AMD Delivers Crimson ReLive Drivers: Yearly Feature Update for Radeon Gamers and Professionals

Crimson 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 4^th 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.