AMD today released their yearly driver update called Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition v18.2.2. (release notes). For the past three years, the company has been releasing year-end feature-packed updates to Radeon Software. The 2017 version saw the introduction of Radeon Software "Adrenalin", before which we had Crimson/ReLive and Omega. The company also sped up its driver release cycle to match AAA game releases, and over the years, increased its reliability score and customer satisfaction. With Radeon Software Adrenalin, AMD is targeting three key consumer segments: Gamers, Enthusiasts, and Creators.

Gamers and Enthusiasts aren't mutually exclusive groups. By Gamers, AMD implies users focused on gaming without much in the way of PC tuning. AMD pieced together a graph showing 15 percent performance gains year-on-year, compared Adrenalin 17.12.1 from a year ago. Just to clarify, this update brings no significant performance improvements, rather AMD chose to get those improvements out as quickly as possible, so that gamers can immediately benefit from them. Another graph shows the gains AMD made over the year in improving competitive eSports performance of its graphics cards, by lowering 99th percentile frame-time, click-to-response, and increasing frame-rates in key eSports titles "Fortnite," PUBG, and Dota 2. This is where AMD's huge list of features for this release begins.

Game Advisor is an extension of Radeon Overlay that lets you optimize hardware and game settings while playing. You get real-time frame-rate and 99th percentile frame-time read-outs, along with a list of recommendations on which specific game settings you could change to improve your eye-candy or performance. Settings Advisor is essentially an "easy-mode" for Radeon Settings when not gaming. It suggests the best display settings specific to your hardware environment. Even for power users, it's a nice list of shortcuts for the most used settings. Upgrade Advisor is a more subjective feature. It lists out your installed games, and checks if your GPU, CPU, and memory meet the game's minimum and recommended system requirements, and suggests hardware upgrade (which of course includes AMD products).

AMD classifies enthusiasts as users who are fully aware of not just in-game video settings, but also hardware tuning. The company made additions to key features used by enthusiasts, beginning with WattMan. WattMan now supports automatic overclocking and undervolting. Auto-overclocking tries to make overclocking simpler by automatically finding the highest stable values for either GPU clock or memory (you can't request auto-overclocking for both at the same time). We tested this and found that it gives a decent indicator of what to expect, without getting even close to what manual overclocking can do. This makes for a great starting point for additional manual overclocking. An issue with automatic GPU overclocking is that WattMan will only test the highest clock state and not the whole voltage-frequency curve (like NVIDIA's driver does). All RX Vega cards run at dynamic clock speeds and almost never at their highest clock state, which means that this auto-overclocking really doesn't have any effect on gaming, because the card switches to a lower DPM state after a few seconds, which is still set to default clock.