I’ve been keeping a curious eye on AMD’s Software Preview Driver for May 2022; GPU drivers often promise “optimisations” that are rarely felt in practice, but this one genuinely sounded like a performance enhancing drug for Radeon graphics cards. In a community post, AMD asserted this particular Preview Driver could provide double-digit percentage gains in games running DirectX 11; claims that were backed up by early independent testing, like the creator of benchmarking tool CapFrameX getting an extra 24% out of Crysis Remastered.
This week, AMD Software Adrenaline Edition 22.5.2 released, making that new Radeon driver available to anyone who didn’t fancy switching to preview builds. Armed with an RX 6500 XT (a low-end card that desperately needs a performance kick), I gave the new software a whirl – and found that, for all those big numbers, Radeon owners should probably lower their expectations.