After dropping aa new RX 480 driver to fix the power issue earlier in the week, AMD has followed up with another urgent fix for the new Polaris GPU. The new 16.7.2 driver is therefore relatively slim with only one minor but important fix.
16.7.1 earlier in the week fixed the power issue with the RX 480 by bringing power consumption within spec. However, for those users who wished to further avoid any potential issues, AMD introduced a new compatibility mode to further trim power consumption with minimal impact on performance. This option defaulted to off as it’s not generally needed. The problem stems from the “Restore to Factory Defaults” toggle in Radeon Software.
When a user chooses to “Restore to Factory Defaults”, instead of toggling the compatibility mode off, it leaves it on, which isn’t the default state. 16.7.2 fixes this and this is the only fix the driver contains. Given the lack of changes with 16.7.1 and 16.7.2, I would suggest anyone without a RX 480 avoid them since updating drivers can sometimes turn nasty, even in this day and age. Hopefully, we’ll see a driver with real improvements and changes for the whole lineup later in the month. The full changelog can be found here.
To be fair, 16.7.1 does give up to 5% performance increase in some games as well as fixing the non-issue power draw issue.