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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 26 2019, @11:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the game-on! dept.

AMD's Latest Radeon Drivers Finally Bring Official Support to Ryzen Mobile

When Ryzen Mobile launched in October of 2017, most probably did not envision the poor state its drivers would be in for over a year. AMD never released an official driver for its Raven Ridge-based mobile APUs, so users had to rely on OEMs like HP that only released a single driver in November.

But at CES 2019, AMD promised to fix the situation with official support for Ryzen Mobile through its Adrenaline drivers. Those are the same drivers that already supported AMD's desktop APUs based on the same Raven Ridge architecture used for Ryzen Mobile. Today, AMD finally delivered on that promise with its newest 19.2.3 drivers.

According to AMD's release notes, the new driver offers an average of 10% more performance in gaming compared to the October Ryzen Mobile driver, and in eSports titles specifically, an average of 17% more performance. Of the games tested, most of them showed double-digit performance gains, especially Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. These kinds of gains could easily turn an unplayable experience into one that is playable, and such extreme gains are seen because this driver is a year and a half newer than the launch revision.

Also at Engadget.

Related: AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver
AMD Ceases Graphics Driver Development for 32-Bit Operating Systems


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:29AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:29AM (#807373)

    Do many people game on laptops much? I would think that is more a PC activity.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:46AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @12:46AM (#807381)

    I play TBS games like Civ or XCOM on my laptop. I've got a real numpad on it too (Thinkpad W540 I picked up used for cheap), so I play roguelikes as well. I could play most games reasonable well if I had a USB/bluetooth mouse, but that would just be one more thing to carry around and get tangled in with the all the other cords in my bag (does anyone know of any good bags/cases that have lots of pockets to store all the shit? I usually have a 2-foot ethernet, 20 foot ethernet, USB->Serial, USB hub, USB-C cable, MicroUSB cable, headphones, plus various needed devices and a laptop and all the assorted spare batteries, charging cables, etc).

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:07AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:07AM (#807393) Journal

      Just get a Logitech M705 wireless mouse. It just works, and the price can be as low as $15 (I think I got mine at Amazon but I have seen them at Costco and other places).

      If you don't have backpack phobia, a good one should be able to carry one or even two laptops and the rest of your equipment. I don't have a specific recommendation. If that's a no go, try a briefcase/messenger bag. They might have less space for your cables though.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:16AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:16AM (#807397) Journal

      Gotta love the numpad.

      In recent years, laptops have been shrinking the bezel (Dell brands this "InfinityEdge"), allowing a 15.6" display to exist in what used to be about a 14" laptop, and so on. Hopefully this doesn't result in models dropping numpads.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday February 27 2019, @02:42AM (2 children)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday February 27 2019, @02:42AM (#807435) Homepage

      I recommend Granite Gear's Campus series backpacks [granitegear.com] on account of them being cheap, well-padded and suited for the outdoors, pockets and compartments out the ass (mine has an internal zipper compartment designed to hold pens, and a compartment with an external zipper designed with a soft interior shammy texture specifically sized for cellphones, to prevent scratching.

      Any one of them with a dedicated laptop compartment will serve you well.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @04:25AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 27 2019, @04:25AM (#807466)

        Dedicated laptop compartments are racist, sexist, and homophonic. A macbook should be free to mix with the rest of your products and not segregated away like that.

        • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday February 27 2019, @04:36AM

          by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday February 27 2019, @04:36AM (#807470) Homepage

          That's actually how I use mine. I dump my Dell lappy with numpad into the dedicated compartment along with the wireless mouse and charger. Put phone into the shammy pocket and cram whetever else into all the pockets in-between.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:02AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday February 27 2019, @01:02AM (#807389) Journal

    Laptops at around the $500 mark begin to have discrete (mobile) graphics cards, and you have a whole category of "gaming laptops" that are usually $1,000 or more. Some laptops are even packing desktop components with sufficient cooling so that they don't melt. Below all that, you might have only integrated graphics. It might play games at a lower detail setting or resolution, but it can play some games. My laptop from 2011 can handle [notebookcheck.net] titles like Skyrim (a 2011 title if you can believe it) reasonably well. It has the integrated GPU and an entry-level discrete GPU working in CrossFire (allegedly, maybe I have it disabled).

    Integrated GPUs have improved much faster than laptop CPU performance and will continue to do so. As for desktop gaming, the current crop of discrete desktop GPUs are aiming at 4K resolution @ 60 FPS. Here's some benchmarks [anandtech.com] showing the RTX 2060 doing 4K @ 55 FPS in Battlefield 1. Most folks here at SN don't give a shit about 4K, or playing the latest games, and would probably be willing to take an FPS hit all the way down to 30. In my experience, most games these days allow you to adjust detail levels so that they can be run on a very wide range of hardware, your shitty laptop included. After all, studios are porting games to Nintendo Switch.

    I would avoid "12nm" Ryzen Mobile + Vega. It could get absolutely blown out of the water by "7nm" Ryzen + Navi next year. Double the CPU cores? Could happen with the chiplet design.

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday February 27 2019, @04:25PM (1 child)

    by Freeman (732) on Wednesday February 27 2019, @04:25PM (#807662) Journal

    People who get a computer for gaming, don't get a laptop, unless they absolutely must have portability. Even then, you're likely better off with a portable tower + monitor, if you're doing real gaming. Otherwise, it's casual gamers all the way down, with the exception of gamers that have plenty of money to get both a gaming laptop and a gaming desktop. A gaming desktop will outlive a gaming laptop, if due to no other factor than heat management. Even a cramped desktop case has more airflow than pretty much any laptop. Heat is part of the reason why laptops die so quickly. There's also the obvious, laptop is moved around a lot, while the desktop generally just sits there. Most people don't repeatedly drop their desktop on the ground. Whereas, laptops generally take a whole lot more abuse.

    You could also afford a VR Headset + Gaming Desktop for the price of a good gaming laptop. What's more, the good gaming laptop would be worse than the gaming desktop.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"