SPONSOR: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (“AMD”) 2485 Augustine Drive, Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA. *Offer available through participating retailers only. Following purchase, Coupon Code must be redeemed by April 6, 2019, after which coupon is void. Oct 12, 2016 - Starting September 12th 2016, AMD is no longer bundling the “AMD Gaming Evolved App” by Raptr with builds of Radeon Software.

You might not remember Raptr Gaming Evolved, but at one point in time it was probably running in the background of your Radeon-based computer. Sadly,, only one year after AMD dropped official support for their app.

If you like the sound of Nvidia or AMD’s software features and fancy a change, take a look at our picks for the right now. AMD joined forces with Raptr to package the Gaming Evolved app as an extra feature of the Catalyst graphics card drivers. This partnership was supposedly AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s GeForce Experience, but for the most part it was pre-destined for the recycle bin.

AMD dropped their official partnership with Raptr one year ago, instead opting to import popular features into their own software. By offering game optimisations and video recording features, Raptr Gaming Evolved wasn’t such a bad idea at its core. The app featured a rewards system with achievements, and massive social aspects, which were pretty hit or miss with PC gamers and similar in many ways to offerings from Steam, which has the added benefit of being the largest gaming platform for PC. Unifying multiple features across gaming consoles and PC was a pretty great feature.

It’s just a shame that these features were never much use due to their reliance on the untouched social aspects of the app. Raptr required a large social presence to make it worthwhile, which it just didn’t have. It has been a sad story for Raptr and their gaming evolved software since AMD dropped them from their driver package back in September 2016. From September 30th, 2017, just one year on from AMD’s shunning, Raptr will no longer exist. No more will we accidentally install it alongside Crimson drivers, then have to uninstall both Raptr and their video-focused sharing platform, Plays.tv. Oh, the good ol’ days “The world is different today than when we first launched Raptr,” Raptr co-founder and CEO Dennis Fong says. “Many companies offer game optimization tools.

Having an independent platform to do this is no longer necessary.” With AMD moving their game optimisations to the Crimson software, and Nvidia releasing Game Ready driver updates on GeForce experience regularly, there really isn’t much real-estate left for Raptr Gaming Evolved that isn’t already covered by first-party software. There is some good news, however, as Plays.tv is no longer under the same umbrella as Raptr Gaming Evolved, and so it will be continuing as an independent company. Featuring automatic gaming highlights, instant replays, and one-click sharing to social media, Plays.tv lives on. Similarly to Raptr, however, Plays.tv faces pressure from in-house apps such as Nvidia’s ShadowPlay highlights, and AMD’s developing ReLive software.

As these apps now offer another front in the battle for supremacy between AMD and Nvidia, it’s going to be a tough sell for Plays.tv to convince the gamer masses to move away from their graphics card manufacturer prescribed apps, especially in the long-term.

AMD's Gaming Evolved Application During AMD’s “partner time” block at the, one of the projects presented was the Raptr social networking and instant messaging application. Put together by the company of the same name, AMD would be partnering with Raptr to produce an AMD branded version of the utility called the “AMD Gaming Evolved App, Powered By Raptr”. In a nutshell, the Gaming Evolved App (GEA) is AMD’s attempt to bring another value add feature to the Radeon brand.

And although AMD will never explicitly say this, to be more specific the GEA is clearly intended to counter NVIDIA successful, which exited beta back in May and has been since. Raptr/GEA contains a wealth of functionality, with the application being several years old at this point, but the key feature as a video card utility and the reason AMD has picked it up is its latest feature addition, the game optimization service. Just launched last month in beta, the optimization service is a functional clone of GeForce Experience’s optimization service. Designed with the same goals in mind, the GEA optimization service is intended to offer the ability for gamers disinterested in configuring their games – or even just looking for a place to start – a way to simply download a suitable collection of settings for their games and hardware and apply those settings to their games. The concept is in practice very similar to the recommended settings that most games apply today, but driven by the GPU manufacturer instead of the game developer, and kept up to date with hardware/software changes as opposed to being set in stone when the game went gold. Even for someone like a professional GPU reviewer, it’s a very nifty thing to have when turning up every setting isn’t going to be practical.