It’s beginning to look like this is the week for new graphics card drivers. Earlier, we posted about NVIDIA’s latest Game Ready drivers, which tackles performance for The Crew 2 (beta) and State of Decay, but somehow, a brand-new Radeon release managed to escape me. Yesterday, AMD released 18.5.1, an actually very important release – even if you don’t necessarily need to upgrade right now.
With 18.5.1, AMD streamlines the driver, by adopting installer to handle both discrete Radeon desktop/mobile GPUs, as well as the GPUs found inside of Ryzen with on-die Vega graphics. This unification will make it easier for users to grab a driver without jumping through hoops (or rather, without having to squint to find the right choice).
It’s always encouraged to upgrade to the latest driver even if the release notes don’t give you a reason to, because stability is constantly iterated on, and this driver is no exception. This becomes the first official Radeon release that supports the Windows 10 April Update, although since the previous driver worked fine (in my tests), I am not sure what that truly means.
Microsoft’s PlayReady 3.0 is fully supported in the 18.5.1 driver, but to take advantage of 4K content, such as on Netflix, you’ll still need to hit all the marks on a ridiculous check list. That includes, at the very least, having an HDCP 2.2-supported monitor, and on the AMD side, only the Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series are currently supported. Watching high-def content shouldn’t be so complicated, but it is.
If you’re planning to jump into the new Ancestor’s Legacy, this latest driver will boost performance by up to 6% over the previous driver if using Vega, but up to 13% if you’re using a Polaris-based card, such as the RX 580. Who doesn’t love free performance boosts?!
You can grab the latest Radeon driver right here.