Rewritten OpenGL drivers speed up AMD GPUs by “up to 72%” in some professional applications.

Most graphics driver development efforts these days, whether you’re talking about Nvidia, Intel or AMD, are focused on new APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, increasingly advanced scaling technologies, and specific improvements for new game releases. But this year, AMD has also focused on an old problem area of ​​its graphics drivers: OpenGL performance.

Over the summer, AMD released a rewritten OpenGL driver that it says will boost Minecraft’s performance by up to 79 percent (independent testing has also shown gains in other OpenGL games and benchmarks, though not always to the same extent). The same optimizations will now apply to officially approved AMD GPU drivers for Radeon Pro Series workstation cards, greatly improving the performance of professional applications such as Solidworks and Autodesk Maya.

“AMD Software Driver: PRO Edition 22.Q3 has been tested and approved by Dell, HP and Lenovo for stability and is available for download through their drivers,”the company wrote in a blog post. “AMD continues to work with software developers to certify the latest drivers.”

Using the Radeon Pro W6800 workstation GPU, AMD claims its new drivers can improve Solidworks rendering speed by 52 or 28 percent at 4K and 1080p resolutions, respectively. Autodesk Maya performance is improved by 34% at 4K resolution or 72% at default resolution. The size of the improvements varies by application and GPU, but AMD testing shows significant, consistent improvements across the board on the Radeon Pro W6800, W6600, and W6400 GPUs, improvements AMD says will help these GPUs outperform comparable workstation GPUs Nvidia. like RTX A5000 and A2000 and Nvidia T600.

A complete list of compatible Radeon Pro Series GPUs is available in the 22.Q3 driver release notes ; In addition to desktop cards, the driver is compatible with mobile GPUs in a variety of laptops from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Panasonic. AMD hasn’t shown any performance benchmarks for older Radeon Pro 6000-series GPUs, though it’s likely that all GPUs supported by the new drivers will see some benefit.

The OpenGL API has been deprecated, but is still relatively widely used in older games (the PC version of Minecraft is one notable example), in professional applications, and as a rendering backend for game console emulators, among others. Earlier this year, AMD also rewrote its DirectX 11 drivers, although the performance gains in most games tended to be much smaller than the improvements provided by the new OpenGL drivers.