AMD's latest Windows 11 driver seemingly brings FineWine magic to ray tracing and much more

Update: We tested the ray tracing performance boost rumors and the results were certainly somewhat interesting.

At long last, AMD released drivers for its AMD Radeon RX 6000 series (RDNA 2) GPUs earlier today. The new driver, version 23.2.1, has some very notable improvements, which include fix for a launch error on Windows 11 22H2 for the 6000 series GPUs. AMD had already resolved the issue on its newer RX 7000 cards.

And although AMD took a long time to finally release new drivers for its 6000 series GPUs, the wait was worth it for Radeon owners as the company highlights excellent performance gains with up to 27% improvement compared to the Windows 11 21H2 launch drivers. In other games, AMD says there is anywhere between 9 to 21% betterment. The tests were conducted on a Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Performance improvement in AMD 2321 driver

AMD says other Radeon 6000 cards will also benefit from the new drivers where the gains can be anywhere from as low as 6% on the Radeon RX 6400 to 20% in case of the more powerful cards and it makes sense as stronger GPUs face more driver overhead issues.

And although not highlighted separately by AMD, some Twitter users claim that the new 23.2.1 driver has huge gains in terms of ray tracing, sometimes by up to 40%. However, these gains may only be confined to synthetic benchmarks like those from UL Benchmarks. Twitter user @JirayD says they gained around 37% performance on an RX 6900 XT in 3DMark's DirectX Ray Tracing feature test with the new driver compared to the older 22.11.2 driver. Meanwhile the Port Royal benchmark only saw a 5% gain. Another Twitter user DOer chimed in on the same thread claiming a 40% improvement, also on a 6900 XT.

Alleged ray tracing performance gain with AMD driver 2321

While the graphics side of things is looking bright for AMD, the CPU side though has had bad news earlier today. That's because stuttering and freezing issues related to fTPM have now begun affecting Linux, something which was Windows-only initially. Though there is some positive news for CPUs as well as AMD has confirmed that it recently fixed a high-severity security flaw in Ryzen Master.

Source: AMD via Twitter (1) , (2)