PC Drivers & Software

[SeismicForce]

Just a note to be aware of this because it's easy to overlook. Yesterday I updated my Radeon driver to 23.5.1 and noticed terrible lagging and stuttering in the 3D shooter game Quake Champions that I play and noticed Adrenalin FPS results were below 60Hz! My display refresh rate is 165Hz so I checked my Windows 11 display properties and it was set to 165Hz there. Then I downgraded back to the previous driver version (that had no problems at all) but it did the same thing there. Then a light bulb went off in my head. I had forgotten about the Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC) setting under Global Graphics. I had it enabled and set to 165Hz but the driver upgrade always resets that back to 60Hz! It made my game unplayable, Doh. So I decided to just disable FRTC and play tested the game and everything was great again. Then I upgraded to 23.5.1 again (with FRTC still disabled) and everything is perfect gaming. To be honest I didn't notice any performance benefit to having FRTC enabled and set to 165Hz before. Yet it's so easy to overlook that setting and not realize that driver updates reset the frame rate to 60Hz default, so I feel it's best to keep that disabled. Maybe AMD can look into that in the future as to why driver updates change a custom Global Graphics setting in the first place. Instead I'm always looking at the custom game graphics profiles, and they don't include the FRTC setting which over time I forgot about. No biggie since I ended up figuring out what happened. Maybe I was using FRTC wrong to begin with and never should have enabled it. I always have to remind myself the KISS principle: "Keep it simple stupid"

System specs: Lian Li Lancool-205 Mesh ATX Case w/ARGB 1x120mm/2x140mm Fans, Intel i7-12700KF CPU, Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L RGB 240mm AIO, G.Skill 2x16GB RipJaws V 3200Mhz XMP RAM, AMD RX 6950 XT 16GB Reference GPU, Western Digital Blue 1TB NVMe OS SSD, WD_Black 1TB NVMe Gaming SSD, 750W Thermaltake ToughPower 80+ Gold PSU, LG 32GP750-B 32" 165Hz 2560x1440 Display.

[PythonCoderPro]

Are you deleting the old driver when updating? If so, it will not keep any custom settings.

[SeismicForce]

No, I did in in-place upgrade from previous version to current version using the Adrenalin interface.

Once in the past I did completely uninstall using the AMD Cleanup Utility, which works great by the way. But I've had no issues except with FRTC doing a normal in-place update using Adrenalin or by downloading the newest driver from the AMD website and manually upgrading the version.

[PythonCoderPro]

OK. In that case I not completely sure why it's doing that.

[SeismicForce]

Not too big a deal as long as people are aware of this it's easy to correct by reapplying the setting or leave it disabled and forget about it.