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AMD’s latest Radeon GPU driver boosts performance of ‘Ghost Recon Wildlands’

Kevin Parrish
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AMD Radeon RX 470
Image used with permission by copyright holder
AMD on Monday released a new driver for its Radeon graphics cards, bringing Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition up to version 17.3.1. The new driver is optimized for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, promising up to 6 percent better performance than driver version 17.2.1 (on a Radeon RX 480 card). The driver also provides a multi-GPU profile for the game running on DirectX 11.

As with the previous driver, AMD is not supporting the 32-bit version of Windows 8.1 with this release. But don’t fret: AMD hasn’t abandoned all 32-bit platforms. The company offers a driver for the 32-bit versions of Windows 10 And Windows 7. AMD reportedly pulled support for Windows 8.1 32-bit because the download numbers were too low to continue supporting the platform.

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The driver also provides a batch of fixes for specific PC games. Here they are:

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Battlefield 1: After returning from performing a task switch, users experienced flickering textures or terrain.
For Honor: In the menus, players saw flickering or corruption when highlighting character models.
For Honor: Systems with multiple GPUs saw texture flickering.
Counter-Strike Global Offensive: Radeon Chill caused stuttering.
DOTA 2: Radeon ReLive caused stuttering on some system configurations.

Outside the game-specific fixes, the new driver provides solutions for previous problems ranging from Radeon WattMan to Radeon Settings to Radeon ReLive. Here they are:

Radeon Settings: User accounts that contained spaces caused the latest graphics driver to not install.
Radeon WattMan: Application hangs or display flickering appeared when adjusting WattMan settings on Radeon R9 300 series-based systems.
Radeon WattMan: Custom WattMan settings occasionally wouldn’t stay saved when the PC went into hibernation or sleep.
Radeon ReLive: This feature couldn’t be used on Windows machines with Hyper-V enabled.
AMD FreeSync: Some multiscreen setups caused stuttering or flickering with both FreeSync and borderless fullscreen mode enabled.
General: Radeon RX 400 Series cards caused mouse cursor corruption.
General: Custom Radeon Software installs prevented systems from rebooting when clicking on the “Restart Now” option.

That’s it for fixes. AMD’s release notes for driver version 17.3.1 also lists nine known issues that still need to be addressed, and seven more outstanding issues tied to the company’s new Radeon ReLive feature. Still hanging around is the conflict with Microsoft’s Xbox DVR service, installation failure on systems with APUs, application hangs when Vulkan is in use, no low storage warnings, and more.

As for that performance increase in Ghost Recon Wildlands, AMD determined its results based on a system with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor, the Radeon RX 480, 16GB of DDR4 system memory clocked at 2,666MHz, and the 64-bit version of Windows 10. With the game running at a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, driver version 17.3.1 produced an average rate of 44.79 frames per second while version 17.2.1 only produced an average of 42.1 frames per second.

To grab AMD’s new 17.3.1 driver, click on the appropriate link below:

Windows 10: 64-bit 32-bit
Windows 8.1: 64-bit
Windows 7: 64-bit 32-bit
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Kevin Parrish
Kevin Parrish
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…
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