English
Gamereactor
news

AMD's new graphics driver enables remote gaming and better streaming options

The huge update includes several appreciated quality of life improvements.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

AMD has released version 21.4.1 of the AMD Radeon driver, which already had considerable options for overclocking, undervolting, settings and monitoring of your graphics card.

The new version of AMD Adrenalin introduces a number of new features and changes that highlights their efforts to combat Nvidia for every single consumer and gamer.

Last year, AMD introduced Fidelity FX - their response to Nvidia's joker, DLSS. This year AMD seems to not only want to match, but also surpass Nvidia. As GPU stock is still at a historical low, this might seem irrelevant to any but AMD owners, but as soon as the market returns to normal, features and price will once again be factors for consumers to consider when buying new hardware.

AMD's new graphics driver enables remote gaming and better streaming options

New drivers means more performance, but as AMD offers overclocking software for both GPU and CPU, they have found it a wanted feature to help users avoid massive crashes. This means the new version of Adrenalin now includes an automatic bug report tool that engages when certain critical parameters are met and will send a report to the AMD engineering department, allowing AMD to be aware of problems or bugs much faster. It also has a very interesting new thing called "Crash Defender" that will contain system crashes when possible, keeping the system running and keeping data instead of having a total data loss during crashes.

At the same time, AMD has made a new community forum to provide better end-user support, and AMD has started to include more users in beta testing.

The new Adrenalin also has improved input latency, with upgrading their own Anti-Lag to support DirectX 12 as the first of such technologies, and having their Radeon Boost support games that uses Variable Rate Shading. This is very early, and only applies to some games, but we should expect support for most games within a reasonable time frame. Radeon Image Sharpening applies to all games, supports DX 9, 11, 12 and even Vulkan, and removes sharp edges, and smooths the images.

AMD's new graphics driver enables remote gaming and better streaming options

AMD Link 4.0 is extremely interesting, and while it improves streaming, making it faster and with lower latency, it not only allows you to stream top phones and tablets, but also TVs. But it will allow you to invite a friend to connect to your PC, making you able to play two people on one system, and even allow them to guide you around. This isn't something all titles support, but this could be a real game changer. It functions somewhat simply, one user generates a code in the driver software, the other inserts it, and the two are linked. AMD's Link system not only works for games, but also for a number of popular PC apps.

AMD also offers some more low-practical software tweaks, such as smaller installation sizes for low capacity storage, colour correction, more performance metrics and tuning of these, as well as Ryzen CPU metrics and simplification of streaming via a streaming wizard that even adjusts settings on-the-fly to optimise quality of the streams.

AMD's new graphics driver enables remote gaming and better streaming options

The new AV1 codec is now also enabled, as RX6000 cards have built-in hardware to handle this. The AV1 codec is what games will use for video encoding in the future, with more and more game studies slowly making a transition. This could potentially increase the real-life usage of your current AMD card.

AMD seems to not only be contempt with its rising market share, but is apparently trying to topple Nvidia long-term.

AMD's new graphics driver enables remote gaming and better streaming options


Loading next content