AMD's latest Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1 driver launched yesterday with claims of OpenGL performance improvements up to 92%. AMD achieved an impressive figure on the company's refreshed Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards. (The mileage will vary on other less powerful Radeon graphics cards.)
YouTuber 54 FPS (opens in new tab) has tested the Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1 driver on the prominent Radeon RX 580 in Minecraft, and the results were nothing less than spectacular. It's important to note that this is the vanilla Minecraft and not the Microsoft Store version with ray tracing. The driver does not affect the latter.
In the first test, the Radeon RX 580 delivered an average framerate of 302 FPS with a low 1% of 71 FPS on the previous Adrenalin Edition 22.6.1 driver. With the new driver, the Polaris-powered graphics card pushed the average framerate up to 547 FPS and a low 1% of 32 FPS. So we're looking at a whopping 81% improvement in average framerates.
The Radeon RX 580 finished the second test with an average framerate of 254 FPS and a low 1% of 60 FPS on the old driver. With the Adrenalin Edition 22.6.1 driver, it managed an average framerate of 454 FPS and a low 1% of 61 FPS. Performance increased by 79%.
The OpenGL performance boost isn't strictly in games, either. Synthetic benchmarks that leverage OpenGL, such as Unigine Heaven, also benefit from the Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1 driver. YouTuber Cary Golomb (opens in new tab) tested Unigine Heaven with AMD's Ryzen 7 6800U mobile APU, which wields the Radeon 680M iGPU. At 10W, the APU delivered 12% higher scores. The performance uplift scaled with the power limit. Increasing the TDP to 15W and 20W raised the scores by 19% and 21%, respectively.
Emulation fans will also be delighted with the Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1 driver. Golomb's benchmarks (opens in new tab) in Ryujinx, a Nintendo Switch emulator, showed double the performance.
AMD released the Adrenalin Edition 22.7.1 driver yesterday along with the company's Noise Suppression technology and other goodies. You can download it directly from AMD's website.
