Does anyone here like Radeon Settings?

[Josh | NFC]

So I've been pretty hyped about this driver release and AMD Crimson in general, and there is still much I want/need to explore on the technical and performance side of things.

I was a bit skeptical about Radeon Settings when I first learned about a while back before the hype as I don't have anything nice to say about GeForce Experience other than you can uninstall it and keep the basic drivers and control panel.

I do like that you can assign an AMD Overdrive profile (easier) to particular games which I do find useful in the real world, but beyond that I feel like we have gone back in time in terms of interface design. Sure it looks nice and transitions slickly, but is it faster and more useful than a drop down menu of organized controls all in one place? I really had to hunt to find things and while I appreciated some attempts at consolidation I just scratch my head at others. If I have to go to the display "tab" and then click on additional settings to launch a cut-back version of the old CCC to fine tune my display...was this really a victory for consolidation?

I might sound pretty mean here and I'm not trying to be, but I was pretty excited for this from all the emails I directly have been receiving from AMD, and I have found my time with it thus far to be overall frustrating. I feel a tweaking of the classic CCC (which by no means do I hold ideal) with some of the new features of Radeon Settings would have been much better...at the very least I wish there was a clearly defined "SWITCH TO CLASSIC CCC" mode.

I'm all for trying something new...and maybe RS will grow on me and the AMD Overdrive Game Profile menu will make it all worth it.

That all being said, I AM super pumped about Crimson!!!

 

[confusis]

I will be trying it this evening - benching the results between the last catalyst driver and crimson

 

[Vittra]

Expect the "Additional Options" section that goes to the CCC to be removed in the future once they finish that portion off.

The freesync, flip queue, and FRTC changes are all quite significant. I think to dumb down this release into "GUI changes" does a disservice to the work AMD has done, though there was obvious intent there as well. Between the consistent driver in the past few months and the overall positive changes of Crimson, it looks like AMD is finally sincere about focusing on the software aspect of things moving forward. I hope this is in fact the case, because I want Arctic Islands vs Pascal to actually be a win for consumer choice.

Take a look at this overview of some of the specific advancements and tweaks Crimson brings:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...ews/70769-radeon-software-crimson-review.html

 

[Josh | NFC]

I think to dumb down this release into "GUI changes" does a disservice to the work AMD has done, though there was obvious intent there as well.

NOOOOOOOO!

I have ZERROOOOO complaints against Crimson! I just have complaints against the GUI changes implemented in Radeon Settings!



I need to be 1000% clear there!

I'm still ultra excited about Crimson...there are so many toys here before Christmas its like I'm cheating...

 

[Vittra]

Delve into it and see everything it has to offer. You will probably grow to like it quickly.

As I said, that "Additional Options" button that goes to the old CCC will likely go away soon once those options are fully integrated.

 

[Phuncz]

I'm also expecting this to be buffed out properly in the future but the new tech is a very welcome addition. I rarely need to be inside that menu because most stuff runs well enough as-is. But with this release FreeSync got a little more interesting, I'm craving that BenQ 32" 4K screen.

My R9 290X is still worth every penny I paid 2 years ago and I haven't found anything bad about it. The only thing that "bothered" me is that I needed to disable Exclusive mode when viewing fullscreen video with MPC-HC. But this was also the first 15.x release where I didn't need to load a modded monitor driver so the DVI to HDMI worked properly. It somewhere stopped sending RGB 4:4:4 over DVI-HDMI connections when the screen (HDMI) accepts audio, even though the DVI output doesn't allow it.

 

[Vittra]

I'd be curious how AMD / Windows 10 handle multi-monitor, whether that be multiple actual monitors, or connections through receivers to TVs and the like. Traditionally, this has always been a sphere that AMD excels at compared to Nvidia.

So far, my experience on Nvidia on Windows 10 has been significantly better for multi-monitor support than either Windows 7 or Win 8.1 before it. I used to have all sorts of issues with remembering monitor positions / settings / desktop icon positions that I had set. So far I've had no such issues on Win10, and switching to single monitor modes through Win + P has been fluid. Moving VLC windows between the two is also seamless and has no odd glitches/quirks that I previously experienced.

For reference, I am using a monitor, and an HDMI connection through to my Anthem MRX 510 connected to my TV.

 

[iFreilicht]

AMD is vastly better for more extraordinary monitor setups. Sure, if you just want to arrange your screens and stuff, Windows does that great, but everything else is a PITA with nVidia drivers.

Eyefinity still works wonders in that regard. I was over at a friends place and we played RocketLeague in splitscreen on two monitors. Setup took about 1 minute in Catalyst, no problems at all. The idea was to merge two monitors together to a single one and then have side-by-side splitscreen. You add a new Eyefinity configuration, merge two displays in it and are ready to go. Once you're done, you go back to the previous configuration, and everything works like it did before.

Tried the same thing with nVidia Surround at my PC and it was an absolute fustercluck. You can set up the monitors to be one display, but not only can you not save configurations, but you also have to manually activate the new display in windows every time and select every single detail about the merged configuration in a horrible UI. You can't merge monitors of different resolutions, either. Once you've gone through that stuff, which can be done quickly after a bit of training, it works fine, but good luck getting it back to normal.
Opening Surround doesn't work anymore, the toggle switch for disabling it is greyed out, the button to open the setup dialog is as well. Disconnecting the display in windows doesn't help, unplugging the displays doesn't help either.
The ONLY way to turn off Surround is to shut the PC down, disconnect ALL displays but one and then boot.
Then you connect the other monitors and are back to normal.
Atrocious.

 

[Josh | NFC]

I had to give up on the driverset for my personal rig and go back to AMD-Catalyst-15.11Beta. The only two games I'm playing right now had horrible graphical issues, although I did get increased FPS on one of them. I'll wait a bit for me, and keep testing on the mule for others. I'm disappointed as there are so many cool features I want to be able to use...

I still don't like the Radeon Settings interface.

 

[Phuncz]

The only "issue" I've had is the one with Fallout 4 others also have, the flickering compass. But it's so minor for me, I feel writing a post about it exagerates the issue.

 

[Josh | NFC]

I had flickering compass, shader glow was broken on many interactive objects, the high-res texture "popin" would fail to "popin" as designed, and DRAMATICALLY poor rendering of AA...which was the main reason I switched back. The multisampling was just awful, and washed out everything and muted colors. When characters moved they would appear blurry all over rather than just the edges, 2D objects with opacity would sparkle, and really everything just appeared fuzzy....like FXAA was "stuck on" but the bad effects on steroids.

I spent sometime on the AMD forums with others and we couldn't figure it out.

 

[confusis]

https://www.techpowerup.com/218006/amd-releases-radeon-software-crimson-edition-15-11-1-update.html

Appears there is now some bugfixes for Fallout 4 (and other games)

 

[Josh | NFC]

I tried looking for the bugfixes but in the patch notes it looks as if they just recognize some of the issues:

• [82779] Fallout 4 - Gameplay may be choppy in AMD Freesync™ mode in Ultra mode at 1440p resolution

• [82645] Fallout 4 - The compass may flicker during gameplay on AMD Radeon R9 390 series products. We continue to investigate the issue with AMD Radeon R9 290 and AMD Radeon R9 295X2 series products

This might be one--it could be that the driver forces on FSAA instead of TSAA:

[58485] Anti-Aliasing settings not being retained after changes are applied

going to check it now...