Focusing on new models, of course, but without forgetting its large "old generation" customer base.
At the end of the summer, AMD pulled out all the stops to present, one after the other, its new range of microprocessors - the famous Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 - and its new GPUs. The Radeon RX 7000 are designed around the new RDNA 3 architecture and the first cards were only a few weeks away. In early December, the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX were released with, of course, a new graphics driver to support their GPUs. Unsurprisingly, new versions of this driver for the Radeon RX 7000 followed... but without AMD releasing any unified version as NVIDIA can do.
So, since the release of the GeForce RTX 4000, the new GeForce drivers are each time compatible with the new range of course, but also with the previous generations. It would not be so convenient, but at a pinch, we could admit that AMD prefers to opt for separate versions of its drivers depending on the GPU generation. But no, since the release of the Radeon RX 7000, it's very simple: no graphics driver update for the previous generations, whether we're talking about the Radeon RX 6000 or the older ones. A lack of follow-up that is a real shame since the video game releases did not wait for AMD.
Fortunately, after more than ten weeks of radio silence, AMD has finally given a sign of life and version 23.2.1 of the Adrenalin driver has come to rally all this little world under the same banner. Not content with updating the software for the Radeon RX 7000 and also bringing together the Radeon RX 6000, 23.2.1 also supports the Radeon RX 5000, the RX Vega and the RX 400/500. Of course, AMD is catching up in a way and includes support for games as recent as Forspoken and Dead Space, but there is no mention of Hogwarts Legacy yet.
As always, the new drivers are also an opportunity to promote themselves by highlighting performance improvements. In this case, AMD is careful to present results on a Radeon RX 6950 XT in 4K and compare the measurements obtained via Adrenalin v23.2.1 to those of the v22.11.2 drivers. It is thus a question of improving performance under F1 22 by a maximum of 19%, which is the most significant gain presented by AMD. For all other games, it is more like +4%(Marvel's Spider-ManRemastered), +5%(Sniper Elite 5) or +9%(DOOM Eternal). Finally, AMD also mentions the integration of some new features related to streaming and support for AV1 hardware encoding.
