This Is How You Should Configure AMD Software

AMD software has been the cornerstone of

the Radeon GPU software offering for

some time now. It's packed with features

and AMD keypading more each year, but

what configuration is best? While

settings are worth changing to get the

best experience on PC, we've been

testing Radeon graphics cards for a long

time now and have explored many of the

features AMD offer. So, we think there's

a range of settings you should be using

on a daily basis. Essentially, this is

the highly requested AMD version of a

recent video we made for Nvidia GPU

owners covering the best settings to use

in the Nvidia app. In a similar fashion,

this guide is not necessarily intended

for hardcore PC gaming enthusiasts who

are super familiar with AMD software.

But if you want to learn more about its

features, if you want to see the

configuration we recommend, or you just

aren't overly familiar with this tool,

hopefully you'll learn a few useful

things from this video.

AMD software utility for gamers is

technically called AMD software

adrenaline edition and it's installed

automatically with Radeon GPU drivers.

It used to be called Radeon Software,

but over time it's expanded with more

features for other AMD products like

APUs and CPUs. Once you've installed AMD

software, there's two main ways to

access it. You can open it through the

system tray icon, or you can right click

on the desktop. Upon first launch,

you're greeted with the option to

perform a quick setup or to skip this

process. Either way, we don't recommend

making too many changes to begin with.

So, the best choice is to start with the

default configuration or skip the setup

entirely. After this, you're greeted

with the AMD software home screen, which

is quite overwhelming. There's lots of

things going on here, and we'll get to

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the video description. First, I think

it's a great idea to configure your

display to get the optimal gaming

experience. AMD software includes some

display settings that aren't part of

Windows itself, which can be useful for

gamers. But I do want to also remind you

that often when plugging in a monitor

for the first time, your PC will not

default to using the highest refresh

rate your monitor supports. To get the

highest refresh rate that you actually

paid for, go into the Windows settings

menu, head to system, display, advanced

display, then make sure the refresh rate

is set to the highest supported value.

Avoid the refresh rates with an asterisk

next to them, as they will change the

monitor to a non-native resolution.

Experienced PC gamers will probably

think this is a super obvious

recommendation, but when I made a video

a while back on how to set up your

gaming monitor, this was one of the key

tips that generated a lot of positive

feedback. You'd be shocked how many

people were sent that video by a friend

and left a comment saying they didn't

know their system would not default to

the highest refresh rate. I genuinely

think this is the origin of many

comments where people claim they can't

see the difference between 60 and 144

hertz. They bought a new 144Hz monitor

and simply aren't using it at 144 hertz

because that's not necessarily the

default behavior. With that said, based

on my experience testing a lot of

monitors on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs,

AMD cards are more likely to default to

the highest refresh rate than Nvidia

cards. So, you may find the highest

refresh is already enabled after

installing the driver. Unlike with the

Nvidia app, AMD does not provide a way

to adjust the refresh rate from within

AMD software. So, if you do want to make

adjustments, you'll need to use the

Windows settings menu. There are other

display settings that are worth taking a

look at, though. These can be accessed

from the settings cog in the top right

corner. Then navigating to the display

tab. The first thing we want to enable

is variable refresh rate technology.

This is the first option under the

display options header and can be

labeled different things depending on

the type of display you have. If you've

hooked up your monitor over display

port, it will probably say either

adaptive sync compatible or freeync. If

you've hooked up your monitor over HDMI,

it will probably say VRR if it is

supported. Regardless of what this

option says, you should enable it so

that you get adaptive sync variable

refresh rates working. There are no

other variable refresh settings here.

And often when enabling the variable

refresh setting, you won't see your

monitor change modes or briefly flick to

black. Don't worry if nothing happens

except the setting being enabled. That's

normal behavior for how AMD GPUs enable

variable refresh. Below the variable

refresh option, you'll see AMD settings

for scaling and colors. Currently,

Windows 11 defaults to using GPU

scaling, regardless of what scaling

option you actually set in GPU driver

software. What this means is that

whether you set GPU scaling to enabled

or disabled, Windows will most likely

ignore this setting and use GPU scaling

anyway. You can see this in action when

you've reduced the resolution in

Windows, but the active signal mode

stays at the native resolution of the

monitor. There is no easy way to force

display scaling anymore. Though, you

might have hit or miss success using the

display adapter modes list. Don't worry

though, because this isn't a big deal

for gaming. The vast majority of the

time, you'll want to use the native

resolution of your monitor. The GPU

scaling option in AMD software is only

useful if you want to use integer

scaling. And in my opinion, if you don't

know what integer scaling is and you

don't have a specific reason to use it,

you shouldn't use it. So, my

recommendation is to leave GPU scaling

disabled. In my experience, again from

testing hundreds of monitors, AMD

generally gets the color depth and pixel

format settings correct by default.

Radeon cards typically default to a 10-

bit color depth where available. So,

this is not a setting you'll have to

adjust. However, I do recommend

verifying the pixel format is suitable

so that your setup is not using color

compression which causes artifacts. On

most monitors, the correct choice is RGB

444 pixel format PC standard full RGB.

444 transmission means there is no color

compression and full RGB means a full

range signal is being sent, which is

optimal for monitors. If the pixel

format drop down does not include any

444 options, for example, if it only has

422 or 420 options, this means the color

depth you've set requires color

compression. In this situation, I would

reduce the color depth to 8 bit and

change the pixel format to RGB 444 full

RGB. My recommendation is to use the

highest color depth setting that allows

for a 444 pixel format. Typically, AMD

cards will use the alternate YCR 444

pixel format over HDMI. Like RGB 444,

this mode does not use color compression

and is fine to use. However, this

configuration relies on your display

automatically setting the correct RGB

range, whether that's full RGB or

limited RGB. This setting almost always

works correctly for me, but you can use

the LOM black level test as a sanity

check. If the correct range is being

used, the background of this test will

be black and each dark square will be

distinct and visible. If you're in a

limited mode, but the correct setting is

actually full, your screen will look

washed out. The background of the test

won't be black. This is fixed. setting

the pixel format to RGB 444 full RGB or

adjusting your display settings. If

you're in the full mode, but the correct

mode is limited, this black level test

will have severe black crush where most

of the first three rows look identical.

This is fixed setting the pixel format

to RGB 444 limited RGB or adjusting your

display settings. I would not touch any

of the other display options in AMD

software. Display color enhancement,

custom color, and color deficiency

correction all adjust display colors.

And moving these settings away from the

default disabled option makes the output

less accurate. However, color deficiency

correction might be a useful option if

you have a color vision deficiency. The

settings menu in AMD software has

several other tabs. The system tab has

some useful options. This is where you

can update the software or perform a

factory reset if necessary. If you click

manage updates, it will open the

separate AMD install manager. By

default, AMD software will automatically

download and install the latest driver

updates. So, you won't need to use this

feature much if you left everything on

default. If you disabled automatic

updates during the installation process,

this is where you can install updates

manually. Also, if you want to disable

automatic driver updates, you can

disable this option in the install

manager. The audio and video tab

includes AMD's noise suppression feature

for microphone inputs and video profile

options. The video profile should be

left on default as it's the most

accurate and won't adjust video colors.

The preferences tab includes various

toggles including some handy options.

Here you can disable advertising,

tutorials, notifications, and other

features if you find them annoying. Ads

aren't too intrusive in AM software, but

it's one that I tend to disable. Next,

let's focus on the gaming tab where we

can control some of the features that

apply directly in games. The games tab

gives you control on a per game basis

whereas the graphics tab apply settings

globally. The most important thing to

configure for gaming in AMD software is

FSR upscaling. Radeon drivers have the

ability to upgrade FSR 3.1

implementations into FSR4 or newer,

which provides significantly better

visual quality while upscaling. This

driver upgrade feature is available on

RDNA4 and RDNA3 discrete GPUs. And the

good news is that AMD do most of the

work for you by default. So there's only

a few things you need to check and

enable. Firstly, it's a good idea to

confirm that the FSR upscaling driver

upgrade is enabled in the graphics tab.

This option should be enabled by default

in the latest drivers. It should also be

enabled in the individual settings for

each game by default. You should only

turn this feature off if you don't want

to upgrade FSR3 into FSR 4.1, and I

don't recommend that configuration. You

should definitely leave this enabled.

There is a second layer to this, which

is ensuring that FSR4 upscaling is

properly enabled in the game you're

playing. There's a couple of different

implementations I've seen. Some games

like Spider-Man 2 update the FSR version

number in the settings menu. If you see

FSR 4.1 followed by an asterisk, that's

how you know the game's FSR

implementation is being upgraded to the

latest FSR4. Some games with the upgrade

toggle enabled split out FSR into

separate settings for FSR3 and FSR4.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one such example of

this. To get FSR4 working, you need to

scroll past FSR3 and specifically set

FSR4 in the settings menu. And some

games do not update the version number

at all. So, you'll need to turn on FSR

3.1 and the driver upgrade will take

care of upgrading it to FSR4. There is a

way to verify this is all working

correctly, which involves bringing up

the Radeon software overlay. The default

shortcut for doing this is AltR. This

should bring up the gaming tab with the

game you're currently playing shown.

Under the FSR upscaling toggle, there

should be a status indicator. If you've

used the right settings in the game,

this should say active with a green

tick. If the upgrade is not functioning,

you'll see an upgrade inactive label

with a yellow exclamation mark. In some

games, FSR upscaling is not enabled in

the menu or in certain situations. So,

even though you've set the right

settings and the upgrade is working, the

overlay could show the status as

inactive. The best way to properly test

the FSR status is opening the overlay

during gameplay. There are also games

that can't be upgraded, even though the

toggle will be available in the driver

settings. Those games will also show the

upgrade as being inactive with the

yellow icon. On RDNA4 GPUs, there's a

separate driver toggle for FSR frame

generation upgrades, which works in a

similar way to the FSR upscaling driver

upgrade. This feature upgrades FSR 3.1

frame generation implementations to a

newer FSR4 version that utilizes an AI

model for better image quality. However,

unlike with the FSR upscaling toggle,

the frame generation toggle is not

enabled by default. So to utilize the

latest version of FSR frame gen, you

should enable this toggle either

globally or on a per game basis. Even

though this setting is not enabled by

default, I would recommend using the FSR

frame generation driver upgrade because

the newer AI based version does

noticeably improve visual quality at no

significant cost to performance. You can

use the same process I described earlier

for the upscaling upgrade to check that

the frame generation upgrade is working.

AMD offer several other graphics

features, but most of them I don't

recommend using. AMD often advertise

something called Hyper RX, which is

found under the gaming experience drop

down. What this does is it enables all

of AMD's driver features, even the ones

I think are not worth using, like Radeon

super resolution and fluid motion

frames. This can actually make the

gaming experience worse because you are

unnecessarily enabling features that are

not very good. The better path to take

is individually enabling the settings

you want to use rather than just

blasting them all on with Hyper RX. For

example, Radeon Super Resolution is

driver-based spatial upscaling. This

option automatically upscales a game

when you set the in-game resolution to

something lower than your display's

native resolution. However, it delivers

worse visual quality than using FSR

upscaling in games that support it

because it's based on firstg FSR

technology. So, I wouldn't recommend

using it. It's only something you'd use

in specific scenarios where other forms

of upscaling are not supported and where

you want to improve the frame rate.

Similar can be said for fluid motion

frames 2, which is driver-based frame

generation. This option is not as good

as using in-game frame gen, and it's

honestly something I don't like using at

all. I think it hurts the gaming

experience because the image quality it

produces is pretty bad. It's an option

if you want to use it. I just don't

recommend it. Radeon anti-lag can

slightly improve input latency in some

GPU limited situations. So it might be a

feature to enable and experiment with.

However, if you are playing a CPU

limited game or a GPU limited game at a

high frame rate, enabling anti-lag can

actually increase latency and/or reduce

performance. So it should only be

enabled on a game-by-game basis. And if

you do enable anti- lag and you discover

that your game has started to stutter,

that is a common issue. Just disable the

setting. You might also have noticed

Radeon enhanced sync. This is a legacy

feature that is not necessary on modern

high refresh rate displays with adaptive

sync technology like Freync or G-Sync.

So, I would not enable it. I also

wouldn't enable Radeon boost if it's

available for your game because this

feature is absolute garbage. So, as a

quick summary, I recommend leaving

Radeon super resolution, AMD fluid

motion frames, Radeon enhanced sync, and

Radeon boost all disabled. I would maybe

enable anti-lag depending on the

circumstances.

As for the features that are potentially

worth using, one is image sharpening

too. This is a sharpening filter that

you can apply to games which you might

find useful if the title you are playing

has blurry visual quality. It's not

something I would enable in every game,

but as far as sharpening filters go,

this is a very good one. You can enable

this while playing a game too via the

overlay. The other is Radon Chill. This

is advertised as a movementbased FPS

limiter to reduce power, which I don't

think is a particularly effective use of

this feature for desktop gamers.

Instead, I'd recommend Radon Chill if

you just want a simple built-in FPS

limiter for whatever reason. Simply set

both sliders to the same value, and this

will act as a normal FPS limiter.

Next, I want to talk about the AMD

software overlay. AMD's overlay

essentially allows you to access AMD

software while gaming. It's the same

interface and most settings are

available. The default shortcut to open

the overlay is alt R which brings up the

full screen interface. You can use the

sidebar mode instead which is enabled by

this button in the top right corner.

This is a less intrusive way to use the

overlay to quickly enable settings like

image sharpening or chill. One of the

things the overlay and by extension AMD

software contains is the performance

tab. This tab tracks in-game performance

as well as CPU, GPU, and memory

statistics. It's quite an in-depth

feature with performance history charts

and options to add even more stats to

the default view. As a built-in feature

to AMD software, it's quite useful for

quickly assessing performance and PC

health. While the main overlay includes

all of these nice charts, there's a

separate performance overlay option

which can be enabled either via the tab

in the performance menu or via the

shortcut control shift O. The

performance overlay is more compact and

designed to be used while gaming showing

statistics like frame rate and GPU

utilization. Though the metric shown can

be customized, the default overlay

design is decent, but on some monitors

it can be a bit small and hard to read,

so the size adjustment option in the

main overlay is useful. If you'd prefer

a horizontal layout to vertical, you can

also achieve that via the column

setting. Another setting I recommend is

game detection for metrics overlay. This

will automatically hide the overlay when

you exit a game and show the overlay

when you launch a game so that the

overlay isn't on when you're just

browsing the desktop. AMD software also

includes built-in overclocking features

which can be found in the tuning section

of the performance tab. However, I'm not

going to cover this extensively in

today's video, but if you didn't know

that feature existed, now you do. The

last feature I want to talk about is the

record and stream feature. AMD software

includes quite a few gameplay recording

options, including the ability to

directly stream gameplay to Twitch.

However, today I'm just going to focus

on the local recording capabilities for

capturing gameplay, which is found under

the record tab. The easiest way to

record gameplay using AMD software is to

bring up the overlay while in game, head

to the record tab, and then click start

recording. You can also use the control

shift E shortcut to start and stop a

recording. If you're going to use AMD

software to record gameplay, and in my

experience, this feature works really

well, you might want to configure the

recording settings to get the best

quality. This can be done through the

settings tab. Here you'll find the

options for recording resolution, frame

rate, bit rate, and codec. Resolution

should either be set to in-game or the

same resolution as your monitor. Frame

rate should usually be set to 60 fps as

that's the most sharable and usable

format, but you can switch this to other

options, including as high as 120 fps.

Just be warned that while 120 fps is

obviously going to create smoother files

for local playback, it's pointless for

uploading to YouTube as the maximum

supported frame rate on YouTube is

60fps.

The recording profile option chooses the

bit rate for you, but it sets this

independent of the video encoding type

and resolution. For example, high uses a

bit rate of 30 megabits pers for both 4K

and 1080p when in reality you typically

want to use a higher bit rate at higher

resolutions and higher frame rates. The

video encoding type defaults to AV1,

which on supported AMD GPUs gives you

the best encoding quality at a given bit

rate. However, there are some practical

limitations to AV1 recordings. You can

upload AV1 to YouTube, but you can't on

all platforms, and I don't recommend AV1

if you're planning to quickly edit the

file because it's much slower to work

with in most video editing software.

H.264, aka AVC, is the most supported

codec and is the easiest to work with in

editing software, but it's the lowest

quality, especially on Radeon GPUs prior

to RDNA4. When the setting is available,

you should enable enhanced filtering to

improve AVC quality. Though this

slightly reduces gaming performance,

AGVC is a mid ground between AV1 and AVC

that you also might want to consider.

It's difficult to make specific

recommendations around codec and bit

rate because recording quality differs

quite a bit between AMD GPU generations.

For fast-paced action and where storage

space or upload bandwidth isn't an

issue, I'd just recommend the maximum

allowed bit rate of 100 megabits pers,

especially for 4K 60fps.

I'd also lean towards AV1 encoding on

AMD GPUs for the increased quality. With

that said, you don't have to encode at

100 megabits at 4K 60 fps with AV1

encoding. You can also get away with

things like 30 to 40 megabits pers with

still decent quality. AMD also offer an

instant replay feature which constantly

records gameplay and saves the last x

number of seconds when you hit a

shortcut. It's not a well-exposed

feature being hidden in the record and

stream settings, but it is in there if

you want to use it. You can even save

gameplay clips as a GIF. There are more

features available in the AMD software,

but for now, I've covered all the

relevant and important stuff. This is a

piece of software that AMD has been

building for some time, so it does feel

packed with stuff in 2026, more so than

the newer Nvidia app. There's even an AI

tab in the latest versions, which is

pretty useless for most gamers, but hey,

it is in there. So anyway, that's it for

this video. Oh, and also, if you

actually don't own an AMD GPU and you

instead own an Nvidia GeForce GPU,

there's a GeForce version of this video.

Not sure why you would have watched the

whole AMD video if you have a GeForce

GPU, but just in case that's the case.

There is a GeForce version. Maybe you

want to share it with your mates that,

you know, have a GeForce GPU instead of

an AMD GPU. So, yeah, there is that on

the channel as well. Anyway, that's it

for this one. Thanks for watching and

I'll catch you in the next one.

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