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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.
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
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.
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...
The argument between HP and nVidia over defective GPUs is between HP and nVidia, not between me and nVidia. My HP laptop with QuadroFX1500M had a known problem. I had to fight with HP for more than 24 total hours on the phone to get them to admit it and issue me a replacement, but I did so. I had no problem with nVidia. HP had a problem with nVidia. I had a problem with HP. Replacement had a newer GPU (and everything else) and I sold it and bought some netbooks.
One of the netbooks I bought has AMD Athlon 64 L110 and R690M chipset. It works properly only under Vista. There are no platform drivers even for Windows 7. Under Windows 7 suspend/resume works once. Under Vista everything works... verrrry sloowwwwwwly. Under Linux I have graphics corruption even with RenderAccel disabled. fglrx doesn't support it and didn't even when it was shipping. ati causes trashing. Power management is essentially nonworking.
I hope one day the ati driver works properly on here, and that I can get coreboot working, because AMD also let Gateway disable AMD-V on the machine and still call it an Athlon 64. In my book when you disable features that differentiate one product from another, you should use a more honest name. That's Gateway more than AMD, except it was wearing the "Athlon 64" sticker, so I knew the CPU would have AMD-V. Indeed, it does, but I can't use it. AMD should not permit the use of the sticker when features are disabled.
I'm over AMD for video. Still happy with my Phenom II X3 720, plan to upgrade to an X6 for encoding. Works nice with my 240GT.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I don't think they're trying to drive themselves out of business, they just aren't that competent but their competitors are.
This smells like a cost savings move to me, I guess the positive spin is that they might take longer to go out of business if they cut costs.
What'll actually happen is they'll get a bad rep for having problems that sit around too long. Seems they have OCZ disease...too excited to release new products and start making money and not smart or thorough enough to validation test their products. I got tired of being someone elses unpaid validation tester. I bought a 6670 and found that out of the box with the latest drivers it couldn't even play a blu-ray without tearing. I'm sure it was just a setting or I just needed another driver, but I'm not going to go through that trouble. A frickin HD video card made and sold in 2011-2012 should play a blu-ray in stunning quality right out of the box. OCZ dropped the vertex 2 and vertex 3 on an unsuspecting customer base, who I'm sure liked the frequent data corruption.
From now on I only buy from companies that do extensive validation testing and get good customer reviews. AMD smells badly in that regard right now. I suspect it'll get worse as they edge closer to chapter 11.
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.
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?
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.
Hey Drinkypoo, according to this post you'll need the drivers for the Toshiba Satellite L505D-GS6000 if you want to run Win 7, as they used the same chipset with Windows 7, if you want to run XP instead there are links at that post for drivers which work under XP. If you want to keep Vista I'd suggest you look up a copy of "TinyVista", its not easy to find but its a stripped down gamer version of Vista that actually runs a little better than XP on laptop hardware and of course all your current drivers will work. HTH.
But this is why i tell my customers when it comes to mobile ALWAYS buy it with the OS you want to run, because OEMs are the worst at dropping support for their laptops. Hell if I stuck with only the OEM drivers I wouldn't have had an update, nor support for DivX hardware acceleration, because they haven't released a single update since they released the unit. That's why i tell folks don't use a laptop as their only machine, the support is terrible and while its easy to get upgrades to most of the common desktop hardware often you'll find chips in mobile that were supported for a few months then dropped thus leaving you stranded. Sorry you got stuck and hope those work for you.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Thanks for the advice, I lost my Win7 key but if I get another one later I'll try it sometime. I bought the laptop on the assumption that surely I would be able to upgrade to Win7, or if not, run Linux since the GPU core is antiquated. Boy, was I wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Regardless of how you feel about their products, it HAS been nice knowing ATI - considering how bad Nvidia's price-gouging is now, think how bad it would be without ATI.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
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.
That is why I advise my customers to NEVER buy a mobile that isn't already running the OS they desire, because all it leads to is headaches. Frankly i have YET to see a laptop manufacturer that gave a crap about software once its left the factory, I've dealt with $2000+ units and $450 best Buy specials and ALL are piss poor when it comes to driver support. Hell when i bought my EEE netbook I found that right OOTB the drivers were badly out of date and didn't support half of the features I had bought an E350 for, such as hardware acceleration of most video formats. Luckily for me the stock AMD drivers work just fine on it because Asus haven't released a single driver update in over a year.
But if you run into that problem again feel free to shoot me an email at the address i use here, I've had to do driver hunts for so damned many laptops at the shop i'm usually pretty good about finding drivers for most chips. occasionally I've even had to disassemble the driver EXE and rub Windows nose in its location to get it to take, but if anybody has released a laptop with that same chip and the version of Windows you want I can nearly always get it to work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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?
RS690M isn't actually an R600 chip, it's an I believe *r400* derivative, hence you need the r300 open source driver on linux to use it.
How do I know this? One of my friends has an XP based laptop with the same chipset and has all sorts of trouble running linux on it. Since he's too poor to afford a new one he's had to tolerate these issues for... what 5-6 years now?
Anyways while I agree with the dropping-the-ball driver support complaint, it at least isn't a currently support graphics core to begin with.
Dropping of 4000 series hardware however is disappointing (since I'm still running a 4770 myself and don't plan to upgrade until I can get >640 cores, 2 gigs of GDDR5, and full speed DP Floating Point support. 2/3 of which my 4770 got me for under 150 bucks and which none of the current generation hardware can compete with based solely on cost.) (Obviously there's some cards being clearanced that can, but most of them have a significantly increased wattage demand in comparison.)
I assuming this means HD(2|3)xxx series hardware has been dropped for a while as well? The only real limited features on these cards being lack of OCL, DP FP, and lack of OGL 4 support. I've got an HD3650 in my dad's computer running Fedora 16 with XFCE and it runs FlightGear at a usable framerate (C2D+G41+DDR3), so as far as performance goes it seems like dropping it is shortsighted. On the other hand elimination of R600 and R700 core quirks may help them better optimize their drivers and reduce graphical glitches in current games on that hardware. But given the half finished nature of all the driver releases, it does make you question future support.
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?)
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).
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.
... if it means fewer nags to update drivers.
Not a problem if you do a custom install. ;)
For the record my vertex-2 is running well, even with dozens of sleeps for months (though I still have the previous system partition still on the HD part as a backup, and doing a proper backup would take no more than 5 mins.
Bought with firmware 1.4x+ , cant be assed updating it since it requires a reformat, which I think is a lame policy.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
> I remember when ATI drivers were notoriously bad, and now it looks like we've returned to those days.
Returned? They never left!
haven't seen a scratched disk since the PSOne days, PS2 DVD's and PS3 Blu-Rays have much much harder coatings.
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.
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.
Yeah, they required me to put the drive by itself in a pc, set it to IDE mode, and make a boot disk to do the firmware upgrade and then another one to do a secure erase. Then they told me not to restore any backups to it, but to install win7 from scratch.
I put it on the shelf until a few more firmwares came out.
But the point is if you don't do validation testing (or ENOUGH validation testing), you're going to pay 3-4x over when you have to fix problems and make diving catches to remediate the issues.