Finally:Ryzen Mobile Gets Better Drivers is Tested

More Performance, and Bugs Fixes

Today we’re looking at the very first set of official Ryzen Mobile GPU drivers to come from AMD. Owners of Ryzen Mobile laptops have been waiting for this day for months now, so the fact these drivers are finally out is great news for the small but growing community of Ryzen laptop early adopters.Let’s backtrack for a moment and catch you up with the full story of Ryzen Mobile laptops.

The first devices to use Ryzen Mobile launched at the tail end of 2017, and while performance in some cases was pretty good thanks to the powerful integrated GPU, it quickly became apparent that work was still needed on the software side. GPU-accelerated productivity apps crashed frequently or didn’t work at all, there were issues playing some games on the laptops despite having enough GPU horsepower, plus there were plenty of odds and ends that needed tidying up with new drivers.

The hardware was there, it just wasn’t very polished and there was a quintessential “early adopter” feel to the platform.Over time, it became apparent that AMD and the OEMs weren’t going to patch these problems in a timely fashion. AMD blamed the OEMs for slacking at pushing out software updates, and that’s true to an extent, but realistically the platform needed proper drivers available through AMD directly. Throughout 2018 users discovered that hacking AMD's newer APU drivers to work on their Ryzen Mobile laptops delivered a more stable experience with better performance. But this was an unofficial, hacked together solution rather than the companies involved directly addressing the problems through official update streams. Not good enough.

Those who had bought Ryzen Mobile laptops for the fast integrated GPU in a portable form factor quickly became frustrated. Users became annoyed at the lack of driver optimizations for new games, which were available for APU and discrete GPU owners. That annoyance grew into anger as some systems hadn’t received a single GPU driver update for a year, while those with Nvidia or even Intel GPUs received reasonably regular updates.

Thankfully, AMD listened and has finally launched official Ryzen Mobile GPU drivers that you can download directly from AMD.com (or from TechSpot's drivers section, of course). These drivers can be installed on any Ryzen Mobile device, whether that’s a new system, or one of the original Ryzen laptops. It’s not locked down by OEMs, it’s designed to work as a generic, updated driver for all. It may have taken over a year but at least the drivers are now available.

Naturally, we wanted to test these new drivers and compare them to the originals that shipped with Ryzen Mobile laptops and then didn’t get updated for ages. We still have our original HP Envy x360 15" with the Ryzen 5 2500U inside, so when the new drivers became available we installed them, updated a whole bunch of other things like Windows, BIOS and other utilities that had received updates since we reviewed the system, and put the updates through their paces.

The driver version we're testing is Radeon Software version 19.2.3, the latest version as of writing. We're going to go through our usual suite of laptop benchmarks to see how the HP Envy x360 performs compared to how it launched back in 2017. There’s also going to be some game testing with direct before/after comparisons focusing on improvements from the drivers alone.