AMD’s official beta GPU driver for ‘Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’ enables HAGS support on Radeon RX 7000 series

AMD drivers for Avatar provide HAGS support

AMD has released a new graphics driver specifically for Radeon 5000/6000/7000 GPUs based on the RDNA architecture. This driver is optimized for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which is scheduled to launch on December 7.

Discover some people on Guru3D Forums This driver can enable a feature that AMD drivers have not had since 2020 Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS). This feature was last seen on the Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.5.1 driver, which was a version specifically dedicated to this technology, and supported the Radeon RX 5600 and RX 5700 models. But years later, there were many versions of graphics cards that lacked this feature, At least officially.

In terms of physical GPU scheduling, it is a special feature introduced for Windows 10 that has the ability to improve GPU responsiveness and allow additional innovation in GPU workload management. That’s why AMD described this feature as the first and The last driver Which was supported by HAGS.

RX 7700 XT with hardware GPU enabled, Source: Neve1/Guru3D

Technically, this isn’t the first “modern” driver to feature HAGS, as the Radeon PRO W7700 driver already offered such support. However, this beta driver is the first specifically for the Radeon RX consumer gaming series. Furthermore, many users have reported that HAGS has become available through some drivers distributed by Microsoft. However, this is the first software through which you can download the HAGS supported driver directly from AMD.

AMD HAGS is not supported on the Radeon RX 6000 series, and it appears that AMD has no plans to enable this feature. In 2021, AMD confirmed HAGS does not provide the expected performance improvements for RDNA2 GPUs, which is why it has been omitted in additional driver releases.

Experimental support was also provided earlier for some cards with this feature as mentioned in the link, but due to there being no performance improvement as expected, this feature is not supported and included in the latest GPU.

– AMD on HAGS, 2021

In terms of actual performance improvements, synthetic tests conducted by Guru3D members show no benefit, however, this feature is not expected to provide double-digit gains, rather something within the margin of error. You can learn more about HAGS at Old games video, which made some first comparisons a few months ago thanks to drivers distributed by Microsoft.

AMD Software: Adrenalin 23.30.13.01 for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Highlights of new features

• New game support
  • Avatar: The Frontiers of Pandora

Known problems

• Audio may become intermittently out of sync with video when recording from AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition with AV1 codec.
• Intermittent corruption on the racetrack can be observed while playing EA Sports WRC.
• Stars may fail to appear intermittently while playing Crysis Remastered.
• Intermittent small slowdowns may occur when running Chromium-based browsers on systems that connect a Radeon™ RX 7000 series GPU to a secondary display connected to an AMD Ryzen™ 7000 series processor.

Package contents

• AMD Software: Adrenalin 23.30.13.01 for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Windows® 10 and Windows® 11 Driver Store version 31.0.23013.1020.

Since this driver is not part of the official branch, this means that users will now have to choose between WHQL, the beta driver with AMD Fluid Motion Frames, and this driver will also be released as a separate beta. It’s not clear why AMD has so many driver versions for the same GPU architectures and when the company will finally release a stable branch that offers all of these features together.

Furthermore, we’re still waiting for AMD to re-enable Anti-Lag+ support after a launch failure that caused online gaming accounts to be banned. Anti-lag+ is an important component to enable AMD FSR3 upgrade.

Source and download: AMD drivers via @harukaze5719