News AMD's New DX11 Enhancing Preview Driver Underwhelms in 50 Game Test Suite

Is anyone really surprised a driver doesn't give a massive performance boost across the board for a card that's been on the market for over a year, especially when those cards are using an architecture that's just a refresh of a five year old architecture?

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May 7, 2022
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It's really a good thing we even get improvements as cards age. 3-10% performance boost in most titles is impressive in a preview driver, especially because it's a wide range of affected DX11 and DX12 games.
 
This lazy review is underwhelming. DX11 should be tested exclusively, by including DX12/vulkan you muddle the results. Every other tech site review separate that data. Very lazy.
This is a very good point, actually. Didn't see it that way before.

AMD never said DX12 or Vulkan would be improved, so the conclusion by including them is misleading. Looking at only DX11, the driver does give a good impression to me. Free performance, even when minimal, shouldn't be scoffed at.

Regards.
 
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hannibal

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Well, in anyway not bad to get improvements :)
But also we know that the test was not pure dx11 test,, but gamers play games, not DX or Vulcan versions, so this give a picture what overall increase is. But it would be nice to see pure DX11 increase also.
 

waltc3

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AMD never said it would improve all of your D3d11 games, and AMD listed the "select" games they said showed improvement. It's hard to see how it "underwhelms" when you investigate a claim AMD never made...;) Indeed, you said a 30% improvement in a game you tested--way above what AMD claimed in its game list. So, it really doesn't matter if all D3d11 games improve, does it? And yet, other people tested and found results that differ from yours, apparently. I'm quite sure that improvements exist in more games than are on the list AMD supplied with the driver, however.

I'm using it now--I prefer the May Performance driver to 22.5.1 WHQL.
 

KananX

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This lazy review is underwhelming. DX11 should be tested exclusively, by including DX12/vulkan you muddle the results. Every other tech site review separate that data. Very lazy.
On top they used a weaker GPU in 6700 XT which is of course way less bottlenecked than a 6900 XT. I think hardware unboxed made a better video about this same topic.
 

russell_john

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AMD's latest May 2022 preview driver, which promises to improve DX11 performance, appears to only help in a few select games, according to a 50 game benchmark suite tested by Techspot.

AMD's New DX11 Enhancing Preview Driver Underwhelms in 50 Game Test Suite : Read more

It's almost a case of too little, too late because more and more games especially those new releases for the Series X and PS5 use DX12 because it's just better at CPU thread management, memory management both system and VRAM and has much more efficient shader pipelines

If this had come one 3-4 years ago it would have been more impressive but in 2022 ..... not so much
 

spongiemaster

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This lazy review is underwhelming. DX11 should be tested exclusively, by including DX12/vulkan you muddle the results. Every other tech site review separate that data. Very lazy.
While your point is true, in this case it has little effect on the math. The actual average in the above graph is 2.88% faster. Removing DX12 and vulkan increases the difference by less than 1% to 3.62% faster. 3.6% still qualifies as underwhelming by most peoples' standards.
 
If you look at the individual game differences themselves, they are basically negligible. You wouldn't notice even the 11 and 12fps differences in Death Stranding and Watch Dogs: Legion (1920x1080) when you're already getting 191 and 108fps, especially when the delta between average and 1% lows are quite large in both games (about 40fps difference in both cases), though you may notice a little more fan noise.

A performance boost is never a bad thing, as long as it doesn't compromise IQ to do it, which both camps have been found guilty of in the past, but this particular performance boost, to me, is receiving way too much attention for what it is.
 

KananX

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While your point is true, in this case it has little effect on the math. The actual average in the above graph is 2.88% faster. Removing DX12 and vulkan increases the difference by less than 1% to 3.62% faster. 3.6% still qualifies as underwhelming by most peoples' standards.
Of course it was to be expected that not all DX11 games would profit from this, only those most notorious to a CPU bottleneck. People here with surprised owl faces, but what happened is quite normal. And I want to reiterate that a 6700XT was used, not a 6900XT. This will profit a 6900XT more.