MaximumBunny: As an AMD user I'mma just laugh at anyone having this problem. :D
Raptr used to be alright but has since become somewhat obsolete, non-maintained, and buggy. It served its purpose of getting me a free graphics card though. :>
Now you can optimize your games through the Crimson driver and download Plays.tv if you need to record/stream anything.
Raptr still comes with AMD Crimson and works just fine for me. The configuration options you can set within the AMD Radeon Settings software are basically the same settings you could change in the AMD Control Center for the last 15-20 years, only expanded to cover new hardware features naturally. These settings are nothing new, and they do not replace what Raptr does. Raptr actually reconfigures the games themselves, altering the game's own in-game settings for performance or quality etc. Throw away Raptr and just use the AMD Radeon Settings and you are more or less just doing everything manually as it was before things like Raptr existed. That's fine if that is what someone wants, but it means you manually configure each individual setting in each individual game yourself - doing your own research either online or by personal experimentation to find what works best for the given game on your own hardware, possibly editing registry keys or INI files as well even if you want to take it to that level, and then optionally manually editing settings in the AMD Radeon Settings per-game options.
Completely different purposes. Doing this manually yourself is nothing new, it's always been like that. The purpose of someone using or want to use software like Raptr for this, is that the software already has built in knowledge of the games and will configure the game itself for you, not just setting up 10-15 configuration options in the AMD driver options.
Yes, you can do everything Raptr does without having Raptr (or any similar software), simply by increasing your knowledge both of all of your video card's capabilities and driver settings, and the capabilities of every individual game you want to optimize and doing it all manually. The point of Raptr is that not everyone wants to do that all manually by hand, nor is everyone capable of doing so. Raptr serves as much purpose today as it ever did, for the target audience it is designed for.
Having said that, I speak only in terms of the functionality it provides and my own experience using it. I do not use it with every game however, nor that often, but it has been useful for some games at times and I understand the appeal it has for the user they develop and target the software for, and why AMD would want to include it with their software, as well as why someone would want it. I have no opinion concerning bugs in the software or how well maintained it is, but I haven't personally had issues with it.
Simply editing settings in the AMD driver settings does not accomplish the same goals however, unless you also in-depth configure the game and customize it for your hardware as well. That can be a quite involved process for some games, especially for many players out there. I lean towards custom-tweaking most of my games personally, but I appreciate software that tries to automate the process also, and there is certainly no reason why someone has to choose one approach exclusively over the other when it is easy to have both. :)
