AMD's Newest Radeon Driver Brings Big FPS Boost To Hitman 3 And Quake II RTX Support
Virtual assassins will be pleased to know that Hitman 3 is now available, and if you plan to play on PC, it is available exclusive in the Epic Games Store. The latest entry wraps up the World of Assassination trilogy. And if you happen to be gaming on a Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card, AMD's latest GPU driver promises a big performance boost.
According to the release notes, the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.1.1 driver release (what a mouthful) provides up to a 10 percent performance gain in Hitman 3, when playing at a 4K resolution with the visual quality settings configured to Ultra. That is a significant jump. It's not clear what kinds of gains can be had on other Radeon SKUs, but if you plan to play Hitman 3, the 21.1.1 driver is optimized to deliver the best results.
Beyond delivering better performance in Hitman 3, AMD's first GPU driver update for 2021 also adds support for Quake II RTX. It has actually been possible to play Quake II RTX on AMD hardware for a few weeks now, courtesy of support for platform agnostic Vulkan ray tracing extensions being added to the game, with the v1.4.0 update.
This latest driver adds official support from AMD's end, which likely amounts to optimizations for better performance.
In addition, the 21.1.1 driver update brings with it a bunch of bug fixes. They include...
- The recording and streaming overlay indicator may sometimes reset itself to the default position.
- Performance Metrics Overlay size may intermittently reset or may not match values that are set in Radeon Software after performing a task switch.
- The Radeon Software installer screen can sometimes display the incorrect release date of the Radeon Software version you are installing.
- Performance Metrics Overlay may flicker during video playback on displays with HDR enabled.
- Reflections in Grand Theft Auto V may fail to appear when ‘Reflection MSAA’ is enabled in the game settings.
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds session timer may continue in Radeon Software even after the game has been exited.
- Doom Eternal may experience an application crash while gaming and having Steam overlay enabled.
- Recorded content from Radeon Software may appear cropped or recorded at an incorrect resolution on Radeon RX Vega series graphics products.
- The Samsung Odyssey G9 C49G95T may experience display or corruption issues when set to 5120x1440@240hz.
- Anisotropic Filtering in Radeon Software graphics settings is not taking effect in DirectX®9 applications on RDNA graphics products.
- Some displays such as the Sceptre C series or Samsung Odyssey G9 series may experience an intermittent black screen on Radeon RX 6000 series graphics products.
- Oculus Link users may experience intermittent crashes on Polaris and Vega series graphics products.
You can grab the driver through AMD's Radeon Software utility, or download it from the company's GPU driver page for a manual installation. As for Hitman 3, the Epic Games Store is offering the GOTY Edition Access Pass DLC for free if purchasing the game by 8:00 am ET on January 30.
