AMD's Latest Radeon Drivers Finally Bring Official Support to Ryzen Mobile

When Ryzen Mobile launched in October of 2017, most probably did not envision the poor state its drivers would be in for over a year. AMD never released an official driver for its Raven Ridge-based mobile APUs, so users had to rely on OEMs like HP that only released a single driver in November.

But at CES 2019, AMD promised to fix the situation with official support for Ryzen Mobile through its Adrenaline drivers. Those are the same drivers that already supported AMD's desktop APUs based on the same Raven Ridge architecture used for Ryzen Mobile. Today, AMD finally delivered on that promise with its newest 19.2.3 drivers.

According to AMD's release notes, the new driver offers an average of 10% more performance in gaming compared to the October Ryzen Mobile driver, and in eSports titles specifically, an average of 17% more performance. Of the games tested, most of them showed double-digit performance gains, especially Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. These kinds of gains could easily turn an unplayable experience into one that is playable, and such extreme gains are seen because this driver is a year and a half newer than the launch revision.

Consumers will be able to get incredible drivers, designed to deliver stable and reliable experiences through extensive quality-assurance and third-party testing, and all notebooks and desktops powered by Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics processor will be supported with Radeon Settings in Radeon Software. Radeon Settings is the one stop application to configure all your graphics settings, check for updates, and provide feedback to AMD. Optimized experiences are delivered with Radeon Settings for Ryzen with Radeon Vega Graphics processors enabling configuration of video playback and game settings to personal preferences.

Ryzen Mobile will also get bug fixes, UI updates, quality of life improvements, stability enhancements, and more than just what 19.2.3 says since the driver includes all the features of every past Radeon driver that didn't make it to Ryzen Mobile. The old method of downloading new Raven Ridge drivers straight from Microsoft and installing them manually (and thus losing out on AMD's useful software) is finally no longer necessary. Although long overdue, this new driver is quite welcome, and AMD will hopefully continue releasing official Ryzen Mobile drivers