AMD’s new drivers boost graphics quality with Radeon RX 5700 GPUs

Image credit: Future (Image credit: Future)

AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards are now on sale, and so the company has made a fresh set of graphics drivers available which give these new GPUs a boost in terms of better visuals, with other benefits besides.

The Adrenalin 19.7.1 drivers provide what’s known as Radeon Image Sharpening for RX 5700 models under DirectX 9, DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. This gives you contrast-adaptive sharpening and also (optional) GPU upscaling, which basically helps provide a better level of detail and crisper graphics in general.

As we noted in our review of the AMD RX 5700, this technology should sharpen up a game’s graphics nicely without causing any weird artefacts or other visual disturbances.

That said, there is a known issue with Radeon Image Sharpening and the 19.17.1 drivers, and this is that the Radeon Overlay may flicker under DX9 or Vulkan.

Lag reduction

Another interesting introduction with these drivers is Radeon Anti-Lag, which can be enabled under settings for DX9 and DX11, and this improves the response time – the time taken for your mouse or keyboard input to be registered and actually happen on your monitor – by up to 31%, AMD claims. In other words, almost a third less lag with your gaming peripherals.

Other changes include a new power gauge readout in the Performance Metrics Overlay and Radeon WattMan, and a useful addition for AMD Radeon Chill, which as AMD notes: “Now supports display-aware tuning which sets frame-rate caps to match your monitor’s refresh rate providing up to 2.5x more power savings than before.”

Head here for the full notes on everything that’s new, and all the known issues, with the Adrenalin 19.7.1 drivers.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).