AMD

Enhancing the User Experience, How?

Engineered to provide almost instantaneous start-up and fast initialization time, Radeon Settings – Radeon Software Crimson Edition’s new streamlined user interface – addresses two key design elements: responsiveness and discoverability. Gamers and game developers can experience intuitive navigation, a new game manager, new video customization options, as well as custom display settings, display profiles, and game profile settings.

Behind the development of Radeon, Software Crimson Edition was AMD’s ambition to reduce the launch time of its predecessor control panel to essentially nil – that is less than one second on any system – and to redefine the overall user experience through a user-friendly and feature-rich UI for the task. AMD chose Qt.

Radeon Settings has been built from the ground up with Qt. AMD’s developers specifically took advantage of QML’s ability to combine procedural and declarative code which allowed rapid runtime and development. In terms of footprint and performance, moving to Qt enables users to launch the application 10x faster at startup compared to the predecessor control panel.

Another critical factor in making the decision to use Qt was the ability to deliver performance-driven and user-oriented functionality thanks to its intuitive APIs for C++ and JavaScript-like programming with Qt Quick for rapid UI creation. QML and Qt modules and libraries – including Network, String, Application and File System – have been key in the creation of a flat modern UI with simplified menus that load quickly, look sharp and work smoothly.

Testing conducted by AMD Performance Labs on October 26, 2015, using an HP Pavilion DM1 with AMD E-350 with AMD Radeon HD 6310 Graphics, 3GB (1GB+2GB) DDR3, Windows 10 64bit.  With AMD Catalyst 15.8, the system took 8 seconds on average to load the control panel (AMD Catalyst Control Center).  With Radeon Software Crimson Edition, the system took 0.6 seconds on average to load the control panel.