Sunday, December 31st 2017

AMD Unlikely to Fix DX9 Games Bugged by Adrenalin Driver
AMD ended 2017 with its year-end mega driver release, the Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition (17.12), which introduced a large number of new features. The drivers, incidentally, also inadvertently caused bugs with some 10-year old games running on the older DirectX 9 API. When AMD Radeon users took to Reddit, and other tech forums to report these issues, AMD responded on its official support forums that it is "unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue."
Among the games affected, old as they may seem, are AAA blockbusters, including "C&C3 Tiberium Wars," "C&C3 Kane's Wrath," "C&C Red Alert 3," "C&C Red Alert 3 Upising," "C&C4 Tiberian Twilight," "Battle for Middle Earth 1-2," and "The Witcher Enhanced Edition." AMD blames its inability to fix these issues to outdated API models. The company's full statement reads "This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules."
Source:
Reddit
Among the games affected, old as they may seem, are AAA blockbusters, including "C&C3 Tiberium Wars," "C&C3 Kane's Wrath," "C&C Red Alert 3," "C&C Red Alert 3 Upising," "C&C4 Tiberian Twilight," "Battle for Middle Earth 1-2," and "The Witcher Enhanced Edition." AMD blames its inability to fix these issues to outdated API models. The company's full statement reads "This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules."
205 Comments on AMD Unlikely to Fix DX9 Games Bugged by Adrenalin Driver
AMD need to make their consumer driver more like their Founders edition driver, thats all, then drivers can easily be loaded to accommodate older tech and cleaner more futuristic APIs.
I don't think a computer in 2040 needs to run pong or digger in legacy with my retro gamer pads drivers still working.
You all chat like you didn't see the 32bit generations occour ,shit stops working with evolving tech thats life.
I saw win 3.1-now though, and lost much software and hardware along the way to ,what the hell why doesn't this workitus ,as i call it.
"How well the GPU drive it" you say? The HD 7000 cards are fine for up to 4K on older DX9 games like Aliens Vs. Predator, Even 5K is playable at steady 30 FPS, using GeDoSaTo. Do you honestly believe that people would want 4K VSR on older cards to play latest DX11 titles? Before Fiji came on to the scene, the R9 290/290X were AMD's go to cards for 4K. How in the hell are they not playable if you had two of them in your system and they scale in CrossFire? What's funny is, people managed to edit the registry and inject older driver .dll files that enabled them to use 4K VSR on 290X cards, which later AMD blocked. ROFLMAO. I believe you have no clue regarding what you're talking about. I explained the use case clearly above. nvidia had DSR out first, ranging from their GTX 400 series of cards to the current gen GTX 1080 Ti, and they didn't impose any artificial limitations like this whatsoever. Async Compute on GCN 1.0 does help with performance, btw. AMD re-enabled it once the cat was out of the bag, and it gave a performance boost as was seen on older drivers prior to the point they disabled it. Probably trying to do a planned case of obsolescence, which didn't work out.
They can't get their driver model up to scratch and keep it lean and functional across several generations of APIs, but they seem intent on spreading their support even thinner across three wildly different architecture tweaks (GDDR5, HBM1/HBM2, MCM).
I honestly do hope their GPU division is going to another, stronger company yesterday. They no longer deserve credit for anything they've done the past years and going forward. Its becoming a joke and meanwhile, the market suffers. If you still support this, I cannot see what arguments you could pull in to defend it.
I guess if I were them and my cards were so good at mining that sales exploded, then I might think along the same lines. It would be a folly to abandon the gaming market, though. In particular, these cards are very expensive, so making them stop working with significant amounts of games could well lead to a class action lawsuit eventually. The least they can do is to keep properly supporting their customers who have invested in them, but this is AMD. People should remember this next time they think of them as the "poor underdog".
Then again, AMD's downfall has been predicted on a yearly basis since forever, who knows what they manage to twist out of RTG next year to stay in business... But honestly, I really do hope they sell it off and let a new giant take on Nvidia. Because there is no doubt in my mind that there WILL be a competitor. Look at the immense pie Nvidia has created for itself the past couple years, RTG's licensing and tech is the key to taking a piece of it.
Despite there being thousands and thousands of older games running DX9, many probably even older and less well played than the few titles listed, the Rep's response was nope, those are old games, we won't support them. So how does that jive with RTW, a 2004 game still being runnable by their hardware and drivers?
I will chalk this up right now to the untrained in public response guy who drew the short straw to work the holiday period being the problem. "Don't worry", they probably said "it will be easy. The peasants never get worked up during the Christmas to New Year period." :laugh:
Edit: I see the crazy new forum decided mid stream to change my entire final 2/3 to bold. Lmao.
Edit2: Fixed. really weird.
The inexcusable part is the response that they won't even attempt to fix the issue. But right now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, because the response was from a tech support person, not directly from the driver team(who I assume is probably all on vacation until after new years). So I think it'd be stupid to not have one person put a few hours into figuring out and fixing the issue. I can't think of any DX9 games that don't work with nVidia drivers. I'm not saying there aren't, I just can't think of any or haven't come across any. Yeah, games older than that, but nothing DX9. DX9 should work with modern hardware and drivers.
What AMD is doing is terrifying truly, I bet if people started testing DX8 or DX7 with the Adrenalin driver they'd be shocked, they are probably not funtioning as well. That's an auomatic 2000 games "at least" not working.
Driver department is in deep back-office. They're role is not to give official statements.
Or maybe AMD went for Zen organization? Each department doing its stuff, connected to a network without a clear supervisor? That would explain A LOT! :roll:
Perhaps you need your memory refreshed, I was talking about what you said several posts ago which has nothing to do with DSR.
You have that distinct smell of a Fanboy, which I am very familiar with.
GCN 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4
:laugh:
Agreed about a competitor. If AMD throw their toys out of the pram and ragequit this market, then there will be a vacuum there, which is guaranteed to be filled. It wouldn't surprise me if Intel buys AMD's graphics business and becomes that competitor. They're already integrating AMD GPUs into their upcoming CPUs, which lends credibility to this possibility.
With nonexistent competition like this, no wonder NVIDIA has the gall to release the TITAN V at a ridiculous $3000. I dread to think how much the GTX version will cost. Those days of improved tech at every decreasing prices are gone.
@rtwjunkie It could well be a customer service droid issue and hope it is, but I suspect that it goes deeper than that. We just have to wait and see. :ohwell:
@newtekie1 All my DX9 games work properly too. What OS are you running those old games on. I know that W10 doesn't run anything below DX9 properly, so is it W7 perhaps?
It would be interesting to see how broken those older games are. I suspect that since W10 no longer properly supports DX8 and older, that those games are being slowly abandoned as W10 increases its market share over those older operating systems that do support it. And that's a real shame. I got lucky with the DX8 Unreal Tournament 2004, since it can be switched to OpenGL in the .ini file, but that's dodging a bullet, not solving the problem.
And as I have said, I CAN'T name one game, so much for 5... Wut? I run a number of DX8 games (SH3, Jedi Knight/Academy ) and even a DX5 game (SW: Rebellion) no problem.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/forum-guidelines.197329/
then you probably don't need a RX580 ...
or anything better then a i3 and a few generation old 2gb card
christ people most of the D3D9 code path is from 2003 get over it nobody cried when nvidia killed OGL 1.5 support a few months ago and thats a newer api
and @Romulus2K4
shadup god everytime you post I want to cut my self
AMD should at least look at this problem as A LOT of great games run on DX9. The solution might very well be simple. However, DX9 is a retired API. Devoting resources to it is not and should not be a priority for them anymore than it would be for NVidia.
Folks, the solution is simple. Built an inexpensive retro gaming rig and install the mainstream OS of the time. Most systems built in 2012 have support for WinXP, which is a great OS for the games affected and anything else DX9.
Alternatively, you could dual boot on the same system with either a second partition or a second SSD/HDD and use the older drivers without the bug.
This also goes for anyone else that wants to add any level of inappropriateness or toxicity to their posts. We'd appreciate you not doing so in the first place.
Thanks! :toast: