AMD Radeon Driver Brings A High-Octane Peformance Boost To Forza Horizon 5
AMD is pushing out an updated Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver package (version 21.11.1), and if you're planning to play Forza Horizon 5 when it comes out next week, you'll want to grab this one. That is, if you're rocking a Radeon graphics card, of course. If so, this driver update brings with it some under-the-hood tuning to significantly improve performance in the racing sim.
According to the release notes, the 21.11.1 driver package boosts performance by up to a whopping 23 percent when playing Forza Horizon 5 at a 4K resolution and with the Extreme Settings option. That performance claim is linked specifically to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, and is compared to the previously driver release (21.10.2).
That's a heck of a boost from just updating the driver, assuming the claim holds up. It's not clear what other settings and graphics cards will gain from the 21.11.1 release, though. That said, the new driver is also optimized for another upcoming game, Call of Duty: Vanguard. That one releases November 5, whereas Forza Horizon 5 comes out on leaves the garage on November 9.
Beyond the game optimizations, AMD fixed a couple of issues with this release. They include...
- Users may experience display corruption issues when they set their Samsung Odyssey G9 C49G95T monitor to 5120X1440 @ 240Hz.
- While playing Call of Duty: Warzone, some users may observe visual artifacts when moving the cursor in the in-game menu.
- During Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy gameplay, some users may experience driver timeouts on some AMD graphics products such as Radeon RX 5500 XT Graphics. A temporary workaround is to disable the Radeon Anti-Lag feature in Radeon Software.
- Some users may experience elevated disk space consumption by the Multimedia Athena Dumps folder.
- Visual artifacts may be observed while playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War on some AMD graphics products such as Radeon RX 6800M Graphics.
- While playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds with multiple displays connected in extended mode, Radeon Software may become unresponsive when the user is in the lobby and attempts to open Radeon Software on the secondary display via the context menu. A temporary workaround is to press the Alt + R keyboard shortcut if this happens.
- Enhanced Sync may cause a black screen to occur when enabled on some games and system configurations. Any users who may be experiencing issues with Enhanced Sync enabled should disable it as a temporary workaround.
- Radeon performance metrics and logging features may intermittently report extremely high and incorrect memory clock values.
Hopefully some or all of these bugs will be stomped out in a future driver release. In the meantime, at least there are a few workarounds for about half of the known issues.
In any event, you can pull the latest driver through AMD's Radeon Software utility, or grab and install it manually from AMD's support page.
