Editorial It's Now Been Over 160 Days Since a Catalyst WHQL Release

[btarunr]

PC gaming isn't about having a new GPU driver out every week or so, it's about having a choice in regards to all software (included and not limited to running older games).

Nice strawman. I meant that either the golden age of PC gaming is over, as in new bugs and issues to fix have suddenly dried up; or AMD stopped taking drivers seriously.

 

[R-T-B]

AMD are lucky they are even still alive in the marketplace. if I was the boss all of them would be gettings a swift kick up the you know what, or fired.

As I just noted, I think this is precisely what you are witnessing.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I hope the delay is due to R9 3##. They want to push out new drivers with the new cards making everyone happy all at once.

 

[raghu78]

Nice strawman. I meant that either the golden age of PC gaming is over, as in new bugs and issues to fix have suddenly dried up; or AMD stopped taking drivers seriously.

or AMD are doing their job and its you who are pimping Nvidia FUD & PR drivel. Hey man if you guys cannot see how Gameworks is hurting Nvidia's own last gen products what can I say. Farcry 4, Project Cars and and Witcher all show cases where a GTX 960 is competing or beating a GTX 780. Thats a GPU which is 2 tiers below even when comparing two consecutive generations. Thats a Maxwell 228 sq mm GPU beating a Kepler 550 sq mm GPU with less than half the transistor count and both are made on the same 28nm node. Pathetic. In non Gameworks titles 780 Ti is on par or trading blows with GTX 970 depending on game and 780 is much more faster than GTX 960.

Alternatively you could also write about Gameworks licensees dragging their feet with CF support and performance optimizations on AMD cards. Farcry took 4 months and a game patch and Techland took six weeks and a game patch to support CF. If you are looking out for gamers interest write about how Gameworks and by extension its licensees are harming both AMD and Nvidia consumers (suckers who bought their last gen). Do that and write an editorial if you have lot of time.

 

[nunyabuisness]

As I just noted, I think this is precisely what you are witnessing.

I really want to root for the little guy. but AMD are making so many poor decisions. and blames it all on Nvidia.

Well you can't blame NVidia for designing better drivers, and designing their video cards. to do better more efficient work of detail.
For so long I have had AMD in my computers. I recommended them for all my friends. since the athlon XP days. The last few vid cards including current are AMD except for a 8800GTS.

But lately Im completely bemused how they are even functioning as a company. I dont know how they are getting away with such poor decisions. That isnt the fanboy talking. for at least 5 years they havent had a CPU. and their GFX share has been dwindling away since then as well. I think ive seen as low as 16% share in DISCREET
from NV's point of view they have released the 900 series that is the best chip. its using the least amount of power. They are releasing drivers with games. which means they are working with developers closely.
AMd can do all of this too. and give me a great experience. But they arent! It's like they want to fail! I really believe that!

And now this fiji 4gb. HBM is limited to 4gb which means its not going to do 4K well at all. even if they do a 295X2 again. its still only going to be 4gb until DX12. as we all know Xfire doesnt pool memory. so its a fail before they even release it!
AMD have pretty much made my choice for them, as I said I have had AMD in my PC's since FOREVER.
3 months ago I finally got i7. and I kept a R9 280 iin my system. as the 970 doesnt deserve my money. we all know that. so once fiji comes out 980ti will be my next purchase unless 290X respin has good power savings, and 8GB and reasonable price. It may sway me. but now the driver issue is taking that away. AMD could have worked with game devs, and had drivers ready for each game like NV. but they didnt, and that is poor form!

 

[Rei86]

Haha, AMD has had a perfectly good driver for 160 days.
Meanwhile, Nvidia releases drivers every week and all of them bsod on alt-tab. So...what was the problem here ?

If you're having such issues with your computer you might wanna just reinstall windows fresh. I alt tab in and out of MOBA games all day long to change what track I'm listening too, youtube video, or podcast. And zero issues over here.

As for the topic at hand its always worried me a bit. The last real AMD GPU I've owned was a 9700Pro and that was when I was... ignorant about the computer world and didn't need a GPU really for gaming but I needed one at the time so I could watch media. Since than and learning bout computers I've always owned nVidia products. I actually enjoy that knowing with all the hyped or massive profile games that I can rely on nVidia to deliver me "optimized" drivers that day of release most of the time. Quotes for optimized as that's not always true, but 9 out of 10 times they usually deliver and continue to improve. I remember the last major issue being Tomb Raider with TressFX giving nvidia card issues but ... that's how long its been since I've paid attention.

So yes, their drip feed of driver updates for their products do worry me. I enjoy how AMD is trying their hardest to be the enthusiasts friendly company but sometimes I just like my shit to work without me having to tweaking NOTHING. So in the coming weeks when I ditch my 980 x2 for two R9-3xxX model has me a bit worried that times the cards will just flat out fail on me because they don't have the support they need.

 

[raghu78]

I really want to root for the little guy. but AMD are making so many poor decisions. and blames it all on Nvidia.

Well you can't blame NVidia for designing better drivers, and designing their video cards. to do better more efficient work of detail.

Well you cannot blame Nvidia for throwing Kepler under the bus too and completely forgetting their loyal last gen customers.

 

[HumanSmoke]

And no, I don't remember any instance when, as you put it, AMD's hardware simply refused to run a AAA title because no one at AMD thought to code for it. Please refresh my memory.

Well, I will use an example that is fairly analogous to the current furore regarding Project CARS - not that recent but more apropos than most.
In 2009, Saboteur was released - and refused to run on AMD graphics hardware. Being a TWIMTBP title, the accusations immediately flew that Nvidia had nerfed the game for AMD users, only for it to later emerge that AMD had dropped the ball- as Richard Huddy admitted the following year:

bit-tech: Recently, Saboteur launched without any support for ATI graphics hardware - although it was patched later on. How did that happen?
RH: It was a mess of timing. The developer put in a change at the very last moment which unfortunately relied on a particular behaviour of the driver. Two changes in our driver and [this change] in the game took place at the same time and we didn't catch that - we should have done, and that's a straight forward failing on our part. We worked as closely as we could with the game developer to make the patch available as quickly as possible, but we messed up on that occasion. If you want to catch me on these I'll put my hands up to every one of them. I wouldn't want to try and discourage you from catching me on this because I want you to go catch Nvidia as well so if you've got a list of titles where you think we failed, bring it out because a PC should just work.

Hopefully that refreshes your memory. There are other instances for both vendors, but this should suffice as an example of what I meant by driver issues not being solely down to a single cause.

 

[R-T-B]

I really want to root for the little guy. but AMD are making so many poor decisions. and blames it all on Nvidia.

Well you can't blame NVidia for designing better drivers, and designing their video cards. to do better more efficient work of detail.
For so long I have had AMD in my computers. I recommended them for all my friends. since the athlon XP days. The last few vid cards including current are AMD except for a 8800GTS.

But lately Im completely bemused how they are even functioning as a company. I dont know how they are getting away with such poor decisions. That isnt the fanboy talking. for at least 5 years they havent had a CPU. and their GFX share has been dwindling away since then as well. I think ive seen as low as 16% share in DISCREET
from NV's point of view they have released the 900 series that is the best chip. its using the least amount of power. They are releasing drivers with games. which means they are working with developers closely.
AMd can do all of this too. and give me a great experience. But they arent! It's like they want to fail! I really believe that!

And now this fiji 4gb. HBM is limited to 4gb which means its not going to do 4K well at all. even if they do a 295X2 again. its still only going to be 4gb until DX12. as we all know Xfire doesnt pool memory. so its a fail before they even release it!
AMD have pretty much made my choice for them, as I said I have had AMD in my PC's since FOREVER.
3 months ago I finally got i7. and I kept a R9 280 iin my system. as the 970 doesnt deserve my money. we all know that. so once fiji comes out 980ti will be my next purchase unless 290X respin has good power savings, and 8GB and reasonable price. It may sway me. but now the driver issue is taking that away. AMD could have worked with game devs, and had drivers ready for each game like NV. but they didnt, and that is poor form!

I don't disagree with anything you are saying. I just think that rather than this being evidence of the death throes of the company (can't afford to pay their driver devs, for example), it may be the company trying to rid itself of parts it perceives as cancerous before that can happen (possibly sacking the driver dev team and finding new guys, hence this delay and subsequent hiring spree)

Either way, the company is hurting. It's question of whether it acknowledges it or not, and whether or not it has enough life left to do something about it...

 

[zmeul]

not like is the 1st time happening:
25th of May 2014 - Catalyst 14.4 WHQL got released
the next WHQL would be 14.9, released 158 days later

 

[raghu78]

not like is the 1st time happening:
25th of May 2014 - Catalyst 14.4 WHQL got released
the next WHQL would be 14.9, released 158 days later

but nvidia pr ( tpu) had to do something to spread FUD ahead of AMD's next gen flagship, especially given that AMD has a 15-18 month lead (time-to-market advantage) with HBM. so not surprising.

 

[zmeul]

but nvidia pr ( tpu) had to do something to spread FUD ahead of AMD's next gen flagship, especially given that AMD has a 15-18 month lead (time-to-market advantage) with HBM. so not surprising.

the thing is nVidia had WHQL drivers 1 day prior to both GTA5 and TW3 releases

 

[R-T-B]

I don't know what's more disturbing here... The fact that AMD has been releasing drivers so far apart for more than 2 years, or the aparent fanboy rush to justify it.

There is a reason we release frequent drivers... Most notably crossfire profiles for new games. It doesn't take much to repackage a new (or even same) driver with some profiles and slap a WHQL sig on it. The fact that AMD seems incapable of doing this speaks to something going on in the company. I guess it's nothing new, but it's sort of hitting me hard right now being that it's been happening now for an almost historic 2 years.

I don't know what to think of it, but pulling the wool over your eyes and pretending this isn't disturbing isn't helping AMD people.

 

[czaczi87]

If you actually want to play games and enjoy them, just get the best single-GPU card you can afford and you'll have a great time. If you want to brag about sinking an ungodly amount of money into your computer, well, you'll just have to deal with reality.

First of all, I thought that AMD actually solved most of the issues with Crossfire when they introduced the new bridgeless connection. I was wrong :/ Second of all, a single GPU nowadays just don't cut it in terms of performance unless it's some Satan's lovechild like the extremely overpriced Titan X.

I actually paid less money for two non-reference R9 290's than I would for a single GTX 980. So no, I'm not "bragging about sinking an ungodly amount of money into my computer" I always seek to find the sweet spot in the performance/price ratio. I thought that I would get great performance from a dual-GPU setup, but sadly this was not the case.

The only options for me to proceed are:
1. Keep the 2x R9 290s and pray to God that I'll get CF support for new games quickly - yeah, right
2. Buy GTX 970 - The way Nvidia cut down VRAM and played dumb was appalling. Nvidia are dicks.
3. Buy GTX 980
4. Wait for GTX 980 Ti (lots of power and at least 6GB VRAM) and see if it will not be terribly expensive.
5. Wait for R9 390 - no, screw you AMD, you had your chance.

And another thing. I want to play games on the day of their release (if I have the time) not on some stupid steam sale half a year later.

 

[4fifties]

I'm no game developer but I've never understood how a game can go "gold" and then have obvious graphics-related issues that seemingly come out of nowhere, regardless of whether we're speaking of nVidia or AMD. I've sat like a dummy and watched the credits roll by after finishing a game and have always noted seeing the various Testing and Quality Assurance teams mentioned. Well, what the hell sort of platforms were these people using that these sort of issues take everyone by surprise?

How can a developer not know that a title they have been working on for years doesn't work as they intended on this or that GPU? Everybody in multiple studios, including both the developers and the publishers QA people, often on different continents, are all running the exact same GPU and driver? No one is checking performance and visuals across multiple platforms using AMD/Intel/nVidia video hardware? How can a developer specify that this particular AMD or nVidia GPU is the minimum required, and that this or that GPU is the one recommended, if they are experiencing brand-related performance problems or haven't actually tested one or the another during development?

Crossfire performance has been an issue for AMD on several occasions. And, I've little doubt that they probably don't have the manpower resources to put out these graphic-related fires as quickly as they would like. But, when a developer is presumably coding in compliance to an existing Microsoft DirectX API, and, despite that, visual issues still arise, should it solely be the responsibility of either AMD or nVidia to adjust their otherwise (mostly) satisfactory drivers to compensate? The developer gets a pass?

I understand that creating visuals for DirectX isn't some rote exercise in terms of coding. Using some creative techniques with a new, or newly-modified, game engine might well expose a shortcoming in an existing driver that does require attention. I really do get that. But, I also get the impression that we're perhaps a bit too quick to criticize the slow response to cleaning-up a mess like that, and maybe not nearly as critical of who actually caused it.

 

[R-T-B]

How can a developer not know that a title they have been working on for years doesn't work as they intended on this or that GPU?

They usually do work out of the box on any given GPU fine. At least, decently coded titles do. It's squeezing every last bit of performance for any given situation in a game that seems to be what driver release accomplish. This is especially true in the multigpu scene.

STFU.

I'll be the first to admit you're responding to a trollish comment, but let's keep the one-liner "STFU" out of the equation, kthanks.

 

[Exceededgoku]

See it's all us crossfire users: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/The-Witcher3.aspx

Good to see their continued support, problem is if you are really excited to play a game it's actually better to wait for the driver that fixes it before buying.

AMD's driver issues are ONLY for crossfire/multi GPU solutions.

Single GPU performance is absolutely fantastic.

CF has been out for, like, forever and there's still issues with VSYNC (causes major image distortion and rendering issues), performance drops, utilisation issues.

But this isn't always the case, when it works it works damn well!

 

[Aquinus]

AMD's driver issues are ONLY for crossfire/multi GPU solutions.

...and very new games. I haven't had any issues with my 6870s lately, probably because I don't tend to play the newest games often.

 

[btarunr]

but nvidia pr ( tpu)

Oh you mean that site which, when the GTX 970 3.5GB drama was just on forums/reddit, was among the first to lunge forward with detailed articles flaming NVIDIA; with several follow-ups, until Jen-Hsun wrote a sorry-letter? Stop making yourself look like an ignorant jackass without reading enough of our content.

 

[Relayer]

Are you people blind or is AMD paying you to write this crap? "If it's not broken, don't fix it" - yeah, but you are forgetting that almost every freaking AAA game in the last half year had poorer performance on AMD cards than on Nvidia cards. Also the Crossfire support is crap. I have 2x R9 290's and can't utilize the second card in The Witcher 3 and CF in GTA 5 is also broken. I am now strongly considering selling those two Radeons and buying a GTX 980 or a 980 Ti if the price won't be murderous.

PS. Sorry for my language usage but I'm not a native speaker.

If you look at TPU's TW3 review you will see the 290 (non X) faster than Titan even. that's before AMD releases optimized drivers for the game. It's like that with many of the newer games in TPU's benchmark suite. I don't get where you are getting the poorer performance on AMD. Unless you are expecting Hawaii (290's) to be faster than the 980 or Titan X?

 

[rtwjunkie]

the thing is nVidia had WHQL drivers 1 day prior to both GTA5 and TW3 releases

And by all reports, TW3 game-ready drivers are screwed. Yet here I am playing it on the driver released 2 versions ago just fine. I will no longer update drivers on Nvidia just for a game. I'll play with what I have that is stable until they no longer are stable or give poor performance, and then upgrade.

 

[oldskooler]

You're kidding right? Is it game-breaking? No, but it is kinda a big deal when driver activity from AMD is far and few between.

And now there are rumors that the new 390x card might cost more money than what people are expecting. Poor driver support and expensive hardware? Yeah, that's going to push people to Nvidia.

 

[R-T-B]

You're kidding right? Is it game-breaking? No, but it is kinda a big deal when driver activity from AMD is far and few between.

And now there are rumors that the new 390x card might cost more money than what people are expecting. Poor driver support and expensive hardware? Yeah, that's going to push people to Nvidia.

AMD needs that money to write drivers and pay R&D to actually make stuff.

I know people don't want to pay more for the 390x, but AMD actually needs to charge more as undercharging for their products has been killing their company. Just look at their net worth on the stock market right now.

They are kind of damned if they do, and damned if they don't, to be quite frank.

 

[rtwjunkie]

AMD needs that money to write drivers and pay R&D to actually make stuff.

I know people don't want to pay more for the 390x, but AMD actually needs to charge more as undercharging for their products has been killing their company. Just look at their net worth on the stock market right now.

They are kind of damned if they do, and damned if they don't, to be quite frank.

You're correct. When you build a quality product, charge for it. People will pay for it. You can't pay off your debts and make a profit by selling products too cheaply.

 

[oldskooler]

It's more about a workable business model more than anything. There are reasons why many many executives from AMD have left over the last few years. No one is asking for anything for free but simply put, myself and many of my friends and the community in general are attracted to AMD for it's fair and value oriented pricing. So far I feel like I am getting a good buy when I buy AMD. The trade off being ( read the tread header ) there is not much in the way of driver updates. IF AMD comes out with expensive pricing on top of poor driver update performance that is just going to force people over to Nvidia. Not everyone obviously but it will cause people to rethink their consumer relationship with AMD.