AMD has announced a ‘special’ driver called: Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition. The main focus of this new graphics driver is to provide users with features, improved performance and stability. Two new features in particular that have caught our attention are: Radeon Chill and Radeon ReLive.
Radeon Chill
The tagline for Radeon Chill is “saving power, while chilling”, which more or less describes what it does. Developed as a result of the HiAlgo acquisition, the way Radeon Chill works is pretty simple: when the software detects lack of movement in a particular game, the graphics card will be put into a power-saving mode.
Several things will take place once this happens. For instance, with ‘Chill’ on, the power consumption of a compatible Radeon graphics card will be reduced by up to 31%. In addition, the Radeon graphics card’s temperature will also be reduced by up to 13%.
The most interesting and worrying trait of the Radeon Chill feature is the fact that it also affects framerates, but in a positive way it seems. It is said that when the feature is turned on, fewer frames will be queued resulting in quicker response times. However, the feature will automatically be disabled once more movements are made. Of course, games that require constant fast-pased action will be added to Radeon Chills’ blacklist; meaning that the feature will be disabled for those games.
Radeon ReLive
The fact that Radeon’s latest driver is named after this feature means that it is rather special. ReLive, finally provides Radeon users with a lightweight tool to stream gameplay onto their favourite streaming platforms like Twitch, YouTube, Panda.TV, and a few others. In addition, users are able to use the ReLive tool to record and take screenshots of gameplay as well.
Radeon’s ReLive tool is said to have minimal impact towards framerates too. The company claims that there is merely a 3% drop in framerates while streaming or recording using ReLive. That aside, the recording tool does come with an in-app toolbar which can be positioned anywhere on the screen. Custom overlays are also supported for gamers who’d like to add more flamboyancy to their stream.
The revamped Radeon Crimson graphics driver (before ReLive) has been doing extremely well, at least according to AMD. In fact, the user approval rating of the graphics driver is currently rated at 4.5/5. Despite this, Radeon doesn’t look like its quite ready to slow down development just yet.
