AMD has released a new Radeon BETA GPU driver which adds support for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and marks the return of the HAGS feature.
AMD’s New Radeon Adrenaline “BETA” GPU Driver Supports Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling Returns!
AMD’s new Adrenalin Edition 23.30.13.01 has brought in support for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which launches on the 7th of December and is an AMD-sponsored title that will get exclusive optimizations for Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs. The game also comes bundled with the latest Ryzen 7000 CPUs and Radeon 7000 GPUs as reported here. Here is the driver’s changelog, to give you an idea of what the new drivers packs for consumers:
New Feature Highlights
- New Game Support
- Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Known Issues
- Audio may intermittently become out of sync with video when recording from AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition with AV1 codec.
- Intermittent corruption may be observed on the racetrack while playing EA Sports WRC.
- Stars may intermittently fail to appear while playing Crysis Remastered.
- Intermittent micro-stuttering may be experienced when running Chromium-based browsers on systems that pair a Radeon RX 7000 series GPU with a secondary display connected to an AMD Ryzen 7000 series processor.
Besides the routine changes, another interesting inclusion is support for the iconic HAGS (hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling). Although the feature hasn’t been mentioned in the company’s official documents, individuals at the Guru3D forum were able to spot the enablement of the feature suggesting a potential revival of the feature in current times. Support for HAGS was last spotted on an AMD driver back in 2020, which was targeted to the RX 5000 lineup but, after that, the feature saw the dust, and was to be found nowhere.
In terms of what HAGS actually is, it is basically a “task scheduler” for a GPU, that allows it to manage its video memory and scheduling tasks, potentially improving performance and reducing latency in certain scenarios. The feature was introduced with the release of Windows 10, and although HAGS acted as a great mechanism for the management of graphic-intensive tasks, it had no evidence that showed any sort of performance improvement, which was a primary reason why the support for the feature was discontinued back in 2021.
The reason for the enablement of HAGS in today’s day and age isn’t specified yet, however, one important thing to note is that this driver is completely separated from the mainstream ones, which shows that either AMD wants to test out the feature with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, or it might be for something else that we aren’t aware of yet. Team Red is currently working on numerous software technologies such as the Anti-Lag+ and Fluid Motion Frames, and it will be interesting to see how the future pans out for the Radeon platform.
News Sources: Videocardz, Harukaze5719
