Friday, January 31st 2014
AMD Catalyst Mantle Driver Delayed
As mentioned in our older article from Thursday, AMD discovered a major bug with its Catalyst 14.2 driver at the last minute, which threw a wrench in the works at the company. The driver was originally slated to come out in sync with DICE' update of Battlefield 4 on Thursday. AMD now tells us that their teams have been working overnight to fix the driver, and should have their next status update for us by mid-afternoon EST (New York time), later today. That update doesn't necessarily mean a driver release at that point in time, and so AMD might be forced to label it Catalyst 14.2 beta, keeping up with its calendar-based driver version naming. Catalyst 14.1 beta was expected to ship the first public distribution of Mantle, AMD's ambitious 3D graphics API to rival Direct3D and OpenGL.
AMD also mentioned a 24 hour exclusive period for press to evaluate the driver before public release, so it looks like your download will be at least 36 hours away.
AMD also mentioned a 24 hour exclusive period for press to evaluate the driver before public release, so it looks like your download will be at least 36 hours away.
36 Comments on AMD Catalyst Mantle Driver Delayed
Personally, i don't care waiting another month or so for stable drivers and support.
Classic example of the tail wagging the dogI don't think the end user factors into the equation. EA have made an art form out of half-assing their way through product launches. AMD, equally, have a record of extreme optimism in calculating software completion (Enduro, frame pacing, and GPU release drivers being relatively high profile examples). You would think that both companies might have learned not to set unrealistic deadlines at the expense of a polished product....short memories, or something worse?
It's another question when a company keeps promising new stuff, but fails to deliver them on time in almost every case. Such companies mostly do not last as long as AMD :-)
(BTW, I'm a software developer)
EA execs cry out...BLASPHEMY!!!
As of now, the word is that Rory Read will keep their expenses below $450M for the next year. That is very low for the projects they take on. It's a drop in bucket when you look at Intel's budget allocations.
AMD is forced to do spend resources on software because no one else will. Everyone is motivated by money and AMD's grand plan won't work if they don't pay the price 10 years before everyone else. They are basically pushing adoptions and Mantle is meant to change the traditional way of doing things. Have anyone ever wonder how mobile graphics had exponential gains in the past decade? Does anyone remember AMD sold their mobile graphics to the ARM market?
I don't think AMD will ever dominate the market like Intel did because they have historically been horrible with marketing and lack any aggression in pushing their products. As far as business tactics goes, AMD is very tame compared to all their peers.
Pretty sad, really.
A company puts a beta out, first as a "restricted" beta. no big deal, just limiting the flood of reports if there is an easily found problem missed by in house testing.* Then comes an unrestricted beta, then a release candidate and so on. If there were no problems found (right!) all this would go smoothly. With more normal lluck beta and candidate release dates will bounce around like water on a hot skillet.
Is it possible to avoid this? Sure. Either don't have beta releases, or ignore all the bug reports--at least those that can't be fixed in the released version before the release date. We've all dealt with companies like that, and wish we hadn't. :-(
* It won't be missed next time, that's what regression test suites are for.
BF3 is still better by far in comparison.
(And before anyone jumps in with the ATI isn't AMD excuse, bear in mind that 1. ATI's management remained largely intact after the AMD acquisition, and 2. the lawsuit covered the product line a full year under the AMD corporate ownership)
And W1zzard hows about a PM with the driver? I wont tell :peace:
That's subjective and entirely your call.
Also its Feb 1st somewhere so now give us the dam driver already!!!