AMD Talks DirectX 11 Performance & How They Managed To Achieve 10% Uplift Through Reworked Drivers

Last month, AMD published a post on their blog, discussing how the company is rebuilding the DirectX 11 driver to allow for improved performance in their newer components released later this year.

The blog post from the company details how AMD puts a total of 6000 different system configurations to test internally. This is to ensure that the majority (99.5%) are tested for stability before the drivers can be shipped out to the public. This also ensures that the majority of the systems do not face any stability issues or crashes with AMD's Adrenalin software.

Last year, AMD released twenty-six WHQL drivers, six more than competitor NVIDIA's twenty drivers. AMD habitually releases WHQL drivers later than BETA version drivers, whereas NVIDIA releases their WHQL drivers immediately.

AMD has never presented why non-WHQL drivers are typically listed as 'recommended' or 'optional' and are released before full WHQL drivers. From the blog post, we can now understand why the company permits this practice and how it affects the gaming community.

AMD Optional drivers are more akin to the production-grade drivers from our competitors. However, AMD Recommended drivers represent tried-and-tested software that often has had months of soak time in the public domain. While every AMD Software release passes Microsoft’s WHQL test suite, it is sometimes advantageous for gamers to use non-WHQL certified software. By releasing a non-certified WHQL passing driver, AMD can ensure more incredible support for new game releases and patches.

AMD appears to regard its non-WHQL drivers as acceptable to production drivers from companies like NVIDIA and Intel. So, when those specific drivers appear before the complete AMD WHQL versions, users can take advantage of the technology for games before receiving the completed WHQL driver that requires Microsoft testing before approval.

AMD's competitive advantage has one unified desktop, mobile, and integrated graphics solution driver. NVIDIA has two primary branches for its desktop gaming series and notebooks, and Intel has dedicated in-house drivers for its ARC and integrated GPUs.

Maximum Performance

Our engineering teams are constantly looking for ways to deliver users better performance. Within the last year alone, we achieved an average 15% performance uplift(5) across various titles, with these benefits being delivered to our users throughout the lifetime of their product ownership.

More recently, we rebuilt our DirectX® 11 driver from the ground up to deliver on average, up to 10% increase in performance gains on your Radeon™ RX 6000 series graphics card, with some games reaching even higher than average gains such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – up to 28%, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands – up to 30%, and Grand Theft Auto V – up to 11%.

AMD optimizations appeared simultaneously as the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan updates that conveyed close headways in particular games, such as:

The company is concentrating on optimizing current games and titles that utilize older APIs. Case in point, DirectX11 games received an average of ten percent improvement. That information is based on comparing 22.5.2 May and 22.3.1 March driver releases.

News Sources: VideoCardz, AMD, AMD Radeon Twitter account