AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 21.4.1 brings a host of new functionality and quality-of-life upgrades but with a few caveats

AMD has updated its Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition to version 21.4.1 with a slew of improvements and new functionality. AMD said that it has been making behind the scenes improvements for better driver stability and has incorporated new methods to test and monitor issues.

The biggest feature in this release is the updated AMD Link tool. Now in version 4.0, AMD Link allows streaming games and multimedia content to Windows 10 PCs (no Windows 7 support) in addition to mobile devices. Other Link players can also join for mutliplayer and split-screen modes. AMD said that Link supports frame rates up to 144 fps, 5.1 channel audio, and reduced latency up to 60% in CS-GO.

One major limitation when using AMD Link on Windows 10 is that both parties should have Radeon GPUs installed, which AMD says is necessary due to low-level API enhancements and hardware acceleration. That being said, the new AMD Live supports 4K streaming with GCN and newer GPUs.

Another feature that is coming with the new release is the ability to select between driver-only, minimal, and full install options. The minimal install offers the driver, Bug Report Tool and Crash Defender, User Interface and Graphics and Video settings. For Game Center, statistics, streaming, performance turning, and AMD Link, one has to opt for the full install. Radeon Software users can now see Ryzen CPU performance stats alongside their Radeon Wattman GPU stats. These including CPU utilization, clocks, temperature, voltage, power consumption, and more.

Other features include basic editing of live streams, so streamers can directly get up and running with their game streams, color deficiency correction for protanopia, deuteranopia, and tiranopia deficiencies, Microsoft PlayReady AV1 decode support, and Crash Defender to try and recover from potential system crashes. Radeon Anti-Lag now supports all major graphics APIs including DirectX 12. Radeon Boost offers DirectX 12 Variable Rate Shading support. There is also a Frame Rate Target Control to limit the FPS to keep things running cool.

It must be noted here that some of these features are configuration-dependent. According to AMD, the color correction and Vivid Gaming Color presets require Radeon RX 5000, RX 6000, Ryzen 4000 APUs or newer, and work only on Windows 10. Similarly, the PlayReady AV1 decode functionality works only with the newer RX 6000 GPUs and Windows 10 with KB5000842 installed.

The AMD Radoen Software Adrenalin 21.4.1 update can be downloaded from here.