Thursday, May 31st 2012
No More Monthly AMD Catalyst Updates?
It's 31st, and Catalyst 12.5 WHQL is nowhere in sight. According to an article by Benchmarks3D, you should give up on it, for AMD is calling quits with the monthly driver update cycle. However, AMD will focus on a staggered driver update cycle that will address issues with games as they crop up. In other words, end-users could end up seeing new drivers as hotfixes more often, depending on launches of games and new Radeon hardware, but that could also mean long periods of lull when there are no major issues to address, or no new hardware to improve drivers for.
Source:
Benchmarks3D
86 Comments on No More Monthly AMD Catalyst Updates?
My last four graphics cards have been AMD branded, and I was on the fence regarding what camp to go with for my next card, but this news pushes me back to the side of the green team. First AMD said their would be no Catalyst updates for cards below the 5000 series for Windows 8 aside from what comes on the disc, their failure to compete with Intel x86 CPU's on the high end, failure to hold onto their price/performance crown on the CPU and GPU side, too little focus on the CPU side of their APU's, and now this.
Graphics division aside, AMD has a very hard time focusing on more than one product/division at a time post-Hector. I'm no longer impressed with AMD.
*smh*
I prefer the monthly updates, recently I have only updated as needed or as performance increases are available.
They need to SLOW DOWN and do things right. Quality and quantity.
I've been using ATI consistantly since 2009. I haven't had any issues with AMD drivers what so ever.
I update my drivers and then say to myself "what is the point, performance was great before and its still great. Did I need this driver?".And TheMailMan78 behaving like a kid wasn't pointless?
Anyway BAF92 welcome to the forums man.If you do nothing but game on a single monitor you have been lucky. For those of us who work and or have more then a generation old card AMD drivers have sucked since they laid off the driver team. This is a fact MANY on here will attest to. As for me behaving like a kid......what because I don't share the same opinion as you I'm a child? How mature.How can you have issues? According to Dent1 AMD drivers are perfect.
Anyhow i don't blame AMD not to do monthly drivers anymore as it must be lots of works
I think a new driver every ~2 months (4-7 a year) should be good enough & it should give them more time to "fix it" good & have something solid to update to... IMO
Gaming wise Catalysts are ALMOST fine but damn OpenGL support is meh, I brought up OpenGL because I remember we talked about it on another thread TMM, so who is new can understand why we bash Catalysts, atleast we can say why they suck, differently from fanboy who they just say "OH LOL <insert random GPU manufacturer> SUCKS"
It all depends on what you do. I could tell ya that my 8800GT, was running all fine ,but over the driver 16*.**, I was dropping from 80 to 15 FPS in Oblivion.. People will say ya but it's old game. So what?yeah that's right. In community, there are haters, and like you said, haters gonna hate, that's it :laugh:
If everybody thinks AMD drivers sucks, why do they buy one? Canyou answer me on this? If people thinks it sucks, well do not buy and go buy something else lol.
Anyway, you have problem with OpenGL, fine you can go on green if it works for ya. I do not think driver are perfect, I,ve just waited soo long for that update for profile :) . Something will be better on AMD, some other on nVidia, there is nothing more to say.
A mature response would have been "ATI drivers have known issues, Nvidia has it right. Hopefully this new way of deploying drivers is a step in the right direction".I never said that. To paraphrase, I believe AMD drivers are perfect for me.
From a business person's point of view this is better. More frequent hotfixes, so customers are happy. Full brown drivers when it's needed. Why expend money on constant development if nothing major needs fixing?Thank you. A response from a business perspective.
A more reasonable one would be Quarterly up-dates 4 a year is okay. Still says you give a crap about your customers and gives you time to soart out issues in testing. Instead of just releasing random betas fixing then breaking features every time a new game comes out.
With all this driver talk from both sides. I'm still waiting for a web-site with the balls to do a driver review. Remember the old days when both companies were being called out on cheap tricks. Texture compressing, Down scaling APIs, not rendering full screens and now its just seams its an accepted thing.
You have to wonder if the community doesnt care enough to cover it. Why AMD/Nvidia would bother fixing their drivers. They already made you buy the hardware.