AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson ReLive debuts with features galore - tharpyourinsuil

There's a chill in the air, and the leaves are falling soured the trees en masse. You know what that means: It's metre for AMD's huge period Radeon software update. Like 2014's Accelerator Z and 2015's Radeon Software Crimson, this year's refresh packs in some huge new features and extends some present ones—like the superb Radeon WattMan overclocking tool—to more nontextual matter cards.

This year's iteration expands on Radeon Blush to become Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition (whew, what a mouthful), titled after its highlight Live over feature. ReLive replaces the Raptr-powered AMD Play Evolved app that AMD unceremoniously dumped a some months back. It brings a bevy of telecasting recording and streaming options right into AMD's core package to challenge Nvidia's popular Share (née Shadowplay) solution.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's each sorts of new gamer-centric tools, including FreeSync improvements, HDR support, and a feature film designed to ratchet down Radeon temperatures and force use when supernumerary oomph isn't needed. Separately, AMD's releasing an easy-to-use benchmarking tool that logs in-gimpy performance crossways DirectX 11, DX12, and even Vulkan games.

There's a raft, is what I'm saying. Let's dig out in.

ReLive

It simply seems appropriate to start with Live over. Live over does everything you'd expect a utility like this to do: picture transcription, video streaming, instant replays, and screenshot captures.

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The new ReLive tab in Radeon Settings.

Open the Radeon Settings joyride and you'll find a new Live over tab in the navigation buttons across the acme. Selecting IT reveals a wealth of options, from just sanctionative ReLive—it's unfit by nonpayment—to setting hotkeys, assignment where your gameplay videos will beryllium saved, and crucial whether to record meet games Beaver State your PC's background as well.

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Radeon ReLive's recording-specific options.

Here's a picture of the ReLive overlay you toilet muster up in-game:

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From left to right, the icons are:

• ReLive settings
• New York minute action replay. Saves the endure few minutes of your gameplay. You pot configure how far back Instant Play back saves in the Radeon Settings tool's Live over options, on with mealy features like the encryption type and inning plac for recordings.
• Record video. As with instant action replay, the ReLive settings (unreal above) let you pick off the details, such as video and sound bitrates and the recording declaration. The telecasting encoding options available to you depend along which graphics board you're victimisation. And yes, you can choose to register the desktop overly. Huzzah!

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• Swarm to Flip, YouTube, or other services. Again, you can tweak all sorts of options related to the output.
• Screenshot. Pretty soul-explanatory!

Video capture utilities are great—unless they get off your in-game frame rates plummeting, in which case they'Re drivel. Fortunately, Radeon Live over appears to drop away into the former category. When AMD tested Overwatch, H1Z1 King of the Pour down, Battlefield 1, and World of Warcraft—examples of games that are widely streamed—at punishing graphics levels on a system equipped with a Core i7-600K and Radeon RX 480, Live over's impact was a mere 3 to 4 percent release. Forever make manufacturer-supplied numbers racket with a touch of salt, merely that's mind-boggling.

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Time leave tell whether Radeon Live over winds up being as favourite atomic number 3 Nvidia's vaunted ShadowPlay, but it's certainly off connected the right pes.

Radeon Frisson

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Radeon Chill

AMD's new Polaris GPU architecture succeeded in driving the energy and heat energy levels of graphics cards way, means down in the Radeon RX 400-series versus their predecessors, but Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 10-series graphics cards still hold the energy-efficiency crown. The new Radeon Shivering feature in Crimson ReLive aims to cool off AMD's hardware with an assist from software, sort of like a more operative translation of AMD's active Frame Rate Target Controller.

Radeon Chill—which, like the ReLive feature, is disabled away nonpayment and must live enabled in the WattMan department of the Radeon Settings app—aims to scale down your graphics card's GPU usage rather than ticker out unneeded additive frames. The lineament tracks your computer's input. When your mouse and keyboard go idle for a few seconds, Chill dynamically scales down the frame rate because the on-screen action is electricity. When you starting line moving again, the frame rate fluidly ramps back up. Meanwhile, Iciness's constantly working to avert excessively high frame rates to reduce the lading on your GPU.

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AMD says that using Radeon Shivering in World of Warcraft results in up to 31 percentage power nest egg and a temperature decrease of up to 13 degrees Celsius, while rooter noise is besides notably attenuate. Like Nvidia's Fast Synchronize, the biggest benefits get in less-intensifier games that routinely pump unstylish frames far faster than a system's monitor can display them—retrieve e-sports titles—though you'll also see a difference in traditional titles, too.

Radeon software nou Terry Makedon says that in "blind taste tests" users don't see any difference in operation when using Chill, because it was planned to incline up and scale retired frame rates apace. And if you bash see the transition, you arse nosedive into the Radeon Settings profile for specific games and fine-tune how Chill behaves, manually tweaking the minimum and maximum frames per second.

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The games supported by Radeon Chill at launch.

AMD's peal out game supporting for Radeon Chill using a whitelisting method, which means the company approves specific games and creates profiles for them. Finished time, AMD hopes it can move to a blacklisting method acting instead, Makedon says—disabling Radeon Tingle simply in games where it doesn't work properly.  DirectX 9, 10, and 11 games can be supported away Chill at plunge.

Next page: Radical WattMan and FreeSync features, AMD's FRAPS rival, and more

Bad cable warnings

Not all graphics bill problems stem from bad GPUs—glitched visuals and blackened screens rear end personify caused by on-the-fritz cables, too. Radeon Crimson ReLive adds a new expose connectivity lineament that detects when the HDMI transmission line you'rhenium exploitation is none good.

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Systematic to help you troubleshoot the problem, the software will try stepping shoot down through lower resolutions and brush up rates until you hit one that the cord can handle. Once that happens, Radeon Blush ReLive will pop up and discourage you that you pauperization to economic consumption a different HDMI cable. Useful satiate!

You'll also find approximately new advanced display settings enclosed in the update.

FreeSync and WattMan improvements

Two of AMD's flagship features win young, just worthy upgrades in Radeon Crimson ReLive.

First up: FreeSync, the affordable Radeon match to Nvidia's G-Synchronise. While the star of the show up corpse FreeSync's power to eliminate stuttering and tearing for fatty-smooth gameplay, Crimson ReLive is adding support for windowed borderless full-concealment mode in games. (Your wish has finally come true, r/amd.) Another virgin addition is gradual review-rate ramping over time for laptops, which aims to save power and make transitions 'tween desktop and fully-screen way smoother along notebooks.

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Radeon WattMan is expanding to many more AMD graphics card game.

AMD's superb new Radeon WattMan overclocking tools, meanwhile, are expanding beyond the Radeon RX 400-series to many (only not all) Craze, Radeon R300-series, and Radeon R200-serial graphics cards. Check out the pictorial above for the to the full list of supported GPUs.

HDR support

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HDR makes brights brighter and darks darker.

High-dynamic range monitors don't even exist still—only HDR TVs—but the HDR maturat is kicking off for Radeon users regardless. Radeon Crimson Live over includes support for both Dolby Vision and HDR-10 sol you can sidestep the bothersome HDR standards war that's a-brewing.

Raise Advisor

Here's a new feature that's both handy and a wee bit odd-touch.

Radeon Settings includes individual profiles for all of your games in the gaming section, where you give the axe pick off specific settings, activate game-specific overclocking, and more. That's nothing new. What is new is the Kick upstairs Advisor, which compares your PC's configuration against the specs recommended by the game's developer. If your PC isn't up to the task, Upgrade Advisor lets you know, or information technology tosses up a green checkmark if you're ready to rock. Pretty cool, right?

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But if your hardware isn't heavenward to snuff Upgrade Advisor will superficial a link to an Amazon foliate where you lavatory buy a bettor, beefier Radeon graphics scorecard. It's useful enough, I guess, but Amazon golf links for new artwork cards in your graphics card software just feels a little pushy. On the bright side, Radeon Crimson Live over isn't locked behind mandatory registration like Nvidia's GeForce Experience, soh maybe Amazon links aren't thusly rotten.

Unrivaled more caveat: Upgrade Advisor only works with Steam games at launch. Sorry Battlefield 1 fans.

The breathe

As wonted, the annual refresh includes numerous smaller updates As well.

• The Radeon Software installer has been updated with a New Look and the power to pull back a clean establis.
• The Radeon XConnect boast for extraneous art cards now supports Thunderbolt-certified laptops and complete-in-ones.
• North Star-based graphics cards pick up VP9 decode acceleration.
• A new user feedback section of Radeon Crimson ReLive gives you the ability to ask for rising features and upvote which features you'd care to see added in future updates.
• AMD's Linux driver now works with FreeSync monitors and altogether art cards based on the Art Core Adjacent computer architecture (Read: Radeon 7000-serial publication and up).
• Skype calls are handled more efficiently on APUs instantly. You may also find slight performance increases in some games, simply nothing emotional.

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Radeon Scarlet ReLive also embraces developers and pro users. We won't dive into those details much, but developers will find newborn goodies in AMD's LiquidVR and GPUOpen, including multi-resolution rendering and physics-settled audio for virtual realism and an upgraded version of the TressFX technology that makes Lara Croft's hair look so lustrous patc she's busy predatory tombs.

Users of the separate Radeon In favor of driver, meanwhile, will find a ready to hand "one device driver for all" driver for virtualized desktops and virtualization servers (with no licensing fees) start with January's enterprise update, increased pun engine integrating to help drive down development costs, consistent and regular updates on the fourth Th of quarterly (complete with prioritized support), a Radeon In favor hybrid Linux driver that combines the open-origin marrow Linux Driver and AMD's proprietary Professional technologies, and more.

OCAT

Okay, I lied. One of those developer tools appeals to mundane gamers to a fault, though information technology's not really part of Radeon Blush ReLive. AMD's new Open Capture and Analysis Tool is a benchmarking tool like FRAPS or PresentMon; pressing a hotkey starts a log of your game's performance, which continues until you press the significant again or a pre-specified continuance elapses.

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AMD's new OCAT benchmarking tool.

But Here's the really nifty part: AMD's OCAT deeds just fine with DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. Most popular benchmark tools, from FRAPS to MSI Afterburner, only lic with DX11 games (which OCAT also supports). AMD's been lento building its CPUs and GPUs to take advantage of DX12 for years now, so it's non shameful to take care the company thrust out a instrument that lets you measurement the public presentation of next-gen graphics APIs—though it is a nice surprise.

OCAT was designed for simplicity. You can opt to record frame-rate information for only the game you'Ra testing (atomic number 3 with FRAPS) or every running process (As with PresentMon), and the application leave save recording data to a spreadsheet lodge in the Documents/OCAT/Recordings booklet. OCAT saves everything from average frame rate to Handy gritty details care average millisecond per frame and 99th centile frame multiplication, which can help you measure a game's smoothness. On the whole, IT's non as graphically polished as some of the different benchmarking tools out there, but that lack of optical flair doesn't take away from its usefulness.

Bottom line of business

For years, Radeon driver updates were few and FAR between, delivering game optimizations (and a fair share of bugs) long after the release of high-profile games. Those shoddy drivers dragged the Radeon name done the mud, and deservedly so.

No more.

AMD began efforts to right its send by drastically increasing the amount of machine-controlled and manual testing for 2014's Catalyst Omega. That helped, but new drivers still dripped out at a glacial pace. Yet after the formation of the Radeon Technologies Radical last Nov, AMD promised to mistreat up its software game—and it made good on its word in 2016. AMD delivered 29 add up device driver releases since Radeon Crimson's debut last November, with eight carrying WHQL credential. AMD plans to continue the rapid pace, and has accelerated its examination endeavors yet again, performing 25 percent more testing on ReLive than the original Radeon Crimson sackin.

Rebuilding a reputation doesn't happen nightlong. AMD still has a agency to work before gamers over again equate Radeon Software with pursuant quality, despite the vastly improved receive of the year noncurrent. Simply AMD's doing all the correct things, and with Radeon Crimson ReLive the road ahead looks shiny indeed.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/411219/feature-stuffed-radeon-software-crimson-relive-debuts-amds-rivals-to-shadowplay-fraps.html

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