AMD’s Crimson ReLive Edition 17.7.2 Driver Adds Slew of Enhancements & New Features

If it’s not enough that AMD has an RX Vega and Ryzen Threadripper launch mere days away, the company has decided to preface that excitement with a major upgrade to its Radeon software. The latest, Crimson ReLive 17.7.2, packs in an awful lot of enhancements, and to be clear, those enhancements are the star of the show. AMD didn’t mention performance differences between this driver and the last, so don’t expect too much there (other testing prevented me from exploring this).

First and foremost, AMD has pat itself on the back for having a 90% positive rating for its Radeon software, something it says is the result of it listening to its customers. Soon, some of those customers will be able to provide even more feedback, through the launch of the Radeon Software Vanguard program. In this program, you’ll be able to gain earlier access to drivers, both on the gaming and professional side, and submit feedback straight to AMD.

As for the 17.7.2 driver, there’s a lot to talk about here, so let’s jump right in:

A major change in this release is the disappearence of the “Additional Radeon Settings” screen, a remnant from the pre-Crimson Radeon driver. Now, every single possible option is found inside the primary software, where it should be. According to AMD, this was the most requested driver plea from fans.

ReLive has also had some great improvement, including the ability to now record at up to 100Mbps, allowing streamers to enable transparency on their camera feed, and a slew of other little niceties that make the solution just that much better. Performance improvements are part of this, with AMD saying that recording overhead has been dropped “up to” 33% on this driver over 17.7.1.

Radeon Chill has been a major focus of AMD’s this past year, allowing many games to run at very low power without a real detriment to performance. In 2016, 17 titles supported Radeon Chill, while this year so far, AMD has added 21 more to the list (the list is worth checking out above). Have more than one GPU? Radeon Chill now supports you. What might be even cooler (no pun) is the fact that Chill also now supports external graphics cards, solving a problem a lot of us hadn’t even thought about. Chill will undoubtedly be supported on AMD’s own mobile GPU solutions when those are released in the future.

A lot of people have multiple monitors, but it’s not often that those monitors are all the same (unless the person is into multi-monitor gaming, that is). That means that in some cases, the colors will not be perfect on each screen, and that leads to the second most requested addition to to the Radeon driver: per-display color colors. Isn’t it beautiful?

There is a lot more to this driver than I’ve written about here, largely due to limited time leading up to travel. To read more specifics about the smaller updates, you can head on over to the driver download page and read while downloading.