AMD Releases Long-Awaited Radeon 7000/6000 Unified Driver

After being neglected for more than two months, AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards, which are still among the most powerful GPUs available, can at last be updated with a new driver. These cards are among the best available. The Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver has been deployed for RDNA 2-powered graphics cards by AMD, thereby delivering on the company’s earlier promise. However, in addition to the RX 6000 series, the RX 7000 series, the RX 400 series, and any later GPUs are supported by the unified driver. This feature is not exclusive to the RX 6000 series.

Both “Forspoken” and “Dead Space” now have official support thanks to the Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver. However, it goes without saying that performance enhancements are part and parcel of any driver upgrade. When compared to the Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver that was released in December 2022, AMD claims that the new Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver offers up to 7% higher 4K performance on Forspoken and up to 4% higher 4K performance on Hogwarts Legacy. These improvements were made in comparison to the previous Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver. Again, F1 2022 demonstrated the most significant improvement; AMD saw a performance increase of up to 19% with this benchmark.

Due to the fact that AMD compares the performance of the two drivers using the Radeon RX 6950 XT (the 7000-series drivers have already received many of these upgrades), your results may differ. In addition, the chipmaker prioritized Vulkan development for this particular version. Additionally, it provided support for the IREE compiler that runs on Vulkan and makes use of the MLIR interface as well as various Vulkan extensions.

Users of the Radeon RX 7900-series who have been enjoying certain features will be pleased to learn that users of the Radeon RX 6900-series will soon have access to those same features. Streaming improvements for H.264 and H.265 are included in AMD’s Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver, and AMD Link has also received an update that was long overdue. The manufacturer of the chips emphasized that customers who utilize graphics cards from the Radeon RX 7900 series would also need to download the updated software.

The most recent release of OBS Studio will have an encoder that has been fine-tuned to work with graphics cards from the Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 series produced by AMD. In addition to that, support for AV1 encode acceleration has been included by the software for the latter.