14 DAY TRIAL // Radeon Crimson Driver is the replacement from AMD meant to help retire the old Catalyst, and it will arrive really soon. AMD is saying that the performance in some Linux games will increase by at least 112%.
When you read 112%, you’ll think that it’s some kind of mistake or that the person who put together the slides doesn’t have a proper understanding of how percentages work. On the other hand, we need to take AMD’s word at face value and believe that’s OK.
The performance increases for new drivers are usually a lot smaller than this number. Gamers will be happy to see a 10 or 15% performance boost, but 112% and sometimes higher, depending on the game, is fantastic news, and it could put AMD in front of Nvidia, at least for the Linux platform.
AMD doesn’t have the best track record on Linux, and there are few users who can dispute that. The driver support for AMD hardware is spotty, at best, sometimes they don’t even provide release notes, new drivers land at odd intervals, and a few developers choose to release games without support for AMD video cards.
Radeon Crimson Driver is a new beginning
The new Radeon Crimson Driver is supposed to launch today, or at least this is the rumor. The developers from Radeon Technologies Group did not single out platforms, so it looks like Linux will get the same kind of treatment. It’s even possible that AMD will also have the first proper installer for video drivers, but let’s not get our hopes up.
According to VideoCardz.com, which leaked slides from the AMD Radeon Software Crimson presentation, Bioshock Infinite performance will increase by 112%, Total War by 155%, Portal 2 by 115%, and DOTA 2 by 113%. These are just a few titles, but presumably AMD chose them because they show the biggest increases. We’ll know more once the drivers have been officially released.
