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AMD Tweaking Radeon Drivers To Reduce Frame Latency Spikes
crookedvulture writes "Slashdot has previously covered The Tech Report's exposure of frame latency issues with recent AMD graphics processors. Both desktop and notebook Radeons exhibit frame latency spikes that interrupt the smoothness of in-game animation but don't show up in the FPS averages typically used to benchmark performance. AMD has been looking into the problem and may have discovered the culprit. The Graphics Core Next architecture underpinning recent Radeons is quite different from previous designs, and AMD has been rewriting the memory management portion of its driver to properly take advantage. This new code improves frame latencies, according to AMD's David Baumann, and the firm has accelerated the process of rolling it into the official Catalyst drivers available to end users. Radeon owners can take some comfort in the fact that a driver update may soon alleviate the frame latency problems associated with AMD's latest GPUs. However, they might also be disappointed that it's taken AMD this long to optimize its drivers for the now year-old GCN architecture."
This. Not to case doubt on techreport's results, especially now that AMD have publicly responded, but does anyone seriously believe that they've found this issue in other driver releases, or even other games? As an engineer, if I found something as substantive as this, you bet GDW the first thing I'd do is retest to verify, then roll back and test with previous. Their insistence thus far on a "narrow net" such as it is, tells me they value the page views more than they value scientific integrity.