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."

Comments

Re:Let me get this straight:

[drinkypoo]

How about forcing the game makers to TEST THEIR DAMN GAME

Games often expose driver bugs. Major game developers are in communication with GPU vendors and when they discover bugs, the ones which turn out to be in the driver or the microcode sometimes get fixed, depending on how new the product is and whether the GPU is from Intel, AMD, or nVidia. nVidia has by far the best record in terms of working drivers, and also in terms of improving support for old hardware in new driver revisions. AMD is by far the worst. They have abandoned whole platforms while they were still shipping, for example R690M. I'm using a subnotebook based on it right now. Only thing it will run without shitting itself is Vista. And fglrx didn't support it when it was brand new, and still doesn't support it, and never will.

Don't be so quick (or anonymous, or cowardly) to assume that it's the game developer's fault when a problem "with the game" is fixed with a driver update.