New Radeon Developer Tool Suite expands testing capabilities with Driver Experiments

What just happened? Originally released in 2020, AMD's Radeon Developer Tool Suite provides a streamlined package giving developers the tools and resources needed to leverage its RDNA microarchitecture. The continuously expanding toolset has resulted in steadily increased success for developers integrating and optimizing AMD's graphics technologies. Thanks to the tool suite's most recent iteration, developers will now have even greater capabilities to test, analyze, and resolve specific driver-related crash scenarios in hopes of further increasing driver stability.

The new developer tool suite was announced earlier this week on the AMD GPUOpen site by AMD technical lead Amit Ben-Moshe. While the package includes new versions of tools such as the Radeon Developer Panel, GPU Profiler, and GPU Analyzer, the post specifically calls attention to one of its newest features, Driver Experiments.

The new Driver Experiments feature is designed to provide developers with the ability to troubleshoot bugs and errors across multiple GPUs. It does this by enabling or disabling specific optimizations and configurations that can be encountered in various user scenarios.

The new feature also provides access to settings previously reserved only for AMD engineers developing the driver packages, such as the ability to disable ray tracing support, and disabling shader compiler optimizations. According to the post, the new tool can be used as a stand-alone feature or in conjunction with existing tools such as the Radeon GPU Detective (RGD), Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP), Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV), or Radeon Raytracing Analyzer (RRA).

The newest version of the Radeon Developer Panel, v3.2, is required to use the new Driver Experiment functionality. Support also requires use of an AMD 5000, 6000, or 7000-series card, which all leverage a variant of the RDNA microarchitecture, as well as AMD Adrenalin v24.9.1 or greater. The tool supports both Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating environments.

Developers can enable and disable Driver Experiments using the Radeon Developer Panel, where it is located alongside other features like Profiling and Crash Analysis. Once accessed, list of all supported experiments will be displayed that can be activated for the next application that connects to the panel. Experiments only remain active as long as the Radeon Developer Panel is running. Once closed, the system reverts to default settings and configurations.

Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference. And while the latest iteration of the tool suite offers several exciting new technical capabilities, it also includes a simple quality-of-life improvement that some users can't live without: dark mode. Tool suite users can access the option through the application's settings to use light mode, dark mode, or simply have the suite's UI follow the operating system's theme.

AMD's drivers and related software have come a long way in repairing the company's previously tarnished reputation. The new tool suite's Driver Experiment feature marks another great step forward, and could help developers to provide even greater performance, stability, and optimizations using AMD's graphics hardware and software solutions.