AMD Radeon 21.1.1 drivers confirmed to bring Radeon cards a massive boost in Hitman III
On Wednesday, we published our Hitman III performance review. Yesterday, however, AMD released a batch of new drivers, not exactly a 0-day driver, but they do bring in a lot more performance.
Admittedly, typically the 5% to 10% performance increases listed in driver release notes for games often are disappointing. However, that is much different with the Radeon Adrenalin 21.1.1 driver released yesterday. After cross-checking this morning, it became clear that AMD found something, perhaps even enabled VRS at the driver level for this game. In the lower resolutions, the performance benefit on a CPU bound card like the Radeon RX 6800 XT is roughly 5%, that's 10% in WQHD and can even run to 15% to 20% in Ultra HD (GPU bound levels). So that definitely is serious, and also makes this game among the very few where AMD leads the charts in ultra HD as the RX 6900 XT is faster than GeForce RTX 3090. Now granted, the performance with the previous driver was already outstanding. But hey now, free performance with just a driver update, who doesn't like that? :)
We have updated the Hitman III charts in our review. Considering that this morning the game also has seen a new patch, we have cross-checked the NVIDIA results; these remain the same in terms of performance. So for the Radeons, it definitely is recommended to update your drivers. This goes for all cards from the 500, 5000 Series upwards to the new 6000 series.
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Senior Member
Posts: 8610
Joined: 2011-10-22
How is this possible.
dont usually see such high gains from a driver.
I think AMD gimp so they can look good latter on.
I would assume once they have access to the game they can see how it works and then optimize the driver to better run the game.
Senior Member
Posts: 14845
Joined: 2008-08-28
Now thats what you call game ready drivers. Its rare to see such a uplift just by updating the drivers.
Senior Member
Posts: 4420
Joined: 2006-12-22
It's not like you needed any extra performance , this game has very low req.
Senior Member
Posts: 681
Joined: 2007-09-03
Wish I could see the difference from the old driver still

Senior Member
Posts: 129
Joined: 2020-06-26
How is this possible.
dont usually see such high gains from a driver.
I think AMD gimp so they can look good latter on.