AMD FineWine magic still shines brightly in 2025 as test shows massive performance gains

Remember AMD's "Fine Wine technology"? If you don't, Fine Wine is a community-coined term about the substantial performance gains Radeon GPUs often experience over their lifetime, all from driver updates.

We last covered the topic back in 2023, where we tested AMD's claims of improved ray tracing performance with driver 23.2.1, and we found some interesting results. Meanwhile, a year earlier in 2022, the company put out DirectX 11-specific optimizations that showed up to 34% better performance.

Now in 2025, Fine Wine is still relevant, as testing has shown that the latest RX 9070 XT sees significant improvement with the latest 25.6.3 Adrenalin driver. The measurements were conducted by the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed as it compared the new driver against the driver version 24.30.31.03 / 25.3.1 RC that was used for review.

The biggest improvements were seen in Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered and Counter-Strike 2, which saw gains of 27% and 23% in average framerate. Those are literally generational gains these days, as we often see similar differentials going from one GPU architecture generation to the next.

Meanwhile, other titles like Hogwarts Legacy, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, Delta Force, and more, also see big gains of 10% or more. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty saw a 7% uplift, which is still significant. The least significant gain was seen in Starfield, as it was 5% better on the newest driver.

Keep in mind though that these improvements are cumulative and thus if you are already on a much newer driver compared to the launch drivers, you are likely already experiencing some of these improvements. Not every tested title however saw an uplift, so a boost is definitely not guaranteed.

If you are wondering how a simple software update can bring so much to the table, there can be many reasons. Perhaps the newer drivers manage to reduce the CPU overhead greatly compared to the launch ones, or the newer drivers may also be better able to use the hardware resources available to the new RDNA 4 GPUs, or it is probably a mix of both.

Source and image: Hardware Unboxed (YouTube)

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