After being forsaken for over two months, AMD's Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards, which are still some of the best GPUs, can finally welcome a new driver. Making good on its promise, AMD has deployed the Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver for RDNA 2-powered graphics cards. It's not just for the RX 6000-series, though, as the unified driver also supports the RX 7000-series as well as RX 400-series and later GPUs.
The Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver brings official support for Forspoken and Dead Space. But, of course, it wouldn't be a driver update without performance improvements. AMD claims that the Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver offers up to 7% higher 4K performance on Forspoken and up to 4% on Hogwarts Legacy compared to the previous Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver released in December 2022. Again, F1 2022 showed the most significant uplift, with AMD measuring a performance increase of up to 19%.
AMD utilizes the Radeon RX 6950 XT for the performance comparison between the two drivers (the 7000-series drivers previously received many of these updates), so your mileage may vary. In addition, the chipmaker focused more on Vulkan in this release. It also added support for the IREE compiler using the MLIR interface on Vulkan and several Vulkan extensions.
Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 Performance Improvements
| Game | Performance Increase | GPU Used | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered | 4% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Sniper Elite 5 | 3% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Shadow of the Tomb Raider | 6% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Quake II RTX | 7% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Hitman 3 | 4% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy | 6% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| F1 2022 | 19% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Doom Eternal | 9% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Borderlands 3 | 4% | Radeon RX 6950 XT | 4K |
| Hogwarts Legacy | 4% | Radeon RX 6950 XT, Radeon RX 7900 XT | 4K |
Radeon RX 6900-series owners will be happy to know they're finally receiving the features that Radeon RX 7900-series users have been enjoying. AMD delivers H.264 and H.265 streaming optimizations on the Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver and a merited update to AMD Link. The chipmaker highlighted that users of Radeon RX 7900-series graphics cards would also need to download the new version.
The newest version of OBS Studio will come with an optimized encoder molded to AMD's Radeon RX 6000- and RX 7000-series graphics cards. In addition, the software brings AV1 encode acceleration support for the latter.
AMD fixed many issues with the Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver, such as the Fortnite performance drops or stuttering in Sea of Thieves. Some known bugs remain, though. For example, the high idle power on Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards related to high-resolution and high refresh rate monitors persists. Some users may still experience performance degradation on virtual reality games or applications. Again, you can find more information within the release notes.
