AMD Radeon RX 7900 ‘22.12.2’ Drivers To Improve Video Playback Power Usage Amongst Other Fixes

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Yesterday, AMD released its latest Radeon Software Adrenalin (22.12.2) WHQL drivers for the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards.

During launch, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards were seen sipping in much higher power draw than the competition when idling and during normal video playback. The power draw was at times 4x higher than NVIDIA's RTX 40 series graphics card in multi-monitor & video playback.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Power Consumption (Image Credits: TechPowerUp):

Also, despite AMD claiming to offer a power efficiency improvement of 54% over RDNA 2, the RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards came nowhere close to that figure. But with the new driver release, AMD is addressing some of these issues and promising to deliver further efficiency improvements in the future. Following is the changelog and the download links of the AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.12.2 WHQL drivers:

AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.12.2 for AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Graphics Driver for Windows® 10 & Windows® 11 64-bit

Corruption may be encountered when using Virtual Super Resolution with multi-display configurations.

A system crash may be observed when changing display modes with 4 display configurations.

While loading Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales an app crash or driver timeout may occur after enabling ray tracing settings.

Improvements to power usage during hardware-accelerated video playback. Further power efficiency improvements are planned for future releases.

High idle power has situationally been observed when using select high-resolution and high refresh rate displays.

Intermittent app crashes or driver timeout may occur when using Radeon Super Resolution with some extended display configurations.

Video stuttering or performance drop may be observed during gameplay plus video playback with some extended display configurations.

Stuttering may be observed in UNCHARTED 4: A Thief’s End during the opening game sequence.

While playing Valheim an app crash or driver timeout may occur using Vulkan® API. Any users who may be experiencing these issues should select DirectX® API as a temporary workaround.

Some virtual reality games or apps may experience lower-than-expected performance.

AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.12.2 for AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Graphics Driver Version 22.40.00.61 for Windows 10 and Windows 11 (Windows Driver Store Version 31.0.14000.61002).

New driver for @radeon RX 7900 cards posted yesterday. Next driver coming in January. https://t.co/qoRkioklUw

— Frank Azor (@AzorFrank) December 21, 2022

These drivers are only compatible with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX & RX 7900 XT drivers and weigh around 590 MB to download. AMD plans to offer the next major driver release in January 2023.