AMD Radeon RX 580 Nearly Doubles Minecraft Performance With New Driver

AMD RX 580 graphics card on box
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

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 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 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 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.

Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • evdjj3j
    The OpenGL drivers have been garbage since Quake 2. Why has it taken 25 years to fix them.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    evdjj3j said:
    The OpenGL drivers have been garbage since Quake 2. Why has it taken 25 years to fix them.
    Likely because OGL has been considered obsolete for a long time, especially after being superseded by Vulkan. I'm surprised AMD could be bothered to spare resources to revisit it.
    Reply
  • InvalidError said:
    Likely because OGL has been considered obsolete for a long time, especially after being superseded by Vulkan. I'm surprised AMD could be bothered to spare resources to revisit it.
    Plenty good old games around using OpenGL. AMD's drivers were lacking compared to Nvidia in this regard. I'm happy with the fix and will test my Ryzen 5 3350G to see what the difference is.

    Too bad it took so long. AMD should have fixed it a long time ago. Their GPU's weren't competitive untill recently and optimizing the drivers should have been a priority.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    tommo1982 said:
    Plenty good old games around using OpenGL.
    Between the CPU and GPU improvements since OGL was mostly abandoned, I doubt even the crap drivers at 120+fps were much of an issue.
    Reply
  • DingusDog
    Only a measly 302 fps? Who could even play with that trash frame rate it would make me nauseous.

    /s
    Reply
  • vern72
    Does Minecraft really need so many FPS? It's not like its graphics are sophisticated.
    Reply
  • johnrthome
    Does this work for RX480 as well? I think they are similar Polaris platform cards.
    Reply