AMD Crimson 16.8.1 released, fixes for 480 crashes and Wattman

AMD has released a new set of Crimson drivers, 16.8.1, adding official support for their new 470 and 460 GPUs and fixing a few lingering problems. The last set of AMD drivers (16.7.3) were apparently a little iffy for 480 cards, and introduced problems with Wattman under-reporting memory limits. 16.8.1 claims to address all of those things.

As the patch notes have it, “Max memory overclock available on Radeon RX 480 being too low in Radeon WattMan has been resolved“. There’s also a specific fix for Firefox crashing when hardware acceleration is enabled (a persistent problem I believe, so nice to see that one gone), and a fix for AMD’s Radeon Settings reporting an error when updating drivers through that application.

Here’s the change-log, and list of known, remaining issues.

Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.8.1 Highlights

• Support for:
  • Radeon RX 470 Graphics
  • Radeon RX 460 Graphics

• New AMD Crossfire profile available for:
  • F1 2016

Fixed Issues

• Max memory overclock available on Radeon RX 480 being too low in Radeon WattMan has been resolved.
• Overwatch™ may experience an application crash on some Radeon™ RX 480 configurations when using AMD Crossfire technology mode.
• The Division poor Crossfire scaling may be experienced in some low resolution configurations when using AMD Crossfire technology mode.
• DOTA2™ may experience lower than expected performance when in AMD Crossfire mode.
• Radeon Settings may not report the correct Vulkan™ driver or API version information.
• Firefox™ may experience an application crash when hardware acceleration is enabled for content playback.
• Low frame rate or stutter may be experienced Wolfenstein®: The Old Blood™ on Radeon™ RX 480.
• Updating drivers through Radeon Settings may sometimes fail with an error message.

Known Issues

• A few game titles may fail to launch or crash if the AMD Gaming Evolved overlay is enabled. A temporary workaround is to disable the AMD Gaming Evolved “In Game Overlay”.
• Ark Survival Evolved™ may experience an error message when trying to launch the game in some configurations.
• DOTA2™ may experience an application hang when using the Vulkan™ API and changing resolution or game/quality settings.
• Corruption may be experienced in Rise of the Tomb Raider using the DirectX®12 API on some Hybrid Graphics configurations when performing a task switch.
• Shader Cache may remain be enabled when set to “off” in Radeon Settings on some Hybrid Graphics configurations.
• Radeon RX 480 graphics may experience intermittent stuttering in The Division™ when high game settings are used and vsync is enabled.
• Battlefield™ 4 may experience intermittent crashes when using Mantle. As a work around users are suggested to switch to DirectX®11.
• Radeon Pro Duo may experience a black screen in Total War™: Warhammer with the games API set to DirectX®12 and V-Sync enabled.
• World of Tanks™ may experience stuttering after performing a task switch in AMD Crossfire mode.
• Rocket League™ may experience flickering when in AMD Crossfire mode.
• Ashes of the Singularity™ may experience an application crash with “crazy” in game settings and Multi-GPU enabled.