Ray tracing enhancements for the RX 6000-series are not officially mentioned in the release notes for the most recent AMD Adrenalin 23.2.1 drivers, however, some Twitter users are reporting increases of roughly 40% in 3DMark. Unfortunately, it appears that, with the exception of Doom Eternal, none of the games that support RT benefit from these benefits.
Finally, AMD released the most recent Andrenalin GPU drivers that support both the new RX 7000 cards and the RX 6000 cards from the previous generation. Version 23.2.1 appears to be specifically designed for RX 6000 GPUs, as measured by average performance gains of 5% over the October 2021 drivers. Surprisingly, the most recent drivers also enhance ray tracing performance, but the release notes make no mention of this feature.
Photo Credit: Wccftech
AMD’s GPU driver support is often spotty, and this is especially problematic for recently released generations. Not to mention the early bugs that mysteriously escape QA, forcing AMD to hurry up with a remedy. Even while the RX 7000-series is outperforming the previous generation, there is no doubt that AMD’s first drivers left some performance on the table and could have used a little more polish.
This most likely also occurred with the RX 6000-series. With each new driver version, the RDNA 2 GPUs, which have been available for more than two years, continue to gain performance. Most RX 6000 cards can experience a substantial performance increase simply by installing the most recent Adrenalin 23.2.1 drivers. If AMD’s promises about performance improvements are to be believed, some games have seen performance increases since the initial RX 6000 launch that are close to 50%.
A few Twitter users are displaying 3DMark results that indicate increases in ray tracing performance of up to approximately 40%. Any improvement should be welcome news because AMD’s RX 6000 ray tracing technology seemed pretty lacking in comparison to what Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series was touting.
Photo Credit: HardwarEsfera
According to Twitter user Ayxerious, Doom Eternal is the only game that benefits from ray tracing. If ray tracing has been enhanced for the RX 7000-series, it is still unknown. With new driver releases, AMD should be able to provide the RDNA 3 cards with something comparable but more reliable.
