Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) has been in the crosshairs of critics and fanboys alike for a variety of reasons ranging from a limited launch of the RX 7000 series to under-shipping CPUs to maintain market prices even as demand shrinks in the face of a resurgent 13th generation Intel Alder Lake platform. But the overwhelming criticism that it has faced of late has been its decision to change gears at the time of the RX7000 launch by seemingly abandoning the RX6000 lineup completely as users waited for driver updates optimized for the latest games for a considerable amount of time.
After a not-so-brief hiatus of more than two months, AMD has finally decided to unify its driver releases, bringing its latest tech to the RX6000 series in addition to support for Forspoken and Dead Space. The AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 23.2.1 driver seems to offer tighter optimization on a range of titles including Hogwarts Legacy, Spiderman Remastered, and Sniper Elite 5. Additionally, AMD has added support for a host of new streaming features including pre-analysis, pre-filter toggle, and native support for CAML in tow.
One must note that AMD has already been regularly updating drivers for the RX 7000 series as it aims to bring it up to speed with the RTX 4000 lineup that does currently enjoy a sizeable lead even sans its RTX and DLSS technologies, which further cements their already-significant advantage.
Needless to say, this should help quell fears highlighted by multiple quarters that AMD is unable to cope with the prospects of updating drivers for both the 7000 and 6000 series at the same time with the company specifically addressing this earlier by stating it had diverted engineers to fix 7000 related optimization issues with its drivers as the Radeon 7000 series seemed to be a generally rushed affair with overheating problems as well as compatibility issues plaguing the lineup.
AMD, which generally does tend to get away with a lot more than its traditional GPU rival, Nvidia due to its underdog status did however get slammed by multiple users looking for a fix or updates to their GPU drivers and problems with games that did not get accompanied by optimized drivers in tow. There was significant noise on Twitter and other mediums with eventually resulted in one of AMD’s engineers breaking the silence by committing to the unified driver releases going forward while giving a timeline for approximately 2 weeks down the line; In a way, AMD driver is slightly ahead of schedule. Disgruntled users who have been in some cases using 3rd party drivers to compensate for some games being unoptimized would however have a very different opinion about how ‘early’ the driver release is. The delay has punished users from the low-end RX 6600 all the way to enthusiasts sporting the 6950 XT in their rigs equally, highlighting their dependence on a robust ecosystem for driver releases to stay ahead of multiple game releases this year.
