If you have a gaming PC and have decided to go the less traveled (but still scenic) AMD route for your graphics card, then you will be familiar with Radeon Software Settings – formerly known as "Radeon Settings". and long before that as an AMD Catalyst control center. For most people, this is probably a no-go zone, and you're very happy to let each game decide what graphics settings work best for you.
ContentsGraphicsRadeon Anti-LagRadeon ChillRadeon BoostRadeon Image SharpnessWait for Vertical RefreshAnti-AliasingAnti-Aliasing MethodMorphological Filtering (MLAA)Anisotropic Filtering ModeTexture Filtering QualitySurface Format OptimizationTessellation ModeOpenGL Triple BufferReset Shader CacheRadeon Display SettingsAMD FreeSyncVirtual Super ResolutionUpgrading GPU scaling Vari-Bright scaling modeUse it wisely, though, and this tool can kick your game up a few notches. So to help you out, here's a list of all the major features you'll find in the Radeon Software Settings, with a particular focus on the "Games" and "Display" sections.
This feature is designed to reduce input lag by ensuring that CPU and GPU speeds are in sync with each other. That sounds great, especially with its promise of up to 32% input lag reduction, but in reality a given game needs to support the feature, which may limit its benefits.
There's a lot of talk about what type of games this feature benefits the most from, and it seems like you should turn it off for CPU-bound games lest you suffer a performance penalty. Beyond that, it seems to work best for games that run in the 60-90fps range.
To give you an idea of how well it works, we'll direct you to Reddit, where Redditor Guerbest recently posted an article showing the difference before/after it can make to an image. Awesome stuff.
It works based on a percentage slider, so we recommend starting at 50% and then increasing or decreasing it depending on the quality/performance you get out of it.
It's a bit of a roundabout way of saying "VSync" (Vertical Sync), which you may have heard of. If you have a game running at a higher frame rate (fps) than your monitor's refresh rate (Hz), you may see jagged horizontal lines on your screen, called screen tearing. VSync combats this by limiting your GPU's frame rate to your monitor's refresh rate.
Click on the "Advanced" button just below all the features we mentioned above, and a whole load of extra graphics settings will pop up for you. Starting with…
Especially on screens with lower resolutions, diagonal lines in video games (which are made up of individual square pixels) can appear jagged and "jagged" rather than smooth. Antialiasing (AA) solves this problem by effectively filling in the gaps in these jagged lines to smooth them out.
If you choose the "Improve Application Settings" option, it will use something called "Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing", which overlays your AA game settings to further smooth the edges. If you choose "Override Application Settings", it will use the settings described below.
There are three types of anti-aliasing you can use in Radeon Settings:
A type of AMD-specific anti-aliasing that claims to have a similar effect to SSAA but with less impact on performance. In reality, its effectiveness varies from game to game, so it's worth experimenting with to see where and when it works best.
Just as anti-aliasing reduces jagged edges, it improves them in textures (wooden crates look more like wooden crates, for example, rather than boxes with a "wooden crate" sticker stuck on them ). It also keeps textures looking great in the distance rather than letting them get blurry and prevents textures from looking jagged when viewed from tight angles.
If you enable this, you get 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x anisotropic filtering options, with even the highest level working quite well on modern graphics cards.
This changes the quality of the texture on the fly to improve game smoothness and performance. Its effects are quite negligible compared to the other texture options, and popular opinion in the gaming community currently is to set it to " Performance".
Another somewhat outdated setting, it was used a few years ago on games to decrease graphics quality and improve performance, but is unlikely to have much effect on modern games and modern GPUs . You definitely won't miss it if you leave it out.
Boosts game graphics by breaking larger polygons into smaller pieces, making graphics smoother (much like crushing peppercorns into pepper powder – if you like your cooking analogies). "AMD Optimized" uses x64 tessellation, but if you select "Override application settings", you can set a lower rate if you think the performance impact is too high.
Few games use the OpenGL API these days (here's a list of those that do), but for those that do, enabling it with VSync will allow your frame rate to fluctuate more easily. So where double buffering would drop fps to 30 even though it could technically run at 55 to compensate for the lag caused by timing, triple buffering removes that problem, allowing frame rates to run at all the fps your GPU can handle.
Stores shaders for games locally on your hard drive, dramatically increasing load times (especially if you don't have an SSD). Be warned that this takes up a lot of hard drive space (about 3GB).
In the Radeon Software Settings menu, click on “Display” to access settings related to your monitor. Here's everything you need to know about them.
AMD's answer to Nvidia G-Sync, this "adaptive sync" technology is built into some GPUs and monitors and virtually eliminates screen tearing. It synchronizes the refresh rates of your monitor and your graphics card, matching the refresh rate of the monitor to that of the graphics card. Consider it a very powerful version of V-Sync which you can read below.
AMD's fancy word for "downsampling". This type of unlocks higher resolutions than your monitor is capable of (4k for a 1080p monitor, for example), then scales the resolution down to the size of your monitor, resulting in a cleaner image with less jitter. /P>
This uses your graphics card (instead of your monitor) to scale the resolution of whatever you're running to your screen. For most decent gaming graphics cards, this is a better option than letting your monitor do the work and should lead to a clearer image.
In most cases, you'll use the full size of your screen, but if you're playing games in 4:3 format, forcing it to fit the entire screen will stretch the image in an ugly way. Maybe you don't mind, in which case go with "Full Panel", but we recommend the "Preserve aspect ratio" option here.
Lots to take in, but these will hopefully give you the confidence to play around with your AMD settings a bit more. Keep in mind that all of these settings can also be applied to individual games (to add game profiles to Radeon Settings, go to "Games -> Add -> Analyze"), and what works for some games may not work for others. Happy crafting!
This feature — primarily for laptops — dynamically adjusts screen brightness depending on whether you're plugged into power, gaming, and other variables. This feature can be a little frustrating, as Windows already has its own built-in screen dimmer when you unplug it from the mains, and it has been found to interfere with that.
Unless you really want to automatically dim the screen, we recommend disabling it.
If you have an Android phone, you should also check out the AMD Link app, which syncs with your Radeon settings so you can monitor things like your GPU fan speed, temperature, and frame rate. You can even use your phone to record your gameplay!
If you want to dive deeper into the world of AMD, check out our reviews of the latest AMD Ryzen processors. We've also compared the latest batch of AMD and processors for 2021, to help you decide which one to choose this year.
