The “22.12.2” drivers for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 will, among other things, improve video playback.

The latest version of AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin (22.12.2) WHQL drivers for its Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards were downloaded yesterday.

The latest drivers for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series include fixes for higher power draw usage and other bugs.

Idling and typical video playing resulted in the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards drawing significantly more power than its rivals. This was seen during the debut of the product. During multi-monitor and video playback, the power consumption was four times greater than that of NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series graphics card.

Power consumption of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics cards:

In addition, despite AMD’s assertion that its RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards will provide a power efficiency boost of 54% over RDNA 2, those cards did not even come close to meeting that promise.

However, with the introduction of the updated driver, AMD is addressing some of these difficulties and has promised to make more improvements in terms of efficiency shortly. The changelog and links to download the latest version of the AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.12.2 WHQL drivers are as follows:

Issues Have Been Fixed in the AMD Radeon 22.12.2 Driver

• When utilizing Virtual Super Resolution with several display setups, there is a possibility of data corruption occurring.
• When switching between display modes on a setup that supports four displays, there is a possibility that the system will crash.
• After enabling the ray tracing options, there is a possibility that Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will crash during the loading process or that the driver will time out.
• Efforts were made to reduce the amount of power consumed by the hardware-accelerated video playback.
  Future updates will provide more power efficiency enhancements when they become available.

The Known Problems

• There have been isolated reports of specific high-resolution and high-refresh-rate displays using excessive power while idle.
• When utilizing Radeon Super Resolution in conjunction with some extended display settings, you can experience random program crashes or a timeout from the driver.
• When using some extended display settings, you could notice a dip in performance or stuttering in the video while you are playing the game and watching the movie.
• During the game’s introductory sequence, UNCHARTED 4: A Thief’s End has been reported to have stuttering issues.
• Using the Vulkan® API might cause the game Valheim to fail unexpectedly, or the driver could time out. As a stopgap measure, users who may have these problems should switch to the DirectX® API.
• There is a possibility that the performance of some virtual reality games or applications will be worse than predicted.

Package Contents

AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Graphics Driver Version 22.40.00.61 for Windows 10 and 11 is now available through the Adrenalin Edition 22.12.2 of the AMD Software suite (Windows Driver Store Version 31.0.14000.61002).

New driver for @radeon RX 7900 cards posted yesterday. Next driver coming in January. https://t.co/qoRkioklUw

— Frank Azor (@AzorFrank) December 21, 2022

The download for these drivers is around 590 megabytes, and they are only compatible with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT drivers. The next significant driver update from AMD will be available in January 2023.