28 PCWorld JANUARY 2020NEWS AMD’S ADRENALIN 2020 EDITION UPDATE
Overlay in-game. Sounds handy, especially
on resource-constrained systems that might
not be able to run Chrome and a game
simultaneously very well.NEW FEATURES: RADEON
BOOST, INTEGER SCALING,
AND MORE
AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020
Edition isn’t all style. It’s packing some
interesting new substantial features too, the
most intriguing of which is Radeon Boost.Radeon Boost
Scott Wasson, the senior manager for product
management at Radeon Technologies Group,
describes Radeon Boost as a “movement-
based dynamic resolution” feature. Radeon
Boost intelligently reduces your game’s
resolution when you’re mousing around or
pushing a control stick on a gamepad—when
you’re moving in game, basically. Any HUD
imagery sticks to
100-percent scaling
to avoid jankiness,
but Radeon Boost
downscales the rest
of the image to
either 83.3, 66.6,
or 50 percent of the
native resolution.
When you stop
moving, the
resolution scalesback to 100 percent immediately.
It’s not quite the same as variable rate
shading, a technology introduced in Nvidia’s
Turing GPU architecture (go.pcworld.com/
trgp) and since enshrined in DirectX 12 (go.
pcworld.com/12dx), but Radeon Boost stems
from the same core idea.
With the way human perception works,
it’s hard-to-impossible to see the dynamic
scaling in action. Everything just looks like it
should to your brain. But because of the way
Radeon Boost ties to movement, it kicks in the
hardest when on-screen action’s getting hot
and heavy. That’s when higher performance
matters most, and you can certainly feel the
increased performance when bullets go
flying. It’s a killer idea, and seemingly the
manifestation of AMD’s 2016’s HiAlgo
acquisition (go.pcworld.com/hiaq), as that
company’s HiAlgo Boost (go.pcworld.com/
hilg) operated similarly. (Fun fact: Wasson says
Radeon Anti-Lag was a byproduct of Boost’s