 5 Beta Support

AMD released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.7.2 driver earlier this week to improve support for the upcoming Gears 5 beta tests. The new driver also fixes some issues in the mid-year Adrenalin update from July 7 that added support for the new AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards, introduced Radeon software tools like Image Sharpening, Anti-Lag and FidelityFX and updated the Radeon Chill power management utility.

Adding support for the Gears 5 beta tracks with AMD's efforts to offer quality performance in new games. There are few major releases coming in the next few weeks--the only AAA title arriving this month is Wolfenstein: Youngblood--so it makes sense for the company to get an early start on Gears 5. You can learn more about Gears 5 test periods here.

Adrenalin 19.7.2 is otherwise pretty standard for new drivers. The most notable thing about the release is that it has several issues with RX 5700 graphics on Windows 7 systems: AMD said that uninstalling Radeon RX 5700 Series Graphics can lead to a black screen, clips recorded via Radeon ReLive may be empty and League of Legends may fail to launch on systems that combine its new graphics with Microsoft's legacy operating system.

Some problems are to be expected when new graphics lines are introduced. (Especially when used in systems that rely on a version of Windows that even Microsoft will stop supporting in a few months.) By now, early adopters probably expect a few technical hiccups at launch. Unfortunately, that means the Radeon Image Sharpening tool recently added to Adrenalin, which is exclusive to RX 5700 cards, might be harder to analyze for a while.

Radeon Image Sharpening appears to be AMD's response to Nvidia's deep learning super sampling (DLSS) feature that debuted alongside its Turing architecture. Both are supposed to improve image quality--although DLSS is primarily focused on high resolutions--with a lesser impact on performance. That is the ultimate goal for many graphics technologies; gamers want to have their pretty pictures and their high performance too.

The other features, Radeon Anti-Lag and FidelityFX, won't be obstructed by any issues with RX 5700 cards. The former is supposed to reduce the click-to-response time when games become particularly hectic and place more strain on a system. The latter is an "open source image quality toolkit" that "combines Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) along with Luma Preserving Mapping (LPM) technologies to deliver great looking visuals while gaming."

Radeon Chill was also updated with "display-aware tuning" to for finding the sweet spots for performance, power savings and temperature control, based on your gaming monitor. AMD said Radeon Chill will now "automatically set frame-rate caps to match your monitor’s refresh rate, whether it’s a static or adaptive FreeSync panel," to offer up to 2.45 times better power savings than previous versions of the utility.

More information about the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.7.2 driver is available via the official release notes.