AMD Adrenalin driver 22.5.2 tested: big promises, but no GPU miracle worker

rockpapershotgun.com:

I’ve been keeping a curious eye on AMD’s Software Preview Driver for May 2022; GPU drivers often promise “optimisations” that are rarely felt in practice, but this one genuinely sounded like a performance enhancing drug for Radeon graphics cards. In a community post, AMD asserted this particular Preview Driver could provide double-digit percentage gains in games running DirectX 11; claims that were backed up by early independent testing, like the creator of benchmarking tool CapFrameX getting an extra 24% out of Crysis Remastered.

This week, AMD Software Adrenaline Edition 22.5.2 released, making that new Radeon driver available to anyone who didn’t fancy switching to preview builds. Armed with an RX 6500 XT (a low-end card that desperately needs a performance kick), I gave the new software a whirl – and found that, for all those big numbers, Radeon owners should probably lower their expectations.

I’m not saying bigger gains won’t be had on other graphics cards, or in games besides the ones I’ve tested. But there’s a pretty wide gap between the reported results of AMD’s internal testing, and my own. For reference, these were recorded using the RX 6500 XT with an Intel Core i5-12600K and 16GB of DDR5 RAM, with all games running at 1080p:

In Watch Dogs Legion, for example, AMD reported performance gains of up to 10%. I in fact lost 10% after switching from the Adrenalin software’s 22.4.2 version to 22.5.2. Granted, I don’t think you’d notice a 3fps difference even around the 30fps mark, but I mean… that’s the wrong way round, right?

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, meanwhile, can supposedly enjoy gains of up to 28%; here, the latest driver added a single extra frame per second, which is more like 2%. Most of the other