AMD's latest Radeon Software Adrenalin driver package, optimized for F1 2021, a new racing simulation developed by Codemasters, promises performance gains of up to 26%. This is definitely on the higher end of the types of performance gains that GPU driver upgrades typically offer.

These numbers are based on AMD's own testing (not by us) and are based on a Radeon RX 6800 XT, playing games at 1080p Ultra High settings. The rest of the testbed consists of a Ryzen 9 5900X processor and 16GB of DDR4 memory. Also, ray tracing is turned off.

As noted in our review of F1 2021, the game runs quite well at 1080p even without the latest hardware.

Naturally, your mileage may vary depending on your particular GPU and platform, but at least there is potential for massive and free performance improvements with AMD's latest driver package (version 21.7.1). The release notes also mention that playing at 4K and with ray tracing turned on could see performance gains of up to 6%. Not bad.

Besides the performance gains in F1 2021, AMD's drivers have been adjusted for the company's Radeon RX 6700M and 6600M mobile GPUs. It also includes a half-dozen bug fixes. They include:

AMD also lists a number of known issues that have yet to be resolved. One of them affects the Game Compatibility advisor in the Radeon Software utility, which incorrectly tells some users that their CPU and/or GPU do not meet the minimum requirements to play a particular game, even though their hardware supports the task. to play certain games, even though their hardware is capable of the task.

Obtain a driver update from the Radeon software utility or from AMD's driver download page and install it manually. if you are using Ryzen Master, before it appears in the utility Note that a system reboot may be required (again, a known issue).