The X-treme Gaming Edition of the AMD drivers has additional optimizations versus the standard drivers, which bring improvements to texture colours and quality, better memory management, better standard resolution support within the AMD settings for older games, and other OpenGL & DirectX optimizations. The aim of the drivers is to provide a better gaming experience. In many cases these drivers can boost fps but slightly lower fps is also possible in some scenes (often this depends on your graphics card).
The drivers have the same modifications as those made by Semp @
www.tweakforce.com for the PC AMD drivers. Credits go to him for creating the initial optimizations within the AMD installer.
The list of tweaks are as follows, which are not provided within the standard driver installer settings:
- A number of standard resolutions incorporated within the AMD installer settings, with potential for providing higher resolutions to older games that may not support them otherwise.
- OpenGL custom settings enabled by default.
- OpenGL texture compression, anisotropic filtering and trible-buffering enabled by default (this does not activate the system-wide triple buffering in Crimson settings however)
- OpenGL antistropic filtering, AGP textures, dynamic dither, macro tile, micro tile, z mask fast clear, z compression are all enabled by default amongst other settings too.
- AMD texture compression is enabled by default.
- Hyper Memory is enabled by default. This allows the graphics card to use system RAM if the card's free VRAM amount starts getting low.
- Better memory management with tweaks to memory management settings, including large system cache being disabled by default.
F.A.Q.Does this version of the drivers make my video card work even harder? Do I have a greater risk of overheating or the graphics card failing?A. No it doesn't. It just applies some software-based tweaks.
It does not overclock the graphics cards without use of additional software e.g. MSI Afterburner.
So the chance of the card overheating/stopping working is the same as with the standard drivers.
I always recommend you use MacsFanControl with modified drivers regardless.
So XG is better than standard drivers then?A. For gaming, yes - there is an improvement to performance and graphics for most users.
Otherwise you will not notice any difference.
Is there a standard driver available for Windows 10?A. Due to time constraints I have decided to not provide a standard driver anymore for Windows 10.
The XG drivers are equally as stable as the standard drivers despite the software tweaks, therefore making the standard drivers redundant.
Can we have an XG version for Windows 8.1 and below?A. The software tweaks that go into XG are designed for Windows 10.