The latest driver for AMD’s Radeon graphics cards is out and the big news surrounding its release is its lack of support for the 32-bit version of Windows 8.1. This doesn’t appear to be an error on AMD’s part or whoever posted the release notes, as a search for a new 32-bit Windows 8.1 driver only leads to Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.2 released on February 8 and not the 17.2.1 driver released on Thursday.
Crimson ReLive Edition 17.2.1 is optimized for Sniper Elite 4 and For Honor. According to AMD, the new driver boosts the performance of For Honor by up to four percent on the Radeon RX 480 8GB card compared to the previous 17.1.2 driver. The company also claims up to five percent better performance in Sniper Elite 4 running on the same card. Multi-GPU DirectX 11-based profiles were added for these two games as well.
As for the fixed issues presented with this new driver, Crimson ReLive Edition 17.2.1 addresses five specific game-related problems:
| For Honor: | PCs using multiple AMD graphics cards experienced game crashes when switching to fullscreen or accessing menus during gameplay. |
| Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: | With Radeon Chill enabled, the game provided incorrect default slider values. |
| DayZ: | When Radeon ReLive Instant Replay/Recording was active, the game would crash. DayZ also caused the feature to work incorrectly. |
| Grid Autosport: | The game would hang when players enabled the advanced lighting graphics option. |
| Civilization VI: | Disabling shadows in the game on Radeon HD 7900 products would corrupt shadows. |
As for other fixes, there are three that address DXVA H.264 encoded video corruption (Radeon GCN products), locked memory clocks (Radeon R9 380 Series), and the AMD FreeSync technology mode’s inability to enable itself (all products). Two other fixes attack problems with Radeon ReLive — one that addresses flickering when recording in full screen with Windows Media Player or Power DVD and one that returns GPU information back to captured videos.
On the known issues front, there are seven outstanding general and game-specific problems and seven issues stemming from Radeon ReLive. Here are the game-related issues AMD still needs to fix:
| For Honor: | In systems with four Radeon cards installed, the game’s menu may experience flickering or will fail to render after performing a task switch. |
| Sniper Elite 4: | AMD FreeSync technology mode may not work with this game. |
| Sniper Elite 4: | Image cropping may occur when supersampling is enabled. |
| Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and World of Warcraft: |
These games may experience flickering or performance issues the first time they are launched with AMD FreeSync enabled. |
For customers using Radeon ReLive, the issues they may encounter could include conflicts with the Xbox DVR application, a failure to install on systems using an auxiliary power unit, and game freezes if recording with Radeon ReLive while the Vulkan API is in use. The Hyper-V feature in Windows may need to be disabled too.
Here are the links to the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.2.1 driver downloads:
