AMD's new graphics driver is a must for RX 7900 XTX or XT owners about to play Starfield

AMD has wheeled out a new graphics driver ahead of the release of Starfield, bringing in performance improvements for Bethesda's imminent space RPG (check out our first impressions here).

AMD's Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 driver comes with support for Starfield, and Team Red tells us it delivers an up to 16% frame rate boost (at 4K resolution) for those who own an RX 7900 XTX or 7900 XT GPU (yes, both offer that same potential 16% uplift apparently).

That's compared to the previous driver, of course (version 23.8.1), and it's great news for anyone with a 4K monitor and one of these AMD graphics cards.

Starfield launches on September 6, and as you're likely aware, AMD has partnered with Bethesda on this one (we've even seen limited edition AMD GPUs and CPUs produced themed on Starfield - and one bundle is on eBay).

The game comes with FSR support, but not NVIDIA DLSS (whether or not the latter will be added remains a controversial topic, though in theory there's no reason why it won't be - eventually).

There's another important move for a big-name game with this new driver. Baldur's Gate 3 is getting a fix for crashes and timeouts that happen with the RPG on some PCs running RX 7000 graphics cards.

On the other hand, there are a few fresh known issues to be aware of with driver 23.8.2, and they are as follows:

• Performance Metrics Overlay may report N/A for FPS on various games
• Audio may intermittently become out of sync with video when recording from AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition with AV1 codec
• Display may not reach correct brightness with certain games on select Samsung FreeSync Premium Pro monitors or TVs with local dimming setting enabled