AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX (RDNA 3) graphics cards seem to have not started off on the right foot, with performance and/or consumption on some fronts not only falling short of the RTX 4080, but also the RX 6900 and RX 6800 XT (RDNA 2). The origin may be due to immature hardware that apparently temporarily scared off some assemblers. Despite this, the red giant has already published the first update of its drivers for Windows to at least mitigate some of the grossest deficiencies that were found.
Version 22.12.2 of the Radeon Software Adrenalin WHQL drivers promises to improve the efficiency of the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards when performing tasks such as video playback, one of the aspects in which these models are most evident compared to their predecessors. AMD hopes to further improve the experience in future driver releases, but for now, these are the issues fixed or mitigated by Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.12.2:
- A possible corruption when using Virtual Super Resolution in multi-monitor setups.
- A system crash when changing display modes in quad-monitor setups.
- When loading the Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales video game, you may experience an application crash or driver timeout after enabling the ray tracing setting.
- Improvements to power usage during hardware-accelerated video playback. AMD expects to include more improvements on this front in the near future.
As is customary for hardware giants, when they release new drivers, they acknowledge the existence of several issues that are still present. In this case, we encountered high idle power consumption when using certain high-resolution, high-refresh-rate displays, as well as application crashes or driver timeouts when using Radeon Super Resolution with some extended display configurations.
AMD has also acknowledged the presence of stuttering or performance degradation when playing games and video on some extended display configurations, stuttering during the opening sequence of UNCHARTED 4: A Thief's End, driver timeouts or crashes in Vulkan API, and certain games or applications experiencing lower than expected performance in virtual reality environments.
Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.12.2 can be downloaded by clicking a link that can be seen in the driver release notes. The installer package (the file .exe) is officially supported on Windows 10 1809 or later 64-bit and Windows 11 21H2 or later. For Linux, if you don't use the proprietary driver (which has limited compatibility with very few distributions), all that's left is to wait for the drivers to mature with new kernel and Mesa releases.
