AMD Radeon Software 16.3 is the driver for Hitman, Vulkan support and external graphics cards

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition became the first game to launch sharply with the new DirectX 12 interface and the problems were many, not least with Radeon graphics cards. Performance improvements for this game and not least official support for the upcoming Hitman are on the agenda when AMD releases a new driver.

In the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3, AMD promises up to 60 percent higher performance in Gears of War: Ultimate Edition with Radeon R9 Nano, R9 Fury and R9 Fury X compared to version 16.2.1. For the Radeon R9 380 and R9 380X, this should be a lift of up to 44 percent. In addition, up to 16 percent better performance is promised in Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Among the news in the driver are official support and Crossfire profiles for Hitman, but also sharp support for Vulkan 1.0 which Nvidia introduced in its latest driver. AMD is also rolling out Xconnect Technology, which enables graphics cards in the Radeon 300 series to be connected externally via Thunderbolt (USB Type-C).

In addition to performance fixes for Gears of War and new features, AMD corrects previous problems, such as the fact that some graphics cards have not been able to maintain clock speeds and thus suffered from substandard performance. The company is also said to have fixed the crashes with tessellation on in Rise of the Tomb Raider, which also gets a performance boost of up to 16 percent with Fiji-based graphics cards.

AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 is available for download on the company’s official website. The software works with Windows 7 or later in 32 and 64 bits.