Got an AMD Radeon R9 390 series graphics card stuffed into your PC to try and run the just-released Doom game from Bethesda? If you’re having performance issues with the company’s Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2 software, you’re in luck, as AMD released a hotfix, version 16.5.2.1, that supposedly boosts performance by up to 35-percent on those cards. That’s a pretty dramatic increase!
Although the new hotfix provided by AMD increases performance for Doom on this specific graphics chip, there is a list of additional known issues, such as a hanging installer when the user installs the 16.5.2.1 driver multiple times on the same machine after rebooting. There are also a few games that will crash or fail to launch if the AMD Gaming Evolved overlay is enabled.
In addition to those issues, AMD lists problems caused by Crossfire mode. Users with four cards installed may not be able to re-enable Crossfire mode when using the global Crossfire option in the “Gaming” tab. Gamers playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt may see flickering in the inventory and character pages if Crossfire is enabled. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare could stutter if both Crossfire and FreeSync are enabled at the same time.
That’s not all of the listed issues. There’s one related to Origin and Uplay applications where Crossfire mode options in the Radeon Settings may not take effect. In addition, Fallout 4 may experience flickering textures when Crossfire is enabled. Forza Motorsport 6: Apex could produce brightness flickering if the gamer has FreeSync switched on.
“Radeon Settings Additional Settings page may not be available when upgrading to Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2.1 from the current windows update driver,” the company reports in its update notes. “As a workaround, please clean uninstall all current Radeon Software when upgrading if your system exhibits this issue.”
Bethesda’s Doom 2016 “reboot” hit the market on Friday. For AMD gamers, you’ll need a Radeon HD 7870 card with 2GB of video memory at the least, but Bethesda recommends the Radeon R9 290 chip with 4GB of dedicated video memory. On the processor front, you’ll need at least an AMD FX-8320, but the FX-8350 is recommended. If you have an Intel-based processor, Doom requires an Intel Core i5-2400 or better, but the Intel Core i7-3770 is the recommended chip
A number of manufacturers offer cards based on the Radeon R9 390 graphics chip including XFX, Asus, MSI, Sapphire, PowerColor, Diamond Multimedia, and Gigabyte. AMD has a bunch listed here, such as the $330 XFX Radeon R9 390 PCIe Gen 3.0 card for the desktop with 8GB of onboard GDDR5 video memory, one DisplayPort connection, one HDMI port, and two DVI ports. This card is CrossFire capable.
The Radeon R9 390 chip is based on 28 nanometer process technology. It features clock speeds of up to 1,000MHz, 2,550 stream processing cores (40 compute units), support for a 512-bit memory interface, and a memory bandwidth of 384 GB/s. The chip also supports DirectX 12, AMD’s Mantle graphics API, OpenGL 4.5, Vulkan, and OpenCL 2.0.
To download the new driver, grab the 32-bit version here or the 64-bit version here.
