Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.