AMD has released a new GPU driver (v21.2.2) with several bug fixes including games that are over 20 years old. Installing the latest driver eliminates corruption when loading and playing games. This is great, but the biggest benefit is not even mentioned in the release notes.

After seeing reports that the release of the 21.2.2 driver improved performance in the mesh shader test, a new feature of UL in 3DMark, I decided to test it on my AMD RX 6800 XT graphics card. I tested it twice, once with the previous driver and once with the latest release of the driver. And lo and behold, there was a big difference: [because in this functional test, we do a first pass with mesh shaders disabled, then a second pass with mesh shaders turned on, and compare the difference.

Using the previous driver release, with Mesh Shaders enabled, performance improved by about 677 percent, from 28.09 fps (baseline) to 218.5 fps. Not bad, or so we thought. But when the latest driver was applied, mesh shader performance improved by 1,569 percent, to 468.77 fps. Compared to the older driver, the new driver improved Mesh Shader performance by about 115 percent.

It is clear that AMD's software engineers spent a lot of time optimizing the latest GPU drivers, and this makes all the difference when using Mesh Shaders. We hope that this will eventually be reflected in actual gameplay. [In addition to the Quake III Arena cleanup, the release notes also fix an issue where objects would sometimes not render correctly when using Blender's EEVEE render on Radeon RX 400 and 500 series hardware. Also, Wolfenstein: also addresses below expected performance in Wolfenstein: Youngblood when AMD Smart Access Memory is enabled.

On the flip side, there are half a dozen known issues that have yet to be resolved. Of these, the most concerning is a CPU spike related to AMD's Radeon Software utility.

"AMD is currently investigating reports from end users that Radeon Software CPU usage can be higher than expected even when the system is idle. Users experiencing this issue are encouraged to file a bug report with Radeon Software.

Some of the related complaints are more than a year old. For example, a December 2019 post on AMD's community forum from a user claiming that the Ryzen 5 2600 "constantly sits between 13 percent and 20 percent utilization and the clock speed is stuck at 3.6 GHz" and the Radeon Software utility shows 12 percent utilization in Task Manager.

In any case, the latest drivers can be downloaded from Radeon Software or obtained from AMD's driver page and installed manually.