Fixing driver latency on Sapphire RX 9070 XT 16G?
The raw power of this card is beastly, but the drivers are a total nightmare. Walking through Kyoto, I'd get these random freezes that made the game feel like a slideshow. The Sapphire RX 9070 XT 16G was struggling with high-frequency lighting calculations, causing the shader compilation queue to pile up in the background, with frame times swinging wildly between 15-40ms. I jokingly tried maxing out every single setting, but that just made the drops worse. I decided to do a full purge using DDU, installed the latest official Beta driver, and wiped 8.2GB of old shader cache. The performance monitor showed the frame time variance settling into a smooth 12-16ms. I did have some brief screen flickering right after the Beta install, but a fresh install of the DirectX runtime sorted it out. Core temps stayed between 65-72℃, and fan speeds stabilized at 1400-1600RPM.
