Testing AMD’s May Preview Driver: DX11 Performance Breakthrough

You might have seen some news about AMD’s May 2022 Preview driver, promising up to 17% better performance in certain DirectX 11 titles. As someone who spends a lot of time benchmarking different game engines and APIs, this certainly piqued my interest… so today we are benchmarking fourteen DX11 games to see how the new driver performs, pitting the RX 6800 XT against the RTX 3080.

The first thing you need to know about the new driver is that it is indeed labelled as a Preview driver for May 2022, so in other words it is a beta driver and is not the latest official WHQL driver from AMD.

Still, the claims made by AMD are certainly eye-catching, so today we benchmark fourteen different DX11 games with AMD’s RX 6800 XT, first using the official Adrenalin 22.5.1 driver, and then again with the May Preview driver so we can see exactly what difference is made. I also tested an Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB, using the latest Nvidia 512.77 driver, just to give us a point of comparison, so we can see exactly what this new Preview driver means for AMD in relation to the competition.

Of the 14 games put to the test today, some are newer and some are older, I tried to get a good balance there. Not all of them are exclusively DX11 titles too, as some let you choose between DX11 and DX12, but for the purposes of this analysis we are benchmarking the DX11 versions.

Test System:

We test using the a custom built system powered by MSI, based on Intel’s Alder Lake platform. You can read more about this system HERE and check out MSI on the CCL webstore HERE.

DX11 Games:

• Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• Battlefield V
• Control
• Crysis Remastered
• Days Gone
• Dying Light 2
• Far Cry 5
• God of War
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
• Total War Saga: Troy
• Total War: Warhammer
• Watch Dogs: Legion
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

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