Naturally, we wanted to test these new drivers and compare them to the originals that shipped with Ryzen Mobile laptops and then didn't get updated for ages. It may have taken over a year but at least the drivers are now available. It's not locked down by OEMs, it's designed to work as a generic, updated driver for all. These drivers can be installed on any Ryzen Mobile device, whether that's a new system, or one of the original Ryzen laptops. Thankfully, AMD listened and has finally launched official Ryzen Mobile GPU drivers that you can download directly from AMD.com (or from TechSpot's drivers section, of course).
That annoyance grew into anger as some systems hadn't received a single GPU driver update for a year, while those with Nvidia or even Intel GPUs received reasonably regular updates. Users became annoyed at the lack of driver optimizations for new games, which were available for APU and discrete GPU owners. Those who had bought Ryzen Mobile laptops for the fast integrated GPU in a portable form factor quickly became frustrated. But this was an unofficial, hacked together solution rather than the companies involved directly addressing the problems through official update streams. Throughout 2018 users discovered that hacking AMD's newer APU drivers to work on their Ryzen Mobile laptops delivered a more stable experience with better performance.
AMD blamed the OEMs for slacking at pushing out software updates, and that's true to an extent, but realistically the platform needed proper drivers available through AMD directly. Over time, it became apparent that AMD and the OEMs weren't going to patch these problems in a timely fashion. The hardware was there, it just wasn't very polished and there was a quintessential "early adopter" feel to the platform. GPU-accelerated productivity apps crashed frequently or didn't work at all, there were issues playing some games on the laptops despite having enough GPU horsepower, plus there were plenty of odds and ends that needed tidying up with new drivers. The first devices to use Ryzen Mobile launched at the tail end of 2017, and while performance in some cases was pretty good thanks to the powerful integrated GPU, it quickly became apparent that work was still needed on the software side.
Let's backtrack for a moment and catch you up with the full story of Ryzen Mobile laptops. Owners of Ryzen Mobile laptops have been waiting for this day for months now, so the fact these drivers are finally out is great news for the small but growing community of Ryzen laptop early adopters. Today we're looking at the very first set of official Ryzen Mobile GPU drivers to come from AMD.