AMD 16.9.1 Drivers Bring Massive Fixes and Improvements

Previous to the current year, AMD drivers releases were major announcements. With only a few releases per year, each new version brought along loads of changes and fixes. Ever since the launch of the Crimson edition, we’ve been getting at least 2 releases a month. However, each driver still brings a good amount of improvements, with some more than others. The latest 16.9.1 release belongs solidly in the former category. This time around, the headline features are Deus Ex: Mankind Divided getting DX12 support and DOTA 2 getting Crossfire support.

For the first September release, we’re getting a total of 10 fixed issues not counting the new driver profiles. This outnumbers the remaining known issue count which stands at 9. GTA V and DOOM for one both get fixes for application stability while AMD’s own Radeon Software and Radeon Settings are getting their own stability fixes. FreeSync, 144Mhz displays, and Dirt Rally are getting their flickering issues resolved while Total War: Warhammer won’t get negative Crossfire scaling anymore. The last fixes deal with high GPU usage when exiting the SteamVR benchmark and RX 400 GPUs resuming from sleep mode.

In terms of known issues, there are still a few. The most troublesome are Radeon Software Crimson Edition settings not saving if you upgrade to a new version and cursor corruption on the RX 480. There are still application stability issues with DOOM using Vulkan and Ashes of the Singularity using Multi-GPU on Crazy setting.

Lastly, there are reports that 16.9.1 is bringing reduced DX11 overhead across the board. This has been an area AMD has lagged behind Nvidia especially in regard to GCN Gen 1-3. According to various users, the improvements range from 2 to 20% depending on the GPU and CPU configuration and the game being tested. Even with DX12 starting to take hold, DX11 is still very relevant and deserving of attention. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see some more improvements before DX12 and Vulkan fully take over.

You can find the 19.9.1 driver releases notes and download links here.