Using Adrenalin 25.5.1 driver with AMD Radeon RX 6700

August 29, 2022

As of today, the Radeon RX 6700 is the latest card from the RX 6000 series released by AMD. As such, it is supported by driver version Adrenalin 22.6.1 and later. Unfortunately, this driver version is also the one AMD chose to deploy a big overhaul of their OpenGL and DirectX 11 driver. This overhaul brings great performance improvements in most applications relying on OpenGL or DirectX11, but sadly, it also breaks a few others. In case of issues, an easy workaround is to stick to Adrenalin 22.5.1 for the time being. That said, the RX 6700 is left in an odd place because this driver does not support the card. So are all RX 6700 owners screwed? Maybe not.

Prerequisites

First of all, if you try to install the 22.5.1 driver with the RX 6700 installed in the machine, the driver will complain that no supported hardware was detected, and it will refuse to install. To follow this guide, Adrenalin 22.5.1 must already be installed on the machine prior to installing the RX 6700. You may install this driver with any supported card in the machine.

The trick

The trick is that both the RX 6700 and RX 6700 XT use the Navi 22 GPU. As a result, those cards are very similar and you can use the 6700 XT driver with the non-XT card. The steps are simple (please note that I have translated the name of the buttons, so they may differ slightly). Needless to say, you have to know that you do this at your own risk, it may break or damage something, you've been warned:

  1. Install the RX 6700 graphics card in the machine
  2. Open Device Manager (simply search for "device manager" in the start menu)
  3. Under the "Graphics card" category, double click on the RX 6700 graphics card (at this point, it may have a generic name like "Display adapter")
  4. Go to the "Driver" tab then click "Update driver" button
  5. Then choose the second option to search for the driver locally
  6. Click on the button at the bottom of the window, "Choose among a list of available drivers on my computer"
  7. Untick the checkbox "Show compatible hardware"
  8. Select "Advanced Micro Devices, Inc." in the left pane and "AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT" in the right pane. If several versions are available, choose the most recent one while staying before June 2022.
  9. At this point, the screen may flicker a little. Even though Windows won't ask for it, I recommend to reboot the computer.

And that's it! I've been using this trick for almost two weeks now, and I've not had a single issue, the RX 6700 works fine with the RX 6700 XT driver :)

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