Benchmark: AMD's new 25.12.1 Windows 11 WHQL driver brings FSR Redstone performance boost

AMD today finally unveiled the details on FSR Redstone at a special keynote. The company alongside it has also released the new driver version 25.12.1 for Windows systems. It is WHQL-certified and interestingly, it brings some performance boost over the previous release.

If you recall, we had tested AMD's Ray Regeneration denoising performance recently in Call of Duty Black Ops 7, and we liked it a lot. We thought it offered a visually clear image quality enhancement over the default game's denoiser.

We again retested the title with the new driver and noticed improvement in performance as well as in visual fidelity.

We have uploaded the two images in before-and-after format below. The visual split between the two is very obvious once you know what to look for. For anyone trying to guess, the "before" is the default denoiser while the "after" screenshot is that of FSR Ray Regeneration.

Before

After

If you notice the reflections on the floor, where the ray tracing effects lie in this game, the "after" image presents a lot more details of the reflections of the different objects. If you notice the couches on the far left, their reflections on the floor are a lot clearer on the after side.

Also the reflections of the cupboard also contain more detail on the FSR side, the overall resolution of the images is definitely much more well defined with ray regeneration on.

We saw a definite improvement in the framerate output in the case of FSR performance, as this time the 9070 XT, on which we ran the test, was faster with ray regeneration than with the default denoiser.

This was a significant uptick over the performance from our last round of testing. Previously, FSR was a bit slower than the default performance while the tables reversed this time as FSR got the lead.

The changelog for the driver is given below:

New Features

• Support for AMD FSR™ “Redstone”

New Product Support

• AMD Radeon™ AI PRO R9600D
• AMD Radeon™ AI PRO R9700S

Fixed Issues

• Radeon Anti-Lag 2 option may not be available while playing Counter-Strike 2 (DX11) with Radeon Anti-Lag 2 enabled on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the Radeon™ RX 9070 XT.
• Intermittent system crashes may be observed while using some high-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 displays during display standby.
• Intermittent application freeze when using the in-game Radeon™ Overlay.
• Intermittent application crash when playing ARC Raiders on the Blue Gate map on Radeon™ RX 9000 series products.

Known Issues

• Intermittent application crash or driver timeout may be observed while loading a saved game in Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing enabled. AMD is actively working on a resolution with the developer to be released as soon as possible.
• Intermittent application crash or driver timeout may be observed while playing Battlefield™ 6 on AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.
• Intermittent application crash or driver timeout may be observed while playing Roblox Player (Car Zone Racing & Drifting) when task switching between media on Radeon™ RX 7000 series products.
• Texture flickering or corruption may appear while playing Battlefield™ 6 with AMD Record and Stream on some AMD Graphics Products.
• Some shadows may not render correctly while playing Call of Duty®: Black Ops 7 on some AMD Graphics Products. AMD is actively working on a resolution with the developer to be released as soon as possible.

You can download the driver on this page from AMD's official website.

Source

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Posted Thursday 11 December 2025 at 3:08 am AEST (my time).

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