Thursday, August 28th 2008
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ATI Deliberately Retards Catalyst for FurMark
It is a known flaw that some models of the Radeon HD 4800 accelerators fail oZone3D FurMark, an OpenGL based graphics benchmark application that has found to stress Radeon HD 4800 series far enough to result in over-heating, artifacts or even driver crashes. The Catalyst 8.8 drivers have found to treat the FurMark executable differently based on its file-name. Expreview tested this hypothesis by benchmarking a reference design HD 4850 board using Catalyst 8.8 driver, with two runs of FurMark. In the first run, the test was cleared at a low score, much lower compared to those of whatever successful runs on older drivers could churn out. Suspecting that the driver could be using some sort of internal profile specific to the FurMark executable, Expreview renamed the furmark.exe file, thereby not letting the driver know it's FurMark that's being run. Voila! the margin of lead the renamed FurMark executable gave over "furmark.exe" shows the driver to behave differently. A shady thing since Radeon HD 4800 almost became infamous for failing at FurMark, and at least passing it with a low score seemed better than failing at it altogether.
Expreview caught this flaw when testing the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 Professional Cooling System (PCS+) when odd behaviour with the newer driver was noted. Successive BIOS releases didn't fix the issue, in fact, it only got worse with erratic fan behaviour caused due to a "quick-fix" BIOS PowerColor issued (covered here).
Source:
Expreview
Expreview caught this flaw when testing the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 Professional Cooling System (PCS+) when odd behaviour with the newer driver was noted. Successive BIOS releases didn't fix the issue, in fact, it only got worse with erratic fan behaviour caused due to a "quick-fix" BIOS PowerColor issued (covered here).
89 Comments on ATI Deliberately Retards Catalyst for FurMark
This is odd to say the least.
I'm so glad I didnt get a 4870... :ohwell:
Are these same problems evident with the 4870X2?
And is this a heat or crappy component issue?
And seriously we all know that the fur causes the GPU to generate more heat that anything else. So if the card can still run every game out there with 100% reliability and there is some silly, relatively obscure benchmark that some cards seem to be having problems with, who cares?
I believe this is mainly an issue with the single slot coolers on the HD4850, not the dual slot ones used on the HD4870.
If some thing works hard it's going produce a load of heat until we make some major break though which is not going be any time soon due to how fast things are moving.
Hence the reason i got the PSU i got as silent has bigger disadvantages IMO. All though never heard the PSU fan still lol.
If any thing they should make these cards easier for people adjust so they can make they work to there fullest
As I said it's not something that hasn't happened in the past. It's very common in the industry, and something the average Joe shouldn't care about, but it does affect many people and it's good to know that it could happen. What it is safe on some regions, on others will make the card get fried up in less than 2 mins. Radeons are around 90C when ambient temps are 25-30C, but what about when the ambient temps are above 40C?
GPU overheating can reduce it's life-span drastically to 3 years and few months. :laugh:
CCC and Everest don't display DISP_IO, MEM_IO or SHADER_core values, the "GPU Temperature" value is somehow derived out of those three values.
you lose ballpark 10% FPS and 10% power consumption accordingly. isn't that to be expected?