AMD’s HYPR-RX tested: an easy way to cut latency and boost frame-rates?

AMD recently added a new HYPR-RX mode to its AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, intended to give users of its RX 7000 series graphics cards an easy way to boost performance and responsiveness in a range of games. Enabling this profile automatically engages a range of technologies, including image upscaling (RSR/FSR), latency reduction (Anti-Lag+) and context-sensitive resolution reduction (Boost). In a small number of “HYPR-Tuned” games, these features are automatically applied when the HYPR-RX profile is engaged, while in others you’ll need to lower your input resolution or choose an FSR upscaling mode to enable the feature in each title. With all that apparent complexity, does HYPR-RX deliver the effective one-click performance tuning that AMD promises – and is it easy enough to use? I tested out a range of games on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX to find out.

Given that we’re relatively familiar with the effects of FSR/FSR 2 upscaling and Boost, we started with the latest feature addition: Anti-Lag+. Like regular Radeon Anti-Lag, this technology aims to reduce the latency between a user input and an on-screen result (eg clicking the mouse and firing a bullet in Counter-Strike), but rather than being a driver-level feature that works in all games, Anti-Lag+ is integrated by developers into the game itself. That makes it more like Nvidia’s Reflex tech, with regular Anti-Lag being analagous to Nvidia’s Ultra Low Latency mode.

To test Anti-Lag+, I booted up Overwatch 2 on a system with the aforementioned RX 7900 XTX, a Core i5 13400F and 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory. With HYPR-RX disabled and AMD’s software running in its default mode, I saw 14.4ms of latency when the game was running in the practice range on Ultra settings – this was at 4K with FSR 2.2 in quality mode (67 percent resolution scale). With HYPR-RX enabled, this figure dropped to a consistent 8.5ms. I was curious to see how regular Anti-Lag fared versus the enhanced version, and was shocked to see a result of 13.3ms with Anti-Lag alone – so the per-game optimisations in Anti-Lag+ resulted in a nearly 5ms drop in latency.

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