AMD Radeon: Crimson Edition First Look

Testing – Performance

Throughout the media presentations and calls, we were constantly reminded of two key features of the new Radeon Software, the Performance gain and the Power Efficiency compared to CCC 15.7.1. The figures are good, but we have been given a newer version of CCC in the form of 15.11.1 Beta which was released very recently. This update was poised to give a performance boost in much of a similar way that Radeon Software: Crimson Edition is, so instead of testing 15.7.1, I will test 15.11.1 to see if there is a performance boost compared between these two.

Heaven Benchmark

I was expecting slightly better results than this, with only the R9 380 gaining 1FPS.

This is what I really wanted to test on, Heaven Benchmark, Basic Preset is a DirectX 9 setting and FRTC didn’t work previously on DX 9 applications. This graph now shows that it does with an FRTC limit of 60FPS.

Tomb Raider

The performance gain in Tomb Raider is more like it, not the 20% that was claimed, but that would only be in certain applications. 8FPS gain for the plucky R9 380 here.

As you can see here, the FRTC software working perfectly. If you want to see 60FPS here it would be better to set the FRTC limit to 61 or 62FPS instead of 60.