AMD Adrenalin 23.2.1 GPU drivers discovered to improve RX 6000 ray tracing performance, but mostly in synthetic tests

AMD finally launched the latest unified Andrenalin GPU drivers supporting both the previous gen RX 6000 cards and the new RX 7000 ones. Version 23.2.1 seems to be targeting the RX 6000 cards specifically, with performance uplifts of ~15% on average over the October 2021 drivers. Interestingly enough, the latest drivers also improve the ray tracing performance, but this aspect is not specifically mentioned in the release notes.

AMD’s GPU driver support is known to be quite iffy and this is especially an issue when it comes to newly-launched generations. Not to mention the initial quirks that somehow get past QA and AMD then has to rush some fix. While the RX 7000-series is showing decent performance gains over the previous gen, it certainly feels like AMD left some performance on the table with the initial drivers that could have been polished a bit more before the release.

This probably happened with the RX 6000-series, as well. The RDNA 2 GPUs have been out for more than 2 years now, and they keep getting a performance boost with every subsequent driver release. Just by installing the latest Adrenalin 23.2.1 drivers, most of the RX 6000 cards can get a noticeable performance boost. For some games, the performance increase over time since the initial RX 6000 launch must be nearing 50% if AMD’s performance improvement claims are to be trusted.

Regarding the ray tracing performance gains, a few Twitter users are showing 3DMark results suggesting improvements of up to almost 40%. AMD’s RX 6000 ray tracing implementation seemed quite disappointing compared to what the RTX 3000-series from Nvidia was boasting, so any kind of improvement should be great news. Unfortunately, the uplift only seems to apply to synthetic tests for the most part. The only game that sees any improvements with ray tracing is Doom Eternal, from what Twitter user Ayxerious is reporting. It is still unclear if ray tracing has been improved for the RX 7000-series. Hopefully, AMD can do something similar but more consistent for the RDNA 3 cards with future driver releases.

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