AMD's New Radeon 23.7.1 Drivers Fix VR Bugs And Drop Idle Power For RX 7900
One of the chief complaints about the Radeon RX 7900 series when it launched was its relatively-high idle power consumption compared to even AMD's last-generation parts. We noted this in our review, as did many other outlets. Well, this latest driver takes steps to resolve that issue. We haven't had time to test and produce hard numbers on the change, but AMD says idle power should be reduced on systems using 4K 144Hz monitors as well as multi-monitor display configurations—both known to be problematic scenarios even for NVIDIA at times.
VRChat characters and environments can be incredibly complex.
Another big frustration for some folks that bought Navi 31 GPUs was their relatively lackluster performance in virtual reality. AMD simply hasn't invested the money into VR that NVIDIA has, but if you're addicted to VR games and the owner of a Radeon RX 7000-series GPU, you should see significantly improved performance and reduced stuttering on your fancy new graphics card with this latest driver. As one example, AMD's GPUs are attractive for VRChat players due to that title's high video memory requirements when playing with user-generated content.
Other bugfixes in this release include app crashes and driver timeouts when playing AV1 video—AMD says it's just in DaVinci Resolve but we've seen this problem in Chrome and MPV, too—as well as fixes for intermittent corruption in the games WWE 2K23 and one of my favorites, Nioh 2. We ran into this corruption issue in Nioh 2 when testing the ROG Ally, so it's good to see it getting a fix so soon.
Nioh 2 Complete Edition
Known issues in this release include crashes while playing Runescape on RX 5000 cards, image corruption around character models in Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix+, stuttering with Radeon Anti-Lag in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (just turn Anti-Lag off), and broken display signals on Adaptive Sync screens when task switching out of a game or video player on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. There's also a bug where the Radeon Overlay may not correctly show FPS in all games, and another where ReLive functions may use gobs of video RAM.
AMD still hasn't fixed its drivers' "factory reset" function, so if you've got some wonky driver settings, you're unfortunately going to have to resort to using something like Display Driver Uninstaller. Otherwise, you can check the patch notes here, or just get this driver from the usual place and then install it over your current version.
