A Quick Look At AMD’s ‘Crimson’ Radeon Settings Driver

When AMD invited us to join a conference call late last month, we were told that it’d revolve around Radeon drivers. Like Omega last year, I just assumed that it’d be a modest evolution, a mass of bug fixes behind the hood, and not much up front. Well, I was wrong, and I’m sure glad I was.

I admit that I’m a bit of a sucker for nice aesthetics, but more than that, I need ease-of-use, and of course, stability. Well, AMD claims that it’s been putting forth a lot of manpower lately into making sure its drivers are more stable than ever, and that now is the right time to roll out a proper overhaul, one that will make people want to fiddle around with their settings.

The above linked post covers all of the basics about the new Radeon Settings tool, and admittedly, we don’t have that much more to reveal now. We do have some hands-on experience, though, as well as a bevy of screenshots.

First, let’s see where we’re coming from:

And here’s where we are now:

A rather mammoth improvement, isn’t it? One of the biggest focuses of this release is UI performance, and I can honestly say that this is something AMD seems to have nailed. I haven’t been able to put significant effort into testing yet, but what I’ve seen so far has been great. Sticking to AMD’s word, the tool launches in under one second, and in use, I never found the UI to be sticky or clunky. Instead, it’s smooth and elegant.

This is the kind of result that could cause NVIDIA to overhaul its own driver UI, and perhaps even improve the performance of its GeForce Experience application, which has become infamous for running sluggish, even after a fresh install.

Speaking of NVIDIA, when it made a few announcements last month about GeForce Experience, including the requirement to get people to register their email address to gain access to Game Ready drivers (something that has not mattered up to this point, as all GR drivers have been available through GeForce.com), I mentioned that if the company wanted a surefire way to market to its customers, it could integrate assets right into GFE.

Well, as the above shot shows, that’s exactly the route AMD ended up taking. Once opened, Radeon Settings flicked between Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and a few other titles, as well as an ASUS motherboard. While these screens are in effect ads, they’re some of the most attractive ads I’ve ever seen.

I know I’m gushing a bit here, but this genuinely impresses me. It might be lacking a lot of red, which is a bit odd given that’s what Radeon is all about, but anyone who likes the color blue is sure to enjoy the aesthetics here.

Here are a slew of screens to help you become acquainted with the new Radeon tweaking hub:

Radeon Settings adjusts itself based on the size you set

I can’t speak to performance or stability yet, and really, that’s likely a story that will be told once the masses get their hands on the first available driver. One odd thing I did happen to notice is that despite having a FreeSync monitor, the driver told me I wasn’t able to enable it:

At least the driver is kind enough to tell me what kind of monitor was hooked up, even if it still can’t tell me the exact model GPU (which was an R9 380X, for the record.)

All around, this new Radeon driver is a great improvement. It’s faster, easier to use (read: less headache-inducing), and looks fantastic. I still can’t speak to stability, but I’ll soon be rebenching a fleet of Radeon cards (and NVIDIA, for that matter), so if there are any issues, I am sure I will stumble on them (as the universe has long decided that I will run into any that can be run into.)