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Despite Game-Related Glitches, AMD Discontinues Monthly Driver Updates
MojoKid writes "Recently AMD announced that it would cease offering monthly graphics driver updates, and instead issue Catalyst versions only 'when it makes sense.' That statement would be a good deal more comforting if it didn't 'make sense' to upgrade AMD's drivers nearly every single month. From 2010 through 2011, AMD released a new Catalyst driver every month like clockwork. Starting last summer, however, AMD began having trouble with high-profile game releases that performed badly or had visual artifacts. Rage was one high-profile example, but there have been launch-day issues with a number of other titles, including Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, Bat Man: Arkham City, and Battlefield 3. The company responded to these problems by quickly releasing out-of-band driver updates. In addition, AMD's recent Catalyst 12.6 beta driver also fixes random BSODs on the desktop, poor Crossfire scaling in Skyrim and random hangs in Crysis 2 in DX9. In other words, AMD is still working to resolve important problems in games that launched more than six months ago. It's hard to put a positive spin on slower driver releases given just how often those releases are necessary."
They didn't say slower, they said as needed. Since they are already releasing 'out of band' they are just normalizing that process. They will release when they have fixes / function instead of on an arbitrary timeline. It seems to make perfect sense.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I mean, of course frequent updates are desirable. On the other hand, every release produces overhead which could be used to fix the problems at hand. In my experience, monthly update schedules are a terrible waste of valuable time.
Personally, I'm an nvidia user, since I hate the driver issues of AMD... but this news sounds like nvidia spin to me.
...what their saying is... is that we should purchase NVidia cards because they will actually make their drivers work, and will update the drivers regularly to address these issues? I remember when ATI drivers were notoriously bad, and now it looks like we've returned to those days. Goodbye ATI, wish I could say it was nice knowing you... but that would be a lie.
You fix third-party software... by modifying drivers?
How about forcing the game makers to TEST THEIR DAMN GAME before releasing? Is it really so hard to throw together four test-beds with GPUs from different vendors?
As someone who is generally an AMD fan - their processors and video cards generally provide much better performance for much cheaper - their driver support, or lack thereof, is frustrating. NVIDIA consistently has far better driver support, and features, than their AMD counterparts, even if their cards don't provide as much bang for the buck.
If AMD falls even further behind in that game, I may just bite the bullet and switch to NVIDIA just to stop having to worry about driver-related frustrations altogether.
With their constant rebranding of old boards I can never keep straight what the hell I'd be buying. (Is that 600 series a kepler or fermi based board? Who can tell?)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
AMD says that they're moving from a monthly release cycle to a release-when-needed cycle and someone decides to write this piece of trash about it?
It's not a bad thing, it makes sense to do it like this. As the summary points out, AMD currently releases out-of-band updates for when a high-profile title has an issue or launch day performance increases, so it doesn't make sense to make another release that month that doesn't change much. It's just confusing and frankly unnecessary. Doing it "as needed" just means that when a driver release comes out, it's worth updating to. If that means I only have to update my drivers once every few months, I'm fine with that - even if it occasionally means there's 2 or 3 updates in the space of a month because a lot of games happened to come out then. Overall, it's better for everyone.
Article is a big load of FUD and should be ignored.
Disclaimer: I've currently got a Geforce 560 Ti in my desktop and my laptop uses a Geforce 555M chipset - frankly, I'm an nvidia fanboy and this article still disgusts me.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
For the life of me, I cannot tell ehat the editorial is trying to say. Is AMD evil for trying to update less often, after recognizing the strain this puts on consumers? Or are thry evil for issuing updates very often, because they want their consumers to be able to. Enjoy the use of their product, and there have been peoblems in the field?
Editors, wtf? Why do you let so much crap through?
You do realize this could also mean quickly releasing hotfixes for games that need them, right? Of course you don't, everybody loves hating on ATI.
Millenia ago, I went with nVidia after having some terribly hilarious problems with ATI drivers (eg, OpenGL not working).
Later, I switched to ATI when it was nVidia's turn to put out worthless drivers.
Presently, I have a lovely situation where my screen goes black for 5-10 seconds before returning to normal. Nothing else is affected during this period - music continues to play, et cetera.
I suspect I'll be picking up an nVidia card soon.
I also suspect that ATI-that-is-AMD and nVidia are in collusion, and purposely orchestrate the alternation of who is putting out shitty drivers at any point. :p
The only graphics cards manufacturer that provides a complete free software driver is Intel.
LaptopVideo2Go.com is a very active web site entirely devoted to making nVidia graphics devices work correctly. nVidia tried to avoid doing anything about defective chips in HP laptops.
When you download AMD's ATI drivers, the web site tries to sell violent video games. The new drivers often have serious bugs.
If there is a competition, which CEO will be voted the worst? nVidia does not seem honest, and AMD seems to be trying to drive itself out of business.
If they released software and patches when they were done instead of on an artificial time schedule.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
heh ok, wonder how bad the demand for that is...
"check it out I got a i7 extreme fucking overclocked, 32 gigs of ram overclocked, quad ATI's also overclocked, 4 SSD's in RAID, and Windows XP cause DX9 is the shit yo"
cause no one plays crysis for the game, its a epeen ruler.
Really? Odd that developers seem to be abandoning consoles, and even console gamers seem to be abandoning them in favor of the PC. The last two years have seen a pretty good resurgence. If you want to see some odd stats, look at some of the indie titles that sold so poorly on consoles but sold so well on PC's that they made enough to make a sequel.
Om, nomnomnom...
Oh for Christ's sake shut the fuck up. Removing the need to release a new driver every month frees up time to work on any issues that come up with new releases. It gives them more ability to fix things in a timely manner, not less.
Spoken like an Nvidia fanboi.
a new Catalyst driver every month like clockwork. Starting last summer, however, AMD began having trouble with high-profile game releases that performed badly or had visual artifacts.
Looks like someone is using Agile!
The thing that drove me crazy with their scheduled releases was that they often broke the working additions from the month prior. My friend has a 6870 and had to roll back his drivers to the previous month's for every release because the latest releases always introduced some new debilitating issue while the CAP profiles (individual game compatibility drivers) released after the latest drivers fixed the previous month's issues.
In addition to not being able to use proper 3D acceleration even using the proprietary Catalyst drivers for my Juniper series in card Linux, which leaves Gnome 3, non-2D Unity, and most GPU accelerated applications in general in an unstable or unusable state of limbo, there have been no obvious improvements that would have justified their release schedule, nothing that has improved existing stability or performance for general use, and nothing like a roadmap to indicate that they understand what the issues are or what they plan to do about them. If it does exist, I imagine it's a giant list of "Won't Fix"es with few "Critical"s about popular benchmark compatibility.
Even though I really like the idea of the low wattage (75W for ~6950 performance) 7 series, I look at nVidia cards every month waiting for the prices to drop so my graphics card's drivers won't be the limiting factor in determining which Linux distro I use.
Yes, consoles never have any problems. Save for RRODs, poor performance and bugs in some games, including major releases like Skyrim (especially on the PS3), scratched disks. Minor issues, nothing to worry about.
If it has graphical glitches, ya that's probably the game, Poor performance, depends on. The problem with Rage is it is OpenGL and AMD has shitty GL drivers, they have for a long time. nVidia has long had GL and DX drivers that performed equally, AMD has long had GL problems (used to be much worse than now).
If it is BSODs or GPU driver crashes though? No, that is 100% on the graphics drivers. No matter what the program does, it shouldn't bring the system down. Anything running in Ring 3 can't bring the system down without a problem form something in Ring 0, or a piece of hardware. That means the drivers (though they are largely Ring 3 these days) or card.
Drive quality has long been a problem with AMD (formerly ATi) graphics cards. There was a time when they were near unusable for anything but 2D. Some of the old Rage products you wanted to run with the included Windows drivers not the ATi provided ones because they had so many problems. They've gotten a lot better, but they still have more issues.
An example of a recent issue I've run in to was with Sony Vegas. It uses GPGPU to accelerate video effects. For nVidia, it uses CUDA, for AMD it uses OpenCL (since those are what they prefer). I was having all kinds of crashing issues with it on my work system, which had an AMD card. I tried disabling GPU acceleration, no crashes. So I tried an nVidia card in it. Again, no crashes. Not long after Sony released an update disabling a bunch of GPU effects on AMD cards until AMD fixed their driver (which they just did not long ago and Vegas has now reenabled the effects).
An artificial release schedule, one tied to the calendar rather than bug fixes, can actually slow things down. It can cause a certain amount of disruption when a team is in the middle of taking care of a bug. It seems somewhat similar to having to put together a demo when you are in the middle implementing a feature. I'd say try for a monthly release but don't necessarily let that goal interrupt fixes underway, let in progress fixes delay the release when it makes sense to do so.
"The argument between HP and nVidia over defective GPUs is between HP and nVidia, not between me and nVidia."
The way nVidia has acted in the past is an indication of how it may act in the future. See one of the many articles, for example: Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip.
If you buy something with an nVidia product in it, you may get involved with enormous hassles like that. People who weren't following the sneakiness and dishonesty closely didn't get their computers replaced because there was a very limited period in which customers needed to act.
Both AMD and nVidia need better management, in my opinion.
Not everyone is a 3D gamer who wants to be on the absolute cutting edge of everything. Not everyone thinks trading off stability against a few extra FPS is a good deal.
Would it be too much to give us a stable driver, with maybe one update per year? By stable I mean no dodgy hacks, and no game-specific "optimizations". I mean a driver that won't crash, and that isn't afraid to be a little slower in order to do things right. Is there really no one else out there who cares about stability?
... if it means fewer nags to update drivers.
Frankly, monthly updates is NUTS. You quite simply CANNOT properly QC drivers with that kind of timeframe. Add in the out-of-band bugfix releases and you have an absolute shambles when it comes to control of the code and code quality. The fact that it has gone on this long is the REASON AMD is having so many issues. Spaghetti code on a massive scale, insufficient documentation, and ever more of same being piled on by programmers who don't have time to get a proper handle on the code, so they treat the symptoms instead of the disease.
Hopefully them stepping back will alow them to reign it in and start improving the drivers in a rational manner.
I've had stability problems with both ATI cards that I've owned recently. The older one was a 4xxx series that was totally inadequate, and my current one is a Radeon HD 6670 which should be adequate for most things, but really doesn't provide a smooth experience in Skyrim under Windows 7 nor is it the best in Linux. Compositing under KDE is not stable with this card. I don't use the closed source driver, however, under Linux, but I don't feel that I should need to use the Catalyst driver just to get KDE's eye candy to work right.
This begs the question: what is a good stable video card that can give modern games under Windows an enjoyable experience and also provides a solid experience under Linux with preferably an open source driver?
if your OEM locks you out of driver updates in the first place? I've had no end of frustration with my Lenovo laptop and the fact that they unlock a new AMD driver about once per year.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I have been building computers since the early 1990s. There has always been a segment of the community that prefers AMD to (Intel / Nvidia / etc) and I have never understood why. I have tried both AMD CPUs and video cards over the years and always end up going back to Intel, and more recently Nvidia. It seems like AMD just cannot get it right when it comes to the gaming market. They often win on pricepoint, but completely fail on issues like what this article mentions.
Why do people continue to support AMD? All I can figure is that it has to do with an irrational hatred of Intel. Intel is monopolistic. Intel is anti-competitive. Intel is expensive. So, rather than supporting Intel and getting the best products on the market, people go with AMD and suffer in smug self-righteousness for doing the "right thing" and not supporting the companies that are dominating the field.
There are bugs in their drivers affecting games, but often times it's probably the game designers fault as much as AMD. Game developers should know enough to test on nvidia and amd graphics cards before release. I have both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards in my home. I used to be an ATI fan boy but I got over it when AMD bought them.
Both AMD and NVIDIA have problems with their products that make them useless after a few years. AMD drops support quickly on graphics cards. My ATI radeon 1900 series card had to be replaced because I couldn't get drivers to work with newer versions of windows well before I consider the card expired. On the NVIDIA side, they have had several hardware issues in the past including the HP laptop issues and the classic "oven" fix for their old GPUs. I've had more NVIDIA cards completely freak out on me on a hardware level than any AMD/ATI product. Yet, the last two cards have been NVIDIA in my main gaming PC. I can actually get drivers for my OSes. Most linux fans like AMD's support there.. well for us BSD folks, NVIDIA makes drivers for FreeBSD at least. NVIDIA supports more platforms than AMD.
I think AMD going cheap on drivers is an obvious. They have to go cheap. They're ahead on performance (with GPUs). All their extra cash went into buying ATI. Now they have to pay for that and try to catch up on CPU performance with Intel some how.
You can still get the latest 'leaks' at places like guru3d.com - it sucks if for people who don't know about this and people counting on (say) Steam Catalyst auto-update, but if I'm having issues with ATI or Nvidia drivers I go there first.
Performance wise, the HD 6670 is not exactly a high end GPU. I have one myself and it is OK for most games, but then I don't expect to run my games at maximum graphics settings. If you expect high quality graphics with decent FPS, a 6850 would be the minimum. Or maybe a HD 7770.
Second, I can confirm some funny artifacts under Windows (windows switched to the background are not fully overwritten). This happens both with the HD 6670 @home and the HD 5770 @work, so I suspect a driver problem that is common to the 5xxx and the 6xxx series.
This begs the question: what is a good stable video card that can give modern games under Windows an enjoyable experience and also provides a solid experience under Linux with preferably an open source driver?
Right now, there is no perfect solution, only tradeoffs: ;-)
- If you have plenty of money and are willing to live with a closed source (but having a good rep) driver under Linux, the Nvidia GTX 670 looks good. But their midrange Kepler stuff is not released yet. The older Fermi "Thermi" models get clobbered on performance per watt by AMD.
- If you insist on open source drivers under Linux, you are stuck with AMD for serious graphics cards. But the open source AMD drivers under Linux suck at performance.
- For those who don't have big GPU performance expectations, Intel is becoming interesting with the HD 4000 integrated graphics. But it still gets clobbered by the HD 5570, see http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review. So even Intel's best integrated GPU still loses to a discrete lowish-end card
C - the footgun of programming languages
Very true. But what will really happen is pretty much all devs and games will go to the PC. They can just make so much more money and have more access to more gamers, and with more freedom. Prediction: F2P, indie, and mid-size will rule the PC and the majority of the gaming world. AAA will be marginalized. But AAA games will remain on the consoles and possible even eliminated on the PC in the future. The costs and art assets involved are going to be even more ridiculous than they are now. If anything, we'll probably only see PC ports starting 3 years in when they have time to program the games to be cross-platform again.
Betweent heir shitty quality, lack of open-source involvement, and shitty tech support is it any wonder Awful Macro Devices is well behind Intel and Nvidia. It is a good thing they are going mobile as hopefully Intel will go that route and totally obliterate AMD off the fucking map. GOOOODBYE AWFUL MACRO DEvICES!!!!!
I'm all for less competition. Always good for the consumers.
This is due to a problem the isn't addrssed buy the Cat update initiative.
I can only surmise that it is an issue with having to rescedule processers within the driver not a CAP update.
This is an issue in itself as the general pubilc was under the assumption that the CAP update would sort all that crap out.
I now sit with a card that has had problem updating ever since the 12.4 Driver set. I have just about lost faith in the trust in the AMD view (partly down to efficiency drives by AMD)
They should not EVER drop driver support for the current way the market works. That is Console centric.
IE- XBox 360's/PS3's are current. Until they are superceded it is moraly ( faithfully?... such a word? ) wrong of the GPU makers to drop Tier1 Driver support for anything
that was made/released in that generations of the current console techs life time.
They are curtailing support to bump profit. No other reason works. The 5xxx generation isn't that different in VLIW layout to the 4xxx. This more to do with scheduling than efficiency.
PS- I have a 4890 BE & i'm very happy with it thank you all very much. It runs evreything fine at 1600x1200, which is all i ask.
the people you bought this game from probably dont have health insurance, and you are worried about YOUR rights. here are your rights.
1. if you receive a defective product. return it to the store for your money back.
eventually the 'invisible hand' of capitalism will take care of the problem - bad companies will go bankrupt and good companies with good products will succeed, because consumers like you refuse to buy products that dont work.
or...
are you saying you dont believe in capitalism?
OK... just go back to the damned abacus, Sketch Pad, and dammed rock carving tools, and you will never have to worry about such things again! And end the crap!
About 10 years ago, I was using a Radeon 9600XT. At the time, it was well-known that ATI's drivers sucked, but that their hardware was better for the price you paid. So, with the release of the 9000 series, ATI (now AMD, as you probably know) made a big deal about how they were starting to overhaul and vastly improve their driver quality.
Well...?
10 years later, they're still not giving their drivers nearly the attention they deserve, and it seems evident that they simply don't consider them a high priority. Does this announcement smell like penny-pinching to anyone else? Slower release cycles allow them to lay-off or cut the hours of employees, and I imagine that this seems quite appealing to a lot of companies in the current economic climate--perhaps in particular companies who produce flagship products that can be deemed "recreational" or discretionary spending."
As it turns out, that 9600XT never did work properly (largely due to driver problems), so I've been forking out the extra dough for Nvidia cards ever since--but I'd love to get my hands on ATI/AMD hardware if/when they solve their driver problems (on Windows and Linux), and find a way to support PhysX or similar without giving the users a lot of hassle or decreased performance.
Why they've never realized that people hating their drivers leads to lower profits (or so I suppose it does) is pretty-well beyond me. Anyone have additional insights on what's going on over there? Are they totally inept, or do they seem to have a strategy of some kind? (Both?)
WTF.. Seriously... I just looked at the release dates of Nvidia's updates, and they are Completely F@#$ING RANDOM!. Clearly, thats soo much better than AMD!
GO NVIDIA!
What about Linux drivers and support? ATI/AMD is supposed to be better in this area, but I haven't seen much compared to NVIDIA's awesome driver support. What about the rest of you?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This represents a shift in mentality for the company. They are no longer focused as a graphics company, but a platform company. The drivers will align with major platform release, which are aligned with vendor hardware shipments (Fathers Day, Back To School, and Christmas). You'll have the release here and there when MAJOR games have failure, but they will be focused more on new product enablement. You will see 3 major releases a year, followed by minor point release from time to time when they have the bandwidth to release. The upside of this, however, is a very long lead time for development and QA - hopefully they will produce a better quality driver in the long term.
i thought that ai wei wei and ang sang syu ki were involved in fighting for 'rights', but you have really hit the nail on the head. there are people right now, as we speak, struggling to get their video games working at optimal framerates. it is a fucking tragedy of epic proportions. surely, we must band together and stop this from happening to anyone else.
think of the children.
haven't seen a scratched disk since the PSOne days, PS2 DVD's and PS3 Blu-Rays have much much harder coatings.
Betweent heir shitty quality, lack of open-source involvement, and shitty tech support is it any wonder Awful Macro Devices is well behind Intel and Nvidia. It is a good thing they are going mobile as hopefully Intel will go that route and totally obliterate AMD off the fucking map. GOOOODBYE AWFUL MACRO DEvICES!!!!!
I'm all for less competition. Always good for the consumers.
Yes, we have seen how competition has forced Awful Macro Devices to improve. Oh wait, it hasn't. In fact Awful Macro Devices keeps geeting shittier every day and with their ties to M$ they don't give a fuck about the open sourcce movement. At least Nvidia released open-source drivers and Intel is heavily involved in the open-source movement. Another worthy competitor will emerge, one that will have the will to compete, the kind of will that Awful Macro Devices had always lacked. No business is entitled to customer loyaly, it must be earned.
other than Rage, i haven't come across any game-interrupting issues. and i was even running old-ass drivers most of the time (6-9 months old usually).
i always bring up launch day/early access games i haven't had issues with: the Crysis 2 demo, Starcraft 2, BF3, NFS: Shift, Alan Wake, Supcom 2. sadly, i was a bit late with Skyrim, getting in at v1.2.
Though, the downside of doing this is, if ATI eventually dries up and goes away, there is no competition to keep nivida's prices reasonable.
This whole thread sounds like an NVidia advertisement to me.
I've been using NVidia for about 10 years as a PC gamer, and have only rarely ran into major bugs on new games. The new drivers come down and fix the bug. It's all good.
If you aren't having troubles with something like video drivers, you should not upgrade to the latest; this is because the latest and greatest will usually be emergency releases to fix a flagship game title's new bug. If you just update it to a stable (for your hardware) version, you should be good to go. It's not rocket science, I don't think it makes sense for GPU drivers to be pushing updates at all; you find a good one and stick with it, until you find a major bug in a game you want to play. Then go check their site, see a new version that "fixes issue Y on your card" and upgrade, and enjoy.
Having said that, both major chip makers have more graphics- related bugs than I care to shake a stick at. It seems ludicrous in this day and age. I guess it's not that they don't know how, just that it would cut too far into their bottom line; it's all part of the "race to the bottom". I am not looking forward to when we all hit rock bottom at the same time on the race to the bottom.
Maybe they determined that a lot of the problems could be detected in a QA cycle if they extended it. That doesn't keep them from releasing hot fixes for specific problems, but it can seriously help to avoid regressions and the like.
Frankly, as someone who writes drivers I find it hard to believe they can release quality drivers every month. It would be one thing if the monthly releases were bug fix rollups, but they include all kinds of things I would assume are more "feature" related, and therefor of no interest to a large number of people who have working systems.