AMD Releases Its First Radeon Pro Enterprise Driver of 2019

Just in time for SOLIDWORKS World in Dallas, Texas, AMD has released its latest Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise driver, which among many things improves performance in Dassault Systèmes’ flagship design suite. According to AMD, the 19.Q1 driver represents a 46% performance increase in SolidWorks, over last year’s 18.Q1 driver. Similarly, a 33% boost can be seen in SPECviewperf’s medical-02 test, year-over-year.

With this release, AMD is bundling in over 320 “Day Zero” ISV certifications, representing its commitment to the professional market, claiming a 40% advantage over the competition, and up from “over 290” in the 18.Q4 driver release. That said, the release notes only mention 256 certifications, so I’m not sure where this 320 number is coming from.

Radeon Pro ReLive also gets some love in this release. Now, users can record their VR content just as easily as they can record regular content. This is pretty important if someone wants to record progress during the design phase, because photos are not always good enough.

Another interesting feature is “Radeon Pro Image Boost”, one that lets you run applications at resolutions higher than the display, in effect crisping it up as it’s scaled down to the native resolution. AMD says up to 5K resolution is supported. This is done so that the scene itself will display at a higher resolution, so that no detail will be missed.

As a unified “One Driver”, this latest Enterprise release will work with all of AMD’s recent- and current-gen graphics cards, even including the new Radeon VII. However, only Pro cards will enjoy any type of workstation performance augmentation. The single-driver release aims to improve the efficiency for IT guys who won’t need to juggle a bunch of drivers just because there are different Radeons in use.

You can grab the latest Enterprise Radeon Pro driver right here.