AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition Goes WHQL With 15.12

When AMD launched their new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 3 weeks ago, it was actually using a beta version of the Radeon drivers. Today, AMD has updated Crimson to use official v15.30 WHQL drivers with Crimson v15.12. Along with official WHQL status, the new release also includes a numbers of fixes and improvements over the beta driver bundled with the original Crimson launch.

Chief among the fixes is the one where some AMD cards were stuck at 30% fan speed. This caused some cards to overheat under load and become physically damaged. The WHQL drivers include the hotfix that AMD quickly released to address the issue. You can find the full changelog here.

On the other hand, some other issues still remain. For overclockers, the most galling is one where clock speeds and voltages don’t get applied properly after a reboot. This appears to be an incompatibility between AMD Overdrive and third-party tools like Afterburner.

While the launch of Radeon Software Crimson Edition was pretty good overall and ushered in a new era for AMD, things look like they were a bit rushed. For such an important release, it may have been more worthwhile for AMD to have waited to get WHQL certification before launching.