Good stuff. I checked some other benchies too it seems all around perf increases. Of course it seems experience varies. DX9 got improved frame pacing. And FLC seems to be good when fps drops under freesync limit with or w/o v-sync smoother then before. Great review as always.

Thanks for the review, Hilbert! They claimed better frame pacing. Is there any difference in animation smoothness? Will you add FCAT benchmarks?

Why do you call this driver Beta 7? Did you not use the WQL version from the AMD site?

somehow borderlands 2 and presequel felt smoother, but didnt know it's because of the placebo effect or not, but i love the new ui.

This driver is almost the same as 15.11.1. But this driver is more about stability in some Gw games,e.g The Witcher 3.

Yeah it's unbelievable how much of a performance difference it makes for the Witcher 3. For me, all micro-stuttering is finally gone. Especially in cities and large towns walking/running around among large crowds was frustrating at times; and it really put you off the game. This no longer is the case. I noticed performance increases in GTA 5 (ever so slightly as reported by Guru3D). Running multiple benchmarks I noticed a small percentage of improvement in all of them (I ran 2-3 hours of benchmarking before updating from 15.11.1 to Crimson), but the most impressive thing is that wherever micro-stuttering seemed to exist, it has now either decreased significantly or vanished completely.

Horray! 2 more fps! 😀

You can do it by yourself.You have nothing to lose.

Wow man, that was unnecessary. :X

Sarcasm aside, small gains like that over several driver releases can add up. I am happy AMD is putting in the effort to make some performance improvements.

True, 2fps with every driver adds up indeed. What nvidia have done lately besides those many TDR crashes? :P

Sarcasm aside, small gains like that over several driver releases can add up. I am happy AMD is putting in the effort to make some performance improvements.

This is true. This is just the beginning of the improvements for the new driver structure. AMD is really making me happy lately. Gotta flash the Sapphire bios on my Fury X still so I can get some overclocking in!

Why isn't Fiji on the benchmarks? Not that I'm expecting a significant difference, but it makes absolutely no sense to exclude Fiji from this analysis...

True, 2fps with every driver adds up indeed. What nvidia have done lately besides those many TDR crashes? :P

Pretty much this. The only thing I got from the last Nvidia release were more TDR crashes.

Why isn't Fiji on the benchmarks? Not that I'm expecting a significant difference, but it makes absolutely no sense to exclude Fiji from this analysis...

Maybe because he's doing a review of the 380x and that happened to be the card in his test system, so he just ran with it? Your use of the word exclude followed by a ... makes it sound like he intentionally left it out. Which is obviously not the case.

Yeah it's unbelievable how much of a performance difference it makes for the Witcher 3. For me, all micro-stuttering is finally gone. Especially in cities and large towns walking/running around among large crowds was frustrating at times; and it really put you off the game. This no longer is the case. I noticed performance increases in GTA 5 (ever so slightly as reported by Guru3D). Running multiple benchmarks I noticed a small percentage of improvement in all of them (I ran 2-3 hours of benchmarking before updating from 15.11.1 to Crimson), but the most impressive thing is that wherever micro-stuttering seemed to exist, it has now either decreased significantly or vanished completely.

Yeah stuttering has definitively been reduced, framerate in Fallout 4, AC: Syndicate and Batman: Arkham Knight are about the same but they feel smoother with less hitching or how it's called, "juddering" comes up as a term every now and again which I at first thought was a typo of "stuttering" but apparently it's an actual term for something. (AC: Syndicate did unfortunately black screen crash when I tried to downsample it so for now it's stock 1920x1200 but eh aliasing isn't too big a deal for me when playing the game though it can be annoying if you try to take some screenshots of it.)

This review feels kind of incomplete and rather strange not having the fury X...

TDR is a classic for the nvidia drivers. Hence the reason for me to never buy any graphics card that company. In the era of fermi I felt the constant Tdrs BSODs twice. I had to sell my graphics card and never had a problem, since I amd, incidentally always had cards from ATI/AMD. For me the drivers AMD are by far much better and more stable. I think a grace people who continue to say that the nvidia drivers are better. This is just my opinion.. 🙂

I know they are still broken. 🙁

I meant your post, meaning you should probably calm down.

This review feels kind of incomplete and rather strange not having the fury X...

I might look into FIJI perf as well, though 380X is GCN based hence the relative perf increment will remain the same at 2~3% The reason I opted the 380X is that it is the more affordable card with 4 GB, hence way more people will buy a 250 bucks card like the 380X opposed to spending the 700 Euro you need to spend on a Fury X here in the Netherlands.

I'm not sure how much this relates to Windows, but framerate can be a pretty gray topic. The frames rendered isn't the same thing as frames displayed (for example, if your monitor is 60Hz, you can get a framerate beyond 61FPS but you're not going to see it). Catalyst on Linux has been notoriously bad because you might measure 100FPS but looking at your display it seems to be more like 40FPS. The claims AMD made about framerate improvements might have more to do with the frames displayed. From what I heard, there was almost no measured performance difference in Linux at all but there was a significant visual improvement. Maybe Windows is the same way?

Thanks for the review, would have liked to see some frametime testing though considering it's the new flashy 3.0 upgrade. 😉

This driver is almost the same as 15.11.1. But this driver is more about stability in some Gw games,e.g The Witcher 3.

Running with the 15.11.1b Catalysts, W3 has never crashed for me--not once. Hard to see anything more stable than that... Speaking of Crimson, I have reverted to the 15.11.1b Catalysts upon the discovery that the Crimson drivers omit any control of resolution! Yup, with the Crimsons installed you must drop out of them and go to Win10 Display Properties in order to set screen resolution! It's been stripped from the Systray icon as well...Unreal. Grrrr--that is crazy. Screen resolution & refresh rates, rather than being completely unsupported in Crimson, should have been added to the per-game profiles just as fan speeds and overclocking were...! Aside from that, hotkeys don't function even though the ATi external events utility service is still being installed and is running. Let's see...oh, yea...couldn't make the custom res utility work...but ancient CRU in Win10 works just fine--even with the Crimsons! Honestly, this software has all the feel of being made for consoles--and then hastily retrofitted for PCs. Pretty sad. Hope they'll fix it soon. EDIT: OK workaround seems to work fine, instructions below for those that need them: install the 15.11.b's and then use the Device manager to install the 15.30xxxx Crimson drivers into the most recent CCC--instructions below for whomever might need them: Install the 15.11.1b cats, then open up the Device Manager select your GPU driver under "Display Adapter." Right-click on the name of your driver, then select "Update Driver Software" and then select "Browse My Computer," and then "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer," and then select "Have Disk" and then point the program here: C\:AMD\Radeon-Crimson-15.11-Win10-64-bit\Packages\Drivers\Display\WT6A_INF\C02969567.inf and select Open--and the 15.30xxxx Crimson drivers will be installed into the 15.11.1 CCC *and* you will also get the new Custom Refresh Utility--assuming you can get it to work--as well. You should have all hotkey function back, etc. Everything seems to work fine--haven't tested everything, though. This gives you the Crimson drivers and solves all control problems with resolution switching & hotkeys, etc. Note: The specific driver numbers above may vary a bit from your own unless you have the same card that I do--an R9 380 4GB.

I might look into FIJI perf as well, though 380X is GCN based hence the relative perf increment will remain the same at 2~3% The reason I opted the 380X is that it is the more affordable card with 4 GB, hence way more people will buy a 250 bucks card like the 380X opposed to spending the 700 Euro you need to spend on a Fury X here in the Netherlands.

Be interesting to see if you get the core going up and down constantly, causing massive performance drops like quite a lot of us are getting, its no fun at all when your cards are dropping to around 350 odd all the time, your frames just plummet. 🙁