AMD Radeon 21.10.3 driver brings hefty optimizations for Age of Empires IV and others

AMD's driver team has aimed its sights on several new game releases with the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.10.3 suite, and major optimizations are being made for Age of Empires IV and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Ubisoft's Riders Republic (October 28) and Doom Eternal's latest update 6.66 have also received support in this release.

Going into the details, those with cards from the red team running Age of Empires IV when it releases on Thursday, October 28, will be able to see performance uplifts of up to 45% over the last driver. This massive increase in frame rates was seen using an RX 6800 XT with the game running at 4K maximum settings. Read our review of the RTS game here, where it received an outstanding 9/10 verdict.

Meanwhile, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is launching on October 26, and with this driver, AMD says it saw performance increases of up to 21% on both an RX 6900 XT and an RX 6800 XT with the title running at 4K ultra settings. This is another game we have a review for reading, with it also receiving a stellar 9/10 verdict.

While it's unclear how these performance boosts will apply to other GPU families of AMD, suffice to say, the driver is a recommended install for anyone wanting to play the mentioned games at launch.

The fixed issues in this release are as follows:

• In Radeon™ Software, the CPU Tuning feature may be missing for some users with AMD Processors such as Ryzen™ 9 5950X Processor.
• Some users may experience elevated disk space consumption by the Multimedia Athena Dumps folder.
• While playing a game, some users may experience a black screen flicker if they have multiple displays connected and they attempt to switch between open windows (via Alt + Tab shortcut).
• Battlefield™ V may crash during gameplay on some AMD Graphics products such as Radeon™ RX 6600 Graphics.
• Image corruption may be observed on some characters when Radeon™ Boost is enabled while playing Cyberpunk 2077® on some AMD Graphics products such as Radeon™ RX 6700 XT Graphics.

Known issues to keep an eye out for are these:

• Users may experience display corruption issues when they set their Samsung™ Odyssey G9 C49G95T monitor to 5120X1440 @ 240Hz.
• Visual artifacts may be observed while playing Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War on some AMD Graphics products such as Radeon™ RX 6800M Graphics.
• AMD Radeon™ Software may crash or become unresponsive while playing some DirectX® 11 games such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds™ with multiple displays connected in extended mode.
• Enhanced Sync may cause a black screen to occur when enabled on some games and system configurations. Any users who may be experiencing issues with Enhanced Sync enabled should disable it as a temporary workaround.
• Radeon performance metrics and logging features may intermittently report extremely high and incorrect memory clock values.

The Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.10.3 optional driver is now available for download on the Radeon Settings app on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Standalone download links are listed on the official release notes page here.

AMD Radeon 21.10.3 driver brings hefty optimizations for Age of Empires IV and others