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?
The issue, for me, is quite specifically the issues revolving around multi-monitor use, a thing that they use to market their cards.
If they cannot get it working on older cards, I almsot feel as though i shoudl get a refund, or free upgrade, so I can get ahrdware that DOESN'T have these issues. I did not buy 5-series and 6-series cards for single-monitor use...I bought them for Eyefinity, and that is currently stil lbroken, as admitted in the news posting.
And becuase they admit this is problem, and that it might not work for earlier cards, this is bad news for me. It's not like I'm complaining about unreal problems...these are problems, obviously, that AMD recognize exists.
The new feedback form is good..I was using the old one every month anyway.
and shit i agree with trickson:D:p
Nothing drives me up the wall faster than all the crap I have to deal with that damndable user interface that Catalyst driver has. It's so unintuitive and there's at least 3 menus/options you have to memorize to get all of the settings. They're not just a centralized in a single menu or list like they were for nVidia drivers down the left hand side. You can't even adjust per application performance or settings from the Drivers themselves. Not to mention the hardware itself is complete crap for using Unigraphics NX with. FirePros excel with Solidworks but not Unigraphics. Though that last part is the company's fault for skimping on a good GPU for us to use.
I've also worked professionally with some great people over at AMD/ATI and it's news like this that really saddens me since I know they've got some amazingly brilliant people over there. Now I'm sitting here humming "Where has the old AMD/ATI gone" to the song "where have all the good guys gone" or something similar. :(
NVs UI i found very confusing to use
It's a horrible layout altogether, to speak nothing of the anemic hardware and poor software optimizations.
I understand some people are facing minor issues here and there, but atleast i haven't come across any AMD driver that killed my card outright.
Hell, why should an HD7970 user suffer from things that HD5870 users suffered from 3 years ago like cursor bugs.
As a reviewer that has worked with dozens of graphics cards i can say for a FACT that i ran into much less issues with NVIDIA's graphics cards. There, you have it.
BTW, the irony is that i bumped into this topic while helping a friend over skype swap his drivers while the current one is eating his HD6870 alive with constant 99% load. (again, a 2 year old problem).
My system specs are as below,
Q6600 @ 3.6 GHZ | HD 5850 @ 950 MHZ GPU - 1000 MHZ - RAM | 8 GB RAM | 650 Watts PSU | Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
I don't say that you are not facing the issue, but your argument of hardware dying is fine but small quirk aren't is way beyond my head.
EDIT: You should completely wipe the Graphic driver of your friend's HD6870 using driver sweeper and do the fresh installation, that should do the trick.
After a LOT of work I found that as long as you used the Catalyst 9.12 drivers, as well as a modified DLL, that you could get the game running on an ATI card up to the HD 3870 . Why they broke this functionality, and broke Crimson Skies support at the same time, I STILL do not know. But for some reason NVIDIA cards, while they were broken for awhile, fixed the issue starting with the 258.96 drivers.
While I'm sympathetic to hardware makers regarding supporting a particular game/application I don't understand why they have to break compatibility with older software and meanwhile leave us holding the bag and trying to figure out at what point things stopped working. The least they could do would be to add in the patch notes something like "had to break x to fix y" so that users could decide if they wish to upgrade or not.
You know, I got these three monitors, and when launching a 3D app, one monitor goes to sleep. I have to turn off the power, then turn it back on, and hope that it works, which doesn't happen about 60% of the time. THat is NOT a working product.
Then, just normal use, move cursor from one monitor to the next, and it turns into a garbled mess.
DO i know what the problem really is? YES. Have I known for years? YES. And is this news posting the first time AMD has openly admitted that it's an issue? YES.
I literally posted years ago saying that the Display output design of the 5-series cards was broken, and that using differnt display output interfaces was the source of the issue. And here we sit years later, with AMD finally saying the same thing.
As I posted earlier, the fix, is hardware they were supposed to release, but never did. IT's a external box that provides a singular display output that prevents all these issues with timings that are occuring, and such a basic thing, to me, that it is astounding to me that AMD has decided to not fix the problem correctly.
Now to sum it all up, if this issue was killing cards, you can probably guarantee it'd be fixed by now, as the loss to AMD for dealing with such an issue would be too great. But because it doesn't kill cards, here I sit, for years, waiting for a fix for a PC I spent $5000 on like three years ago.
And my current $6000 PC? OH, yeah, it has issues as well. I coud have bought new VGAs in the past few weeks...I bought a new U2412M monitor, a i7 3820 and a i7 3770K, an OCZ Nocti mSATA drive....all that cash I would have gladly spent on a couple of HD7950 3 GB cards.
But I didn't, becuase AMD has failed me with the past 2 generation of products. I've been burnt by them so bad, I won't buy GTX670's, either, until I know 1000% for sure that multi-monitor issues are a thing of the past.
I have ZERO confidence in AMD as a company, as a result of them failing to deliver properly functioning hardware as they have promised.
I will say though, that an AMD rep took the time to call me after so many bug reports, and ask me exactly what the issue was. I'm not sure how they got my phone number, but call they did.
and i use both my hd7970 and 6870 on the same motherboard to fold.... so they are at 100% 24/7 and no problems
edit: i also do alot of gaming... either youve had bad cards or you dont know how to take care of your things
I WANT IT NAOW!!! It has been three bloody years!!!!
I mean, it's no big deal, really. Just some users have spent thousands on Eyefinity configs, only to have them BSOD. NO big deal at all!
Those are some big issues, and it's nice to see they are fixed. But here they are working on new cards, when they haven't fixed issues with cards two generations old. As far as I am concerned, this is why they fired so many people in that department
Hell you should send in your resume ASAP! :laugh: