Graphic Design Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX (RDNA 3) from AMD don’t seem to be getting off on the right foot, with performance and/or consumption on some fronts not only falling short of the RTX 4080, but also the RX 6900 and RX 6800 XT (RDNA 2). The origin may be due to immature hardware, which seems to have temporarily scared off some assemblers. Despite this, the red giant has already released the first update of its Windows drivers to at least mitigate some of the more serious flaws found.

Version 22.12.2 of the Radeon Software Adrenalin WHQL drivers promises to improve the efficiency of the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards when performing tasks such as video playback, which is one of the aspects in which these models have more evidence compared to its predecessors. AMD hopes to further improve the experience in future driver releases, but for now these were issues that have been fixed or mitigated Radeon Software Adrenaline 22.12.2:

• Possible corruption when using virtual super resolution in multi-display setups.
• System freezes when changing display mode in quad display configurations.
• When loading the Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales video game after enabling ray tracing settings, the application may crash or the driver may time out.
• Improved power consumption during hardware-accelerated video playback. AMD hopes to include more improvements on this front in the near future.

As is customary with hardware giants when they release new drivers, they acknowledge the existence of various issues that are still present. In this case, we find high idle power consumption when using certain high-resolution, high-refresh rate displays, as well as application crashes or driver timeouts when using Radeon Super Resolution with some extended display configurations.

AMD has also acknowledged the presence of stuttering or performance drops in gaming and video playback on some extended display configurations, stuttering during the opening sequence of UNCHARTED 4: A Thief’s End, driver timeout or app crash for Valheim video game with Vulkan APIin addition to certain games or applications that offer performance beyond expectations in a virtual reality environment.

Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.12.2 can be downloaded by clicking the link provided in the driver release notes. The installation package (file .exe) is officially compatible with Windows 10 1809 or later 64-bit and Windows 11 21H2 or later. Unless you’re using a proprietary driver for Linux (which has limited compatibility with very few distributions), you have to wait for the drivers to mature with new kernel and Mesa releases.