AMD Gives Navi A New Rose

A Five Year Tradition Continues

The name has changed over the years but AMD is continuing their habit of releasing a major update and facelift to their GPU drivers at the turn of the year.  This year the Adrenaline 2020 driver brings a complete interface change, similar to the changes we’ve seen in Steam and other familiar faces which have gamified their interface.  Indeed, it is now a game launcher in and of itself, letting you choose graphics settings from within Adrenaline and then launching your game, regardless of the platform you bought it on.  As with other game launchers it will have it’s own baked in Chromium style browser, and track hours played and other statistics.

It is not just an interface update, you will now be able to use AMD Image Sharpening in DX11 games, AMD Radeon Anti-Lag will support DX9 games on legacy GPUs and they have introduced Integer Display Scaling, a way to upscale older games to high resolution displays without any performance cost.  DirectML Filters have been added to help you clean up screenshots and other pictures, game streaming can be controlled from within the app, Radeon Boost can be enabled to automatically downscale resolution during fast motion-based camera movement to improve performance and AMD Link has been significantly updated.

There is also an interesting feature with some unfortunate consequences for reviewers, which is the new User Profiles.  With User Profiles you can switch many features on or off with a single click, great for users who shift between disparate types of game.  The three profiles, which you can see below allow you to make some major changes to your cards features with a single click.   This is lovely for those who spend sometime in a fast paced and pretty FPS, but then switch over to a MOBA or other eSports type game. 

On the other hand, as The FPS Review mentions it means you will need to pay attention in performance reviews to ensure you know which of the profiles were used when benchmarking.  Pop over there to get an even closer look at your early Christmas present from AMD.