AMD Crimson ReLive 16.12.1 Drivers

[Pudgie]

D'ld this new anniversary driver pack and installed.....all went well.

Like the new AMD installer..........employs the KISS method and still gives user choice on how much to install\not install.
Installed the usual parts as before (drivers, Radeon Settings, Vulkan).

New features: Radeon Wattman GPU power\temp control is now enabled for most older Radeon R9 users....includes Radeon Chill (new frame rate limiter control which uses game input activity to control GPU FPS and enhanced AMD FreeSynch control (features Borderless Full Screen Mode and Gradual Refresh Rate Ramp).

Just got done flying around and the new Radeon Wattman GPU power\temp control is the real deal so far. Shows excellent power\clock control on my FuryX....clocks\power stays low until the game goes to the hangar then the GPU goes full speed\power and STAYS there.....even when using AHIII Dx11! GPU FPS is rock steady so far on my box at 79-80 FPS (AMD FRTC set). Game runs very smooth so far and I'm digging it!

Driver version 16.12.1's are looking good!

Haven't installed AMD ReLive software yet.........haven't much need for it at the moment.

All in all a good driver set.

 

[Randy1]

Pudgie are using W10? 
Have you had these screen freezes in the latest patch?

[Pudgie]

Pudgie are using W10? 
Have you had these screen freezes in the latest patch?

Hi Randy1,

Nope, I'm using Win 7 HP SP1 so I can't say much towards Win 10 either way.
Patch 12 was a big improvement....still saw screen pauses but very few and far in between.
Was the same for Patch 13 until I made 2 changes.........

1st was to go back in mobo UEFI and reset Intel CEIST Function and TurboBoost Technology back to the Auto setting so the UEFI will set this up in the UEFI cache then went into Windows and reset the Windows Power Plan back to Balanced from High Performance (so Windows power control will control the Intel CEIST and Intel TurboBoost) then went into the advanced settings of the Balanced power plan and set all the other aspects to use full power\no Windows power control except the Processor Power Management section...here I reset the minimum CPU power level from the default 5% to 80% (so Intel's EIST will not understep the CPU cores at low game CPU loads but will still allow 100% power at full CPU loads). Found out that this made a big difference on my I7 5820K CPU's operation to the positive since I also have set CPU core affinity for the OS across all 6 cores instead of the 1 core (default is CPU core0). My CPU's performance stabilized much better when using the Balanced plan as currently configured over the High Performance plan.

2nd was d'ld AMD Crimson ReLive 16.12.1 drivers (only installed drivers, Radeon Settings and Vulkan API). Now my Fury X is using the new AMD Radeon Wattman GPU power\clock control which is leaps and bounds better than the old AMD OverDrive GPU power\clock control which is showing to extract even more GPU performance from my Fury X as Wattman is much more finely granulated in it's stepping control of GPU power and GPU clock speeds so I'm getting much more overall GPU performance thru AMD's PowerTune 2.0 but more importantly, GPU stabilization under full game load at full power\clock speeds.

Since I've made these 2 changes I haven't witnessed another screen pause but all this was done yesterday evening when I got home from work @ 17:45 hrs and tested\flew until 00:47 hrs this morning so time will tell.......but so far the results are looking pretty impressive on my box. FPS is pegged at 79-80 regardless of whether on the ground or 30K and graphs don't show any evidence of screen pauses to date as well.

If the screen pauses show back up again I'll let you know.

 

[Pudgie]

So far, so good.................haven't witnessed not 1 screen pause, screen freeze or any petite freezes since.

Problem is I don't really know which change made the difference concerning this issue as I made both changes within hours of each other.
I made the changes concerning the CPU and Windows 1st and noticed an improvement in CPU operation so I went back in Balanced Power plan, Processor Power Management and raised the minimum power setting from the initial setting I had input of 50% to 75% (I had remembered running my old Intel C2D E8600 CPU using the Windows Vista Balanced Power plan in similar fashion back in the day......also ran the minimum power setting on it @ 75% due to Vista OS not being good at handling CPU power optimization but Vista didn't like this disabled). My reasoning for setting all this back up was due to me not liking my CPU running at full power\clocks all the time so I wanted Intel CEIST back on along w\ Intel TurboBoost but I also needed to stop CEIST from understepping my CPU due to low CPU core loads while playing AHIII Dx11 as I believed that this had something to do w\ these screen pauses (was still getting them even w\ CIEST disabled and using High Performance power plan in OS) so I put all back to default (w\ the exception of Hyperthreading as this certainly wasn't the cause) in the UEFI so that I could reset the power plan in Win 7 back to the default of Balanced but then go into the advanced settings and reset all. So Win 7\Intel CEIST will still look at clocking down the CPU core clock speeds on low game CPU loads but Win 7 won't allow CEIST to cut power to the CPU cores below 75% so if the CPU cores have to clock back up due to a game CPU load increase it will have the necessary power on hand to do so w\o stumbling (throws the CPU signaling off momentarily to the graphics card's GPU to operate so it hesitates until the CPU catches back up) as this is the only way I know of to have some user input\control over this......................

But I was on WCCFTech site later yesterday evening and saw that AMD had just put this Crimson ReLive driver out and when I saw that 1 of the features was Radeon Wattman\Radeon Chill was now enabled for older AMD GCN GPU's I had to d'ld it and install it right then hoping that Wattman would provide better GPU power\clock speed management over OverDrive.................... .which it certainly does.

Here's a snippet of all this running on my box while playing AHIII Patch 13 Dx11:

Continuing testing....................

 

[Randy1]

Pudgie thanks for the reply.  I switched to the 16.12.1 drivers and went without a single freeze or stutter.  I suree hope this continues to work.

Thanks so much for posting the new drivers.

[Pudgie]

Pudgie thanks for the reply.  I switched to the 16.12.1 drivers and went without a single freeze or stutter.  I suree hope this continues to work.

Thanks so much for posting the new drivers.

Me too, Randy1.

AMD OverDrive was AMD's 1st attempt at providing a GPU power\clock regulation control setup after Nvidia came out w\ their driver-level GPU power\clock control setup w\ Kepler to compliment GPU Boost 1.0 to bolster their 1st attempt w\ PowerTune 1.0 (which wasn't pretty as I understood it) to try to get a handle on 1st gen Hawaii GPU's. I could never get OverDrive to operate right on it's own....only by using a 3rd party software to hook into the fan control part of OverDrive to work the fan speed control the way it needed to work according to the AMD engineering white papers on how PowerTune was designed to work could I then gain the necessary control to tame it and get the performance out of it. I had set up this Fury X in the same manner. All was peachy until the VR coding was added to the Dx11 port of AHIII....this is when I started seeing the GPU usage and GPU clock speeds take a nose dive regardless of the game scene loads causing stuttering due to being underpowered. Only by disabling the PowerEfficiency setting in the driver I could regain full power to the GPU to regain full clock speeds but this wouldn't rectify the lower GPU load issue which I believe was causing issues at the hardware level w\ PowerTune and drivers due to Dx11 API (from reading up on Dx11 API 1 main feature advantage was API-level CPU\GPU multithreading support vs Dx9 which would make the CPU\GPU operations more efficient as I also saw lower CPU loading as well vs Dx9 setting up a fair amount of CPU\GPU wait\lag time) that I wasn't seeing when running under Dx9 API.

Was hoping that AMD's Radeon Wattman GPU power\clock control regulation\Radeon Chill FR limiter is much better designed, both in actual GPU power\clock control across the full GPU spectrum and in user operation and from the results I'm seeing so far it looks like a winner. I have Wattman set up in Automatic mode on all of it's settings to test the control as AMD has shipped it and it has worked perfectly right out of the box...actually almost mimicing the temps that I was getting before but the big improvement is that Wattman has my GPU constantly running at full power\clock speeds under AHIII Dx11 game loads w\o any input from me. Then when I use this in conjunction w\ AMD's FRTC (read up on Radeon Chill tests and found that a game has to support this before it will work so I disabled it after I verified that it wasn't working w\ AHIII) and set the upper FR limit @ 80 FPS the Fury X runs very smooth w\ FR hardly moving at all but if you could see the Wattman graphs of my card running under game loads you will see the GPU usage fluctuating from as low as 1% all the way up to 100% fairly frequently but the GPU clock speeds never waver, the GPU temps are very steady and the fan speeds are also very steady and actually track w\ the GPU temps.
That takes some very polished, fast acting and fine-grained control code algorithim in operation to maintain steady GPU performance under these operating conditions...............

Either 1 or both of these changes could have something to do w\ the results I'm seeing now. Time will tell.

Hope the new drivers help you out.

[Pudgie]

Here's a couple of graphs....1 of AHIII Patch 13 Dx11 running on my box under the new AMD Crimson 16.12.1 drivers using Radeon Wattman and 1 of MSI AB showing all this from another perspective:

In-game is smooth as silk right now w\ FR locked at 79-80 FPS and so far no screen pauses, freezes, nada...........

 

[Randy1]

I had not thought about the timing of AMD screen freeze problem starting with the introduction of VR.  That is a good catch.

[Pudgie]

Just installed AMD ReLive in Radeon Settings and looked at it........looks fairly simple to use and Ryan Shrout @ PCPer gave it a good review so I might do a recording just to see how it all goes.

AMD's redo of Gaming Involved! and answer to Nvidia's Geforce Experience\Shadowplay................but you get to choose if\when you want it......at this time.

 

[Randy1]

Pudgie is this kind of like fraps?

[Pudgie]

Yes it is.

 

[Pudgie]

Update:

While working w\ ReLive I ran into an issue w\ the sound recording very slow and garbled and out of synch w\ the video recording. The video recording works very well and looks very good.

After messing around w\ it for a while and getting nowhere w\ correcting the sound recording issues I Bing'd this issue which took me to the AMD web site's BBS. Looks like this issue was a common one.

The issue is due to sound scaling bug currently coded in ReLive which can't correctly process any sound source above 24-bit 48K Studio Quality bit rate so to correct this issue at this time go into Windows Hardware and Sound and set the bit rate for your sound device to 24-bit 48K then all is well afterwards.

I'm sure that this will get fixed fairly quickly so users can use the higher bit rates if they choose to.

Now I see why Nvidia's GE ShadowPlay is so popular. Once I got all to work it was nice to watch playbacks of sortie(s)................ 
Sure see a lot of action in these recordings that you miss while actually flying....................... .....

Still haven't figured out the mic part yet so it records my voice as well while recording.......heck I just recently figured out that somehow the Mic Boost setting in AHIII got reset to 0 so my mic wasn't working in game.........reset it and all is well now.

ReLive takes up very little resources to operate........my FR was never affected while I was recording. The only thing that I noticed was the difference of ReLive recording at the max rate of 60 FPS when I'm actually using 79-80 FPS so the recordings were slightly hitchy but looked very good.

 

[Shamus]

I am running a r9 270 with win7 pro and DX11 was unplayable for me, downloaded this driver and have had two nights of flawless play for what its worth.

[Pudgie]

Hi all Radeon users,

Read this to help you w\ considering to use these drivers.............

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows+7+-+64

Click on Supported Products tab...................

FYI.......................

 

[Bizman]

HD6970, no joy... Thanks for the link for easy checking.