AMD's new AI to fix Windows driver issues with no performance loss, privacy concerns

AMD finally unveiled its new RDNA 4-based Radeon RX 9000 series desktop graphics cards. As always, alongside the hardware, AMD also announced new software upgrades that will be available for the GPUs starting with driver version 25.3.1.

AMD has made it abundantly clear in its presentation that RDNA 4's biggest leap in performance improvement is in the case of AI processing, and this was a good move by Team Red given that we saw Nvidia easily outpacing Radeon GPUs in terms of AI and ML performance throughput. In our review of the RX 9070, we certainly saw some massive upgrades much like AMD had promised.

As such, leveraging this AI boost in its hardware, the new Radeon Software will pack a feature called "AMD Image Inspector" which will use a convolutional neural network (CNN) that's "trained on more than 100 games" to detect gameplay corruptions and screen artifacts and thus reporting of game and display-related driver bugs and issues should improve tremendously. AMD's approach makes sense given that CNNs excel at image pattern recognition and processing.

If you recall, a report back in early 2023 suggested that Nvidia was working on such a feature that would use AI to optimize display drivers and AMD's new Image Inspector sounds similar to that.

This should be a welcome feature given that Radeon GPUs are infamous for "driver issues" and some of them like the TDR driver timeout bug have been fairly widespread problems. Credit to AMD where due, the company has been hard at work to fix problems such as these (remember the RGD tool?).

AMD promises the utmost respect for user privacy. On its Image Inspector whitepaper, the company explains how:

AMD Image Inspector prioritizes your privacy and gaming experience. The feature must be explicitly turned on.

Once it is enabled, AMD Image Inspector begins monitoring when it detects a game from the driver’s Games list. The feature operates in exclusive or borderless full screen mode so
that only your game content is captured. And its default mode is to prompt you for review. Nothing is sent until you give the go-ahead.

Privacy issues aside, if you are wondering about the performance concerns of this new feature since it will capture data while you play, AMD once again says that the Image Inspector tool is designed to be resource-efficient as it only samples data during periods your graphics card is not under heavy load already and thus, there should not be hitches or stutters or skips if we are to believe AMD.

AMD Image Inspector helps maintain performance by sampling only when GPU utilization is low enough for minimal impact on gameplay.

The footnotes mention that the feature was tested on Windows 11 version 23H2 and with Microsoft also making driver timeout debugging easier on Windows 11 24H2, AMD driver issues could become a thing of the past on Windows.

Alongside AMD Image Inspector, the Radeon Adrenalin software is also getting the new AMD Chat, a built-in AI chatbot in the driver that will help users navigate through and enable/disable the various features and options in the driver via simple queries.

Not only that, it will also help users generate images, and summarize local documents, among other similar tasks.

Along with these, a couple of new features called AMD AI Apps Manager and AMD Install Manager are also landing with this new driver. The former will work similar to how the Gaming tab works currently in the driver UI. Essentially, all the AI apps can be monitored in that place.

Meanwhile, the Install Manager is said to bring a better driver installation experience with more customization options.