AMD has released a new Radeon driver, Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.1.1, which promises a significant performance boost for IO Interactive's latest video game, Hitman 3. By our calculations, this is enough improvement for the AMD RX 6800 XT to lead rival Nvidia's RTX 3080, which had lagged behind with older driver versions.

Moving to the test bench and intensive Dartmoor benchmark scene and using the latest drivers, the RX 6800 XT's performance at 4K improved by 18 percent, from 93 fps to 110 fps, no small improvement.

At 1440p, the improvement was a more modest but very welcome 6 percent; at 1080p, the numbers are a few frames lower, from plus one or two percent. Thus, some may not see much difference in performance at lower resolutions. [This boost is enough to give the RX 6800 XT a 9 percent lead over the RTX 3080 at 4K, a tentative victory for AMD in the constant back-and-forth battle for gaming dominance between the two companies.

There is one possibility, however: Nvidia has yet to release its own graphics drivers, so it may gain a bit once Nvidia becomes "Game Ready." We must say that it is a bit odd not to see Nvidia Game Ready drivers at game launches.

We contacted Nvidia to see if they had any plans to release a bespoke driver for "Hitman 3". We would not be too surprised if Nvidia releases drivers in the near future.

AMD's new 21.1.1 driver also provides official support for Quake II RTX and a large number of bug fixes; Quake II RTX was pre-functional on RX 6000 series GPUs with the necessary Ray accelerators, and now AMD has given the official green light.

Fixed Issues

Known Issues

The Oculus Link fix will be a pleasant surprise for those hoping to use standalone VR headsets connected to a PC.

The latest AMD drivers can be downloaded from the support site.