AMD Releases 18.5.2 Optional Drivers
A few years ago, AMD committed to releasing more drivers for their graphics units. Since then, the company has managed to keep up a trend of at least a single release every month. Last week, AMD released their new Radeon Software 18.5.1 WHQL edition. Given the tight timeline, that was expected to be the last for May. In a surprise move, the company is releasing another driver in the waning days of the month. We now have the Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.5.2 Beta to play with.
As a beta optional release, the new driver offers a number of interesting fixes as is. Both the Sea of Thieves and The Crew get important fixes for bugs that affect gameplay. Warhammer Vermintide 2 also gets a fix. Also, Arizona Sunshine gets a fix for zombie textures. Furthermore, the Shader Cache will now properly enable for all games. Finally, FreeSync gets a fix for a blank screen bug.
Driver Brings Fixes to Older Titles
In terms of known issues, not much has changed on this end. Compared to 18.5.1, there are only two new bugs to report on. Edited videos in Radeon ReLive are sometimes failing to appear in the gallery after switching tabs. This is somewhat important as ReLive is a headline feature. The other new bug is corruption when using OGL or Vulkan API applications. This bug only occurs on Hybrid Graphics systems. Hopefully, this bug will get resolved soon as it has the potential to affect a lot of use cases.
It’s quite interesting to see AMD returning to some older titles to offer fixes. It does show they are keeping track of these issues and returning to fix them or making fixes when bugs do pop up due to driver changes. Given the gaffle with some DX9 games and Adrenalin Edition, its important for companies to continues to offer fixes over the lifetime of products. Hopefully, the industry will move to longer standards of driver support for their products. You can find the full release notes and driver downloads here.
