AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition
AMD has been delivering graphics drivers for the past 20+ years, and during this time the graphics driver evolved way beyond the graphics device driver. It’s more than just a driver. It’s a whole range of software, and we know how important the software experience is to gamers, game developers, professionals, and others who use the products every day.
Now we have user interfaces, libraries, tools, applications, packaged as what we call drivers. This great set of software has evolved into a mini graphics Operating System. With the formation of Radeon Technologies Group, AMD decided to call this mini graphics Operating System “Radeon Software”.
This means AMD will be retiring Catalyst drivers. This marks the end of an era, and the beginning of a new age of immersive computing where they will be surrounded by billions of pixels that enhance our daily lives in ways we have yet to fully comprehend.
The change is all-encompassing. AMD re-designed and re-architected what was previously known as AMD Catalyst Control Center (CCC), and named it Radeon/FirePro Settings. With the new design, we focused on experience, form and function.
You’ll see how the new Radeon/FirePro Settings has a modern user interface that is simple and clean, is intuitive to use, and has a significantly faster start up than its predecessor. It also has new features:
- Game Manager
- Video Quality presets
- Social Media integration
- Simplified EF setup
- System notifications tab
AMD Radeon Software will also add FreeSync support for DirectX 9 titles and a new feature called Low Framerate compensations. E.g. the second your FreeSync monitor falls outside of its maximum or minimum dynamic range, it'll VSYNC the monitor. For DirectX 9 titles there's some more candy as Frame Pacing has been improved here as well.
AMD claims up to six major WHQL Radeon Software releases in 2016, along with additional beta and hot-fix releases. Anyway, have a look at some screenshots and then download and trout the new software driver yourself I'd say. In the following pages performance measurements.
