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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
"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.
Hah, I was waiting for it. Waiting for the first post to bring up your argument. I've been reading slashdot for way too long.
Don't forget that console games have tons of bugs now too. And big huge flaws. The Skyrim save game issue? Bioshock always messing up widescreen? Rockstar grand theft everything. Silent Hill Downpour--the entire freaking game is full of bugs and hard locks.
Anyway, I go back and forth on this. I don't know which solution is better. I think it's gotta be down to simply personal preference. I think both sides has it's flaws.
PC flaws:
- I swear to god I'm so sick of updating drivers, for anything. Graphics drivers should just be auto-updated, period. Not even to have a button in the ATI/Nvidia control panel is good enough. As it stands now, there are too many steps. Yea yea it's more safe to do it this way now, where if a driver is broke they can revoke it. But it's the same issue windows was having. Either deal with that, or deal with most users not upgrading at all.
- All games should have built in patching mechanisms. Steam does this right now, as do EA games or GFWL. But what if a game isn't? Or what if I want to buy a game from say GOG or Gamersgate. They don't auto patch. So ur stuck back in the days of yore, hunting down patches from fileplanet or something. That's bull and I flat out refuse.
-Small dev Q&A problems. I love freakin Red Orchestra 2 and Arma 2. Amazing games. But the bugs. Oh the bugs. Jesus it's terrible. Don't even bother playing a game until it's been out 6 months.
Console flaws:
- No support of alternative games. Read: MMO or F2P. Short of DC universe for PS3 or free realms, it's out. But that's a big segment of the future and part of the solution to keeping online communities big and a steady, not one-off, revenue stream. And consoles could OWN this market, but they don't. They could make a badass-looking (compared to the PC F2P's right now which have to be simple enough to run on IGP's) MMO's or F2P's. But nooo.
- No digital downloads for everything. There are a few games I want. Can't get em. Both ps3 and xbox only have like 20% of their titles available. Even on the ps3, you can't download most sony games. Pathetic (resistance 3 I'm looking at u). And the prices are atrocious. $60 or $40 for games that are only $30 or $15-20 online retail. And more money for a game without shipping or physical presence AND is locked to an account? Who in their right mind would buy it?
- No mouse/keyboard support. I'm not saying they should do it across the board like most people who throw out this argument do. No, consoles are meant to be played with a controller. HOWEVER, make keyboard support only for some genres, like strategy. There are barely any RTS games. This would allow them access to the market.
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.