AMD Delivers Crimson ReLive Drivers: Yearly Feature Update for Radeon Gamers and Professionals
by Ian Cutress on December 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTCrimson ReLive: Radeon Pro Drivers
The rebrand of the FirePro line of professional GPUs to Radeon Pro has been, as probably expected by the professional environment, a slow and steady trek. Over the past couple of years, a number of initiatives from AMD to integrate professional style workflows into something that can be optimized under AMD have been in place. As a result AMD is making the launch of this next generation package a marked uptick for an increased level of platform testing, ISV certification, and more stress testing under professional level requirements.
This extends to performance as well, particularly on popular software on both older FirePro and the new Radeon Pro cards.
With the ReLive update, AMD is committing to Enterprise users (data centers, HPC, large clients) that there will be a regular cadence of driver updates throughout 2017, with the 4th Thursday of each quarter (so 1/26, 4/27, 7/27 and 10/26) marked for official releases.
The Radeon Pro drivers and the regular drivers, despite still being separate packages, are set to integrate more common features between them during 2017. This includes game engine support, allowing professional workflows to take advantage of DX12 for CAD visualization or modeling in Unity with professional cards. LiquidVR will also come to the Pro driver set for specific cards (WX7100, Pro Duo, W9100), enabling VR workflows for a number of ISV packages as shown below.
The Radeon Pro driver for Linux is also being improved with AMD offering an both open source driver core as well as a proprietary driver set. The latter was explained as specifically pointing to larger install/professional bases that might have additional IP requirements to which an open-source implementation might not be sufficient. Nonetheless, this means FreeSync 1.0 on Linux, improved performance for Pro WX and FirePro W cards under Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS.
The launch of ReLive for Radeon Pro will also include support for vmware vSphere 6.5, allowing direct GPU virtualization for FirePro S7100X/S7150/S7150 X2 cards and deterministic performance across multiple VMs. AMD is keen to stress that there are no licensing fees for this and these drivers in virtualized environments also come with a number of high-priority ISV certifications that a number of customers demand.
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valinor89 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
I have tried the Relive recording and I get crashes on my Gigabyte R9 280x saying the vcore is unstable. My card has a 1100 factory overclock and the voltage is stuck at 1,200v. I have been using OBs with VCE and I have no problems, but seems like something in the new Relive feature doesn't like my card. Also, having the record logo all the time is anoying, specially as it also appears in the video.TLDR: Your mileage might vary
Senti - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
> At present the system does not offer recommendations as to what to buy (or where), or where to read reviews on potential upgrades. I highly recommend a site I know called AnandTech. I’m sure you’ve heard of it?Yeah, I've heard it used to be great hardware site. Now all it can do is fancy-print marketing slides. For example, Tom already posted benchmarks of Radeon Chill while we likely won't see anything substantiation for weeks.
Michael Bay - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
You forgot your 960 whine.Senti - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
You can write your 960 whine, don't be shy. Otherwise people would have no idea what it means.darckhart - Thursday, December 8, 2016 - link
then again, drivers are now 200 MB downloads where they used to be 25 MB at most...valinor89 - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Mine was a 440 MB download with all the software... I guess those include the almost legacy CGN drivers for my 280x and they can streamline the ones for the new 400 series.Gigaplex - Saturday, December 10, 2016 - link
It's half a gig (499MB) on the AMD download site...Michael Bay - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
Presentation that by all rights should have been titled "look, our drivers are not as awful anymore!".Jesus christ.
AndrewJacksonZA - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
"H.265 encoding has been a part of GPUOpen, but with the new launch the tools are being expanded for in-game DX12 frame processing."Is that technology used while recording gameplay to disk, or else when is it used? BF1 was shown, which prompted me to think that it's for gameplay recording.
zodiacsoulmate - Friday, December 9, 2016 - link
85M download... i have to download different version 10 times to get a working one. i guess i contributed