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AMD Drivers – AMD Adrenalin 18.5.1 drags Raven Ridge APUs into the driver mainstream

Ancestors Legacy

AMD has released the latest Radeon Adrenalin Edition 18.5.1 drivers for public consumption, bringing with them support for the Windows 10 April Update, Raven Ridge APUs, Ancestors Legacy, and finalised support for Microsoft’s PlayReady 3.0 on Polaris graphics cards.

AMD users are now supported for the the latest Windows April 2018 Update, which brought with it features such as: Timeline, some fancy UI effects, and a host of settings updates. However, one of the more sought after updates from team red has been the inclusion of PlayReady 3.0 support, which is a necessary DRM measure required by Netflix for streaming in 4K.

Fancy a team red PC build? Here are the best AMD graphics cards around.

Most 10-series Nvidia GPUs, and some Intel CPUs since Kaby Lake, have had PlayReady support for a while, but all-AMD rigs have been stuck with sub-4K streaming for some time. Ryzen CPUs have no integrated GPU, so unless you have one of the Raven Ridge APUs, it’s all down to your graphics card. That’s starting to change, however. Beta support for Polaris PlayReady rolled out in the last driver update, however, it has now been finalised and Polaris 400- and 500-series GPUs now officially support the content protection tech. AMD have indicated Vega support will come later in the year.

There’s also considerable performance bumps for both RX Vega 56 and RX 580 graphics cards in the recent RTS, Ancestors Legacy – at 6% and 13% faster performance, respectively.

This driver also includes AMD Raven Ridge desktop APUs, which had been utilising much older drivers that were not inline with the current desktop graphics card drivers.

You can download the latest AMD drivers here.

AMD RX Vega 56

Support for:

  • Windows 10 April Update
  • AMD Ryzen Desktop processors with Radeon Vega graphics (AMD Raven Ridge APUs)
  • Ancestors Legacy

Up to 6% faster performance using Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.5.1 on the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card than with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.4.1 at 1080p.

Up to 13% faster performance using Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.5.1 on the Radeon RX 580 graphics card than with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.4.1 at 1080p.

  • Microsoft PlayReady 3.0 supported on Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series desktop graphics cards.

Fixed issues:

  • HBCC options may not properly reset to default when Radeon settings “restore factory defaults” option is selected.
  • Destiny 2 may experience increasing load time durations when the game is run for extended periods of time.
  • Tearing may be observed in some borderless fullscreen games on Radeon FreeSync enabled displays when Radeon Software performance metrics is enabled.
  • Netflix playback through a web browser may experience corruption or hangs when using multi GPU system configurations with Radeon RX 400 series or Radeon RX 500 series graphics cards.
  • Radeon ReLive streaming or uploading of videos to Facebook may intermittently fail.

Known issues:

  • Some games may experience minor stuttering during gameplay when the Radeon ReLive Instant Replay feature is enabled and FRTC is also enabled.
  • Radeon Overlay may not show all available features when some games are run in borderless fullscreen mode.
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt may experience stuttering during gameplay.
  • A system hang may occur on a small number of system configurations after Radeon Software installation if Radeon settings is launched without a system reboot. A workaround is to reboot your system after install.