Adrenalin VS Crimson drivers (RX 480)

[Pixel Rebirth]

The first thing I did before even starting the game was adjusting some graphical settings and running the benchmark.

The results can be seen here: Crimson benchmark results

I thought not too bad considering my hardware setup. But Uplay showed a message telling me that the graphics driver wasn't supported (Crimson 17.9.3).

So I updated to the latest Adrenalin driver and ran the benchmark again: Adrenalin benchmark results

As you can see the difference is striking. Suddenly I had crazy stutters all over the place, the frames score ending up over 800 points lower. I ran it a few times to verify the result.

I tried a few other driver versions. For example the last driver version labelled Crimson, which ran better than the Adrenalin one, but still had bad stutters. I also tried Crimson version 17.9.2, which gave me a similar stuttery result.

Back to 17.9.3 and it's all much better again like before.

So for the moment I'm sticking to that exact outdated driver, since it delivers by far the best experience when playing. I'd like to take advantage of some of the better features in Adrenalin, but of course the performance is more important.

I'm not entirely sure if it's simply AMD dropping the ball and making their latest drivers actually perform worse. My hardware setup with a bottlenecking CPU might be playing a bigger role too.

Anyone having a similar experience with the different AMD driver versions?

Btw I also played Rainbow Six Siege with the newer Adrenalin drivers and it did perform worse with more frame drops, especially when recording via Relive. Also the resulting video file wasn't really watchable, while it was fine again when rolling back to Crimson 17.9.3.