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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.
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.
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
If as a programmer I can do something that crashes your driver or blows up your machine, then the problem was with the driver, not the application programmer.
I was a systems programmer for 30 years. I wrote a ton of OS and driver code, especially drivers. If you could break the machine or cause stupid things to happen by having your app do something improper with the driver, then that was my fault.
I'd rather have to download patches than have the thing autoupdating when I don't want it to just yet. Same thing with drivers. Those are things that really should be managed by the user. There are plenty of circumstances where latest_version = best choice is a horrible assumption, esp with people who have older hardware. Some drivers just don't like some hardware configs too.
One of the biggest selling points of PCs is that the user controls the software. Take that away and it's just another stupid console like everything else is nowadays. I don't mind having an option for autoupdate, but I would not want it mandatory. I still want to have the installers available for local storage.