AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive offers ShadowPlay clone and Radeon Chill

I was about to log off and call it a night but interesting news about a major driver release from AMD just crossed my desk. Over a year ago, AMD introduced the first Radeon Software "Crimson Edition" driver and soon we can expect the launch of the first Radeon Software "Crimson ReLive Edition" drivers.

VideoCardz got its hands on all the slides of an AMD presentation about the new ReLive drivers. There are more than 80 slides that detail the new features for the consumer and Radeon Pro cards so I'll just cover some of the highlights.

AMD ReLive = NVIDIA ShadowPlay clone
First up is ReLive, this is one of the big new features of this driver release - it's basically a clone of the NVIDIA ShadowPlay tool. It allows you to capture, customize and share your game sessions, and unlike NVIDIA's tool it doesn't require online registration. The performance impact of using ReLive will amount to about 3-4 percent in most games.



AMD Radeon Chill can lower your power consumption by throttling the framerate
Radeon Chill is an optional feature that can be used to lower the power consumption (and thus also the temperature and noise level) of your video card. It works by throttling back the framerate when the driver detects there's not much going on in your game, for example when you're standing still. As soon as you start moving again, Radeon Chill will automatically increase the framerate to ensure you don't notice anything of what's happening behind the scenes.

It's going to be interesting to see if it works as advertised, especially because AMD notes the benefits of Radeon Chill will depend on the game and on the performance of your system. Furthermore, the company also claims Radeon Chill actually has the potential to decrease the amount of input-to-response lag. There are some caveats though, Radeon Chill only works with DirectX 9, 10 and 11 games, newer APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan aren't supported at launch. Not all games will support Radeon Chill support, AMD says they need to add support on a per-game basis.

In AMD's best-case scenarios, the use of Radeon Chill can lower average GPU power consumption by up to 31 percent and lower average GPU temperature by up to 13 percent. The technology also promises to lower average frame-time delivery to display by up to 32 percent.



Other changes and performance gains
Besides the two big features mentioned above, the ReLive driver also features a list of stability enhancements and some minor feature updates like FreeSync support for borderless fullscreen mode, as well as WattMan support for the Radeon 200/300/Fury series video cards, support for Displayort HBR3 and VP9 decode acceleration.

Gamers can look forward to some minor performance gains. In games like Ashes of the Singularity, Batman: Arkham Knight, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Shadow of Mordor, and Overwatch they promise gains of up to 4 to 8 percent if you have a Radeon RX 480. The caveat here is AMD is comparing against the six-month old RX 480 launch driver, so if you keep your drivers up-to-date it will probably amount to a very minor performance boost.



The footer of the slides says the information is under NDA until December 8 @ 9.00 AM EST. Presumably that's the time when the drivers will become available to the public.