AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson Edition arrives, and NVIDIA feels a disturbance in the force

A large portion of your PC gaming experience is governed by the GPU you’re using, so it’s no wonder that NVIDIA vs. AMD has always been a hotly debated topic.

NVIDIA has the clout and holds dominion over a good portion of the market; and AMD, forever nipping at the heels of NVIDIA, is more than just an underdog.

For AMD, however, it’s not their lacklustre marketing efforts that has so often detracted from their sales performance.

Make no mistake, AMD’s recent GPU offerings have been superb and more than a competition for NVIDIA. Instead, it’s their drivers that hold them back. And we’re talking about more than NVIDIA’s GameWorks suite.

A recent, really rather poignant, example of what we’re on about is with Fallout 4, something Digital Foundry pointed out in feature that questioned what it took to run the game at 1080p with GPUs at various price ranges.

The Radeon R9 390 has more computational grunt than its counterpart, the GTX 970, and yet, in the case of Fallout 4, the GTX 970 happily blitzkriegs the R9 390 – we’re taking general frame rates as wells maximum/ideal frame rate uptime.

Ultra settings	Lowest FPS	Average FPS	Dropped Frames
Radeon R9 390 1080p	34.0	53.5	1630 (10.9% of total output)
Radeon R9 390 1440p	28.0	51.3	2170 (14.6% of total output)
GeForce GTX 970 1080p	52.0	59.6	91 (0.6% of total output)
GeForce GTX 970 1440p	36.0	53.2	1700 (11.3% of total output)

Enter AMD’s latest Radeon Software Crimson Edition, and hopefully, a new chapter in AMD graphical performance.

Arguably the most significant graphics driver update for Radeon users in, perhaps, ever, Catalyst Software has been replaced by a far prettier, faster and more capable driver software suite.

The gist of this new software package is a much faster and more feature-packed UI, courtesy of a new and improved user experience, an all-new control panel, near instantaneous start-up, a built-in bug report system and a more intuitive experience in general.

Think of it as AMD’s answer to, up until this point, the far, far superior NVIDIA Experience software package.

There’s a heck of a lot to be found in Crimson Edition, all of which is covered in a very comprehensive look at the new driver suite by Anandtech and WCCF Tech.

The conclusion both sites came to: not only is Crimson Edition enriched with useful features, but it offers small frame rate improvements to a large array of titles, from modern titles like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and the notorious Batman: Akham Knight to Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3.

No single addition made by AMD’s Crimson Edition software suite is going to blow you away, but the sum of the additions and improvements made is another story.

Those of us with NVIDIA cards have rarely considered AMD, simply because their driver support has lagged far behind; that’s all changed.