The new AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.2 drivers support all AMD Radeon graphics cards since HD 7700/HD 7900 series as well as adds support for the recently released dual GPU Radeon Pro Duo graphics card. The biggest update are the support for Oculus Rift SDK v1.3 as well as the HTC Vive VR headsets.

In a blog post over at its website, AMD's Graphics Technology Group revealed a bit more details regarding the asynchronous shader technology and its implementation in VR, including the async shader prioritization feature, now to be know as the Quick Response Queue feature.

According to the blog post, the Quick Response Queue feature allows developers to submit certain time-critical tasks to a special queue in order to get higher priority and preferential access to GPU resource, which running asynchronously. Supported on 2nd generation GCN or later GPUs, this ability is possible due to the fact that AMD's Asynchronous Compute Engines in the GCN architecture are both programmable and can managed resource scheduling in hardware.

The same blog post explains the use of Asynchronous Time Warp (ATW) in virtual reality rendering where it both reduce latency and prevent image judder caused by dropped frames. Referring to another blog post over at Oculus, where the ATW is used to rendering a warped frame rather than to drop a frame, AMD says that Quick Response Queue feature can be quite helpful by adding priority access to the compute units and making it more likely to complete rendering before the next display refresh in order not to cause a noticeable lag.

In addition to the support for the Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift SDK v1.3 and upcoming HTC Vive VR headset, the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.2 drivers also add an updated Crossfire profile for Hitman in DirectX 11 as well as resolves a couple of issues in some games and Radeon Settings.

As always, you can download the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3.2 drivers over at AMD's drivers support page.