New AMD Crimson driver adds support for Doom and Battleborn

By Brad Jones Published May 13, 2016

amd am4 desktop platform bristol ridge apu a series hp lenovo at gdc 2016 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

AMD has released version 16.5.2 of its Radeon Software Crimson Edition graphics package. The latest update offers support for a couple of major new releases, as well as a bevy of improvements sure to help the performance of older games, and some fixes to issues previously reported by users.

Version 16.5.2 is headlined by the addition of support for the hotly anticipated Doom reboot that’s set to release today. It also features a new AMD Crossfire profile intended to help players get the best performance possible while gunning down enemies in Battleborn, which launched earlier this month.

Recommended Videos

Several other games will see major improvements once the update has been applied. The recently released Hitman reboot is one such title, which sometimes suffered from a problem where character models and environments would be rendered too dark while using AMD Crossfire technology mode — this has now been fixed.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

Crossfire technology mode also caused some graphical errors for League of Legends players, which should be cleared up thanks to this update. Meanwhile, an issue with corrupted textures during the Survival on Hoth mission from Star Wars Battlefront has also been taken care of.

There are also several more minor adjustments made to the software’s UI and functionality, largely concerned with refining the Radeon Settings utility.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition was introduced last year as a replacement for the company’s Catalyst Control Center. Its many performance and usability improvements have been warmly received by users in the six months since the launch of its first iteration.

Users with a compatible AMD graphics card can head to the company’s website for a full rundown of the contents of Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2, as well as driver download links and complete install instructions.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

Computing

AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 CPU gets beaten by an unexpected rival

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D installed in a motherboard.

AMD's new Ryzen 9000 CPUs are releasing in a little over a week, and the first review has already been posted. SaddyTech posted a video taking a look at the 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X in a slate of games, and there's some bad news for AMD. Across titles, last generation's Ryzen 7 7800X3D is faster.

There are minor differences in some games, but others show a massive lead for AMD's last-gen CPU. In Alan Wake 2 at 1080p, for example, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X are within two frames of each other. However, in The Last of Us Part One, SaddyTech showed that the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is 18% ahead at 1080p. And in Fornite, it's 16% ahead.

Computing

AMD has a new motherboard, but you should avoid it at all costs

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D installed in a motherboard.

Alongside Ryzen 9000 CPUs, AMD is introducing a range of new motherboard chipsets. The new 800-series is the typical affair for the most part. The new X870 chipset forces PCIe Gen 5 across both the graphics and storage, and it mandates USB 4, while the new B850 chipset offers optional PCIe Gen 5 for the GPU and mandates it for storage. There's a curious new addition you should avoid, though -- the B840 chipset.

It sounds like a slightly downgraded version of the B850 chipset, and if you believe AMD, it's supposed to sit between B-series boards and the previous A620 chipset. That's not the case. The B840 chipset only comes with PCIe Gen 3 across both storage and graphics, which is actually a downgrade compared to the A620 chipset.

Computing

AMD’s new integrated graphics just did something really impressive

A render of the new Ryzen AI 300 chip on a gradient background.

For years, any type of semi-serious gaming required having a discrete graphics card. While that's still the preferred way to do it, modern integrated GPUs can do quite a lot, as can be seen in this benchmark of the new AMD Radeon 890M. The GPU, bundled in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, may not give you Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra settings, but it can rival some of Nvidia's most popular discrete GPUs.

Of course, we're not talking about the likes of the RTX 4080 Super, but about cards from several generations ago. However, that doesn't make them any less popular in the Steam Hardware Survey. For example, Nvidia's GTX 1650 is the second-mostused GPU in the latest survey results, and it has been for some time -- and it also happens to be one of the cards that the Radeon 890M can keep up with.