Conclusion
Crimson purports to be the biggest enhancement to AMD’s drivers since the revolutionary drivers for the Rage Fury Maxx from 1999. What we’ve seen from our article on the specifics of the new driver is that it’s a revolutionary visual upgrade, bringing the driver GUI into the modern age with an ease of use that belies the actual power and plethora of options for control that lie underneath.
But Crimson represents more than just a visual overhaul and tweaking of the user interface and experience. With this release we’re also seeing an incredibly large performance increase, such that hasn’t been seen since the AMD Omega driver from December of 2014. The wide array of newly added features and the technical aspects of what has been added on the backend to help increase performance and what types of low-level tweaks that have been performed are detailed by Khalid in his very informative post regarding AMD’s new Crimson drivers. Instead, here we're going to focus on performance.
Much improved interface, but does this truly mean improved performance?
First, the user experience is indeed much improved. It starts up in mere milliseconds, just as advertized. It looks great and the location of all of the various features you’d need are very intuitive. The applicable setting here, the gaming tab, is very useful. Easily click into it and a dapper animation will reveal all of the games that Crimson has detected thus far. Click in any of those games and all the options you could ever want to control are available at your disposal, including game specific OverDrive settings. Unfortunately, voltage adjustment of HBM is still not present in AMD’s homegrown overclocking utility, but it’s otherwise quite complete. Though my time testing it was relatively short, there were no encountered crashes or display driver crashes whatsoever. Whether or not this stability will last beyond the initial testing date is unknown, though it’s certainly a good start. I personally never had any issues with Catalyst Control Center aside from it’s lack of quickness. But there have been widespread reports of stability issues and other performance issues regarding the driver software itself, necessitating some serious re-engineering of the software.
Now for the performance. We know what it's about, you should have a handle on what changes were brought with this entirely redesigned from the ground up driver. But how does it perform?
First we test at 1440P, a useful resolution that remains the a primary resolution for PC gamers as great 4K screens still remain prohibitively expensive. 1440P can provide a great amount of fidelity depending on the underlying engine. We tested the new Crimson driver in 15 different games against the 15.11.1 beta driver that was released very recently. That already provided a good increase in mainstream games, such as Fallout 4, but we're looking to see if performance gains have been obtained across the board in games that have released recently, and some that are perhaps a little older.
To test we used the follow system:
| Component | Selection |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-6600K |
| Motherboard | ASRock Z170 Extreme 4 |
| Power Supply | EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 G2 |
| SDD | SanDisk Extreme II 120GB |
| Storage Disk | Seagate 2TB |
| Memory | 16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4 2400 |
| Monitor | Dell P2715Q |
| Video Cards | Sapphire Tri-X R9 Fury Vanilla, ASUS R9 380X Strix, Gigabyte Windforce R7 370, XFX Reference 290X (severely throttled) |
| Operating System | Window 10 64-Bit |
| Drivers | AMD - 15.11.1 Beta AMD Crimson |
[Edit] The 290X is a reference model that is slightly older and a bit more used, meaning it throttled tremendously during these tests. We are in the process of getting a better model more representative of the performance that the 290X is actually capable of. Investigation showed that it wasn't nearly operating at it's peak frequencies, and was actually operating between 10-20% lower than stock due to heat and throttling. Further evaluation of a new better cooled
1440P Crimson Benchmark
In this test we have everything from Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Star Wars Battlefront, Battlefield 4, and even Planetside 2 and Dirt 3. 15 games that were chosen to see if performance was indeed increased across the board as it was said to be. To quickly summarize the results that are below, Fiji see's the largest increase in performance across all games tested, with between a 2-20% increase actually seen. This is actually astounding. But mostly, all tiers of card seem to have increased in performance, benefiting greatly from the new Crimson driver.
1080P Crimson Benchmark
1080P, despite being a resolution that's typically balked at by some PC gamers, is a useful resolution to use and can still be quite nice looking depending on the effects and level of AA present. And even some modern engines can challenge even 1080P on modern PC's. Crimson, as you'll see, has bolstered performance of all GCN cards that are supported, breathing new life into the 290X and letting Fiji, and our Fury here, stretch its legs just a little bit more than it had when it first released, sometimes with 10% or more of a performance increase.
Conclusion
Despite this being a beta version of the driver, the performance is nothing short of being magnificent. The results aren't necessarily unexpected, as we've been able to see such gains from the tweaking and reworking of the back-end and lower level API's of drivers in the past, but to have been able to perform better and consistently better in this manner is just wonderful.
Initially, like you, we thought Crimson, or AMD's Radeon Software was just a nice UI overhaul and a renaming to help divert peoples attention to the poorly optimized CCC of the past. But it's so much more then that. Certainly the slides call it as being a revolutionary upgrade, one that brings a new era of Radeon, but they just might also writing those lines based on truth. While it isn't a truly mind-blowing amount of performance, it's a consistent performance increase at 1440P and 1080P in nearly any game. Even Planetside 2, a not so well optimized game, for any GPU, see's an appreciable gain. Some games even see a far more substantial increase with Fiji, such as Battlefront, Battlefield 4 and Fallout 4. This is similar to the slow and steady increase in performance of the 7970 and the 290X that has allowed them to remain significant even in the wake of more modern releases. They can compete by the very efficiency, or conversely the initial inefficiency, of the drivers.
Stability? Sure, that's something that can only be truly evaluated over time and with enough samples. But currently there were no issues and I hope that trend continues.
This is hopefully only the beginning of a new course and commitment from AMD for their software and drivers. There have been many issues in the past, and perhaps those issues will largely remain there, in the past, with other historical events that should likely remain there. The performance improvements are fantastic, so let's hope that both sides can bring even more improvements with such driver releases.
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