After churning out drivers in quick succession for the past several months, the pace has slowed a bit at AMD. April saw the release of 16.4.1 and 16.4.2 of AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson Edition. Kicking off the month of May, we now have a new beta hotfix, 16.5.1. This builds upon the March release of 16.3.1 which was the last WHQL driver to come out.
Unlike almost every other driver release we’ve seen this year, 16.5.1 doesn’t contain any fixes to bugs or other issues. Instead, the drive simply adds support for Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, the Windows 10 Store exclusive racing game. Performance in that title has been significantly improved, with up to 27% improvement for the Fury X. We can expect somewhat similar numbers for other Fury/Fiji cards and most other GCN cards should benefit.
Given the limited scope of the new release, I wouldn’t recommend updating unless you plan to play Forza Motorsport 6: Apex. The lack of fixes isn’t too surprising since only a week has passed since 16.4.2 came out. There are still a number of known fixes relating to Radeon Settings and Crossfire so hopefully, AMD will get cracking on those. I expect we’ll see another driver release near the end of May to add support for Polaris as well as bring out some fixes.
