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Driver Update Addresses Radeon Frame Latency Issues
crookedvulture writes "AMD has begun addressing the Radeon frame latency spikes covered previously on Slashdot. A new beta driver is due out next week, and it dramatically smooths the uneven frame times exhibited by certain Radeon graphics processors. The driver only tackles performance issues in a few games, but more fixes are on the way. In the games that have been addressed, the new driver delivers more consistent frame times and smoother gameplay without having much of an impact on the minimum or average FPS numbers. Those traditional FPS metrics clearly do a poor job of quantifying the fluidity of in-game action. Surprisingly, it seems AMD was largely relying on those metrics when testing drivers internally. The company has now pledged to pay more attention to frame latencies to ensure that these kinds of issues don't crop up again."
When will Nvidia and ATI release proper open source drivers instead of us having to install a binary blob to get our hardware working? That would really help if there were drivers that could ship in the kernel to handle ATI hardware instead of the closed source options.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
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Probably one of the most important divides in engineers (the world?) is the ability to read the data, acknowledge your mistakes and fix it. It seems like most companies spend more time doing damage control than damage remediation. Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Slashdot cannot be fooled (with apologies to Richard Feynman).
I thought I was going crazy, I guess this is why getting that SSD didn't help.
Go with a cheap 7770, or 650 Ti, up to a 7850, 7870, 7870 Le, or 660?
What's the choice you would pick?
Does this mean I finally get to play Diablo 3?
In addition the security hole with the aslr being disabled was also fixed last stable release 12.10.
This year ATI also stopped releasing a driver every month and instead focused on QA before certifying drivers.
ATI really is improving as they try to stay alive. Bravo indeed and my next card will be an ATI.
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That's great. Now how about you fuckers run this story again when the drivers are actually available? It's nice to know that they'll be available in the future, I already assumed that from your previous coverage.
Now they need to fix the Catalyst driver to stop crashing on Windows 8. This is getting annoying, especially the BDOD that pop up every other day.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
And I mean ALL ATi cards since the early Radeon 7000's. And the problems aren't just isolated to Windows. You can't get a decent read on the vertical blank timings because their cards are simply shitty and will randomly have frame drops and latency. nVidia seems to have somewhat followed them in their path lately but they were pretty good before.
This is generally not a problem for gamers to lose 1 frame or have a couple of them a bit later (you can't notice it) but when you're doing psychophysics experiments, it becomes a huge fucking problem.
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Where's my updated legacy drivers, AMD? Or have you just abandoned us forever to horribly outdated drivers that won't even work in the latest GNU/Linux distros?
I am not interested in paying money to replace a card I bought at retail only a little over a year ago which serves me quite well, thank you.
Back to nVidia I go.
To get a better idea of how smooth the experience is just add two more values:
- average of positive values of first derivative - this will show how fast framerates go high
- average of negative values of first derivative - this will show how fast framerates drop when they drop.
When they intersect 0 on the Y-axis you have some key moments to look at and see what could have caused a spike or a drop.
Also if both these averages are high (for +) or low (for -) then gameplay is not smooth. If they are close to 0 (changes are very small) then gameplay is smooth.
If avg+ - avg- is not close to 0 then framerates went mostly up (>0) or mostly down (<0) and there is another problem to look at.
So there. That's why you should study some basic calculus
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
Really? These people who want to put a binary into your computer, as a fully privileged user, interacting with every part of your system in order to improve graphical performance - with full access to all design documents, chipset manuals, and source code - couldn't work out that FPS could potentially be "spiky" and that just a single figure wasn't an accurate representation of how a human perceived their extraordinarily complex and expensive graphics, and that's why things didn't look or work smoothly?
And it took them YEARS to work this out? And only really weeks to "fix"?
I haven't used or purchased or recommended or approved a purchase that used ATI/AMD cards in years. The last one I personally used was an Xpert@Work many, many years ago. It was cheap and cheerful but did the job if you were prepared to put up with the driver hassle (never really got any sort of performance out of it on Linux, but that was true of a lot of cards back then).
Not because of a framerate issue that I ever perceived but because I just stopped trusting them with my computer after numerous driver issues and being "abandoned" once I had an old card. This just reinforces my belief that it was the right decision.
So am I right in understanding the resolution is that DX9 games may be fixed by if they get around to addressing that game (dx9 requires game-by-game fixes), whilst all DX10 & DX11 games should be fixed by a forthcoming (hopefully...) general driver fix?
So will these drivers be available on linux systems too? i think im still using Catalyst 12.9
This is going to come off sounding kind of trollish/regionalist/xenophobic, but I'm curious if the location of silicon valley has a lot to do with this. Different areas and regions have different cultures, and in my line of work I have to deal with a lot of people in California. The immediate reaction to any problem is finger pointing, not looking for a solution, which is a stark contrast to where I live where mistakes are OK as long as they are owned and rectified. Everyone who transfers here from California undergoes a culture shock where we don't put up with the finger pointing shit, and over a couple of months to a year they adapt. Granted, I mainly work with the Los Angeles area, but I saw it in Oakland to an extent as well.
Am I just being stupid here or is there more to this?
Based on my experiences, their hardware, drivers, and control panel all have issues. Recent purchase of a 660 Ti, which I ended up returning for a 7950, presented me with several problems.
Nvidia's control panel lacks in many options which AMD's provides, or provides a worse version of the options. While AMD's control panel is bloated and slow on load up, it is better in almost all other regards when it comes to configuration.
The 660 Ti I received (This issue may not apply to all) had serious issues with contrast, brightness, and gamma. It could not reproduce blacks correctly no matter where I configured the settings (Windows or Nvidia's control panel, or on the monitor), the gamma was completely off and the range from white to black could not be reproduced correctly, and it would not work with Flux (With Nvidia's settings all being reset with regards to contrast, brightness, gamma, or color temp). I was using the latest drivers.
I have had none of those issues with AMD cards, and no crashes or frame rate issues unless overclocking too far. It may have been a bad card, but it could also be that some people are ignoring or don't notice those issues as they are focused on frame rates and preconceived notions that "AMD bad, Nvidia good".
And I get money and free heating out of my ATI re: BitCoin mining.
Currently using a 6750 on Windows 7.
To accuse someone of being a shill simply because they post as AC (as if /. IDs are somehow validated) smacks of someone who's losing it...
Writing anonymously as a former AMD-er: the performance has absolutely NOTHING to do with the underlying architecture. The root cause is a software development (if you can call it "development") culture which is completely incapable of moving at more than a snails pace. Thank you Ben Bar-Haim & associated Markham Bozos. I've met a lot of developers who are actually focused on quality at AMD, but they generally seem to be in the minority. Too many managers/directors of SW products at AMD seem to believe that the "look and feel" of the UI is much more important than actually being correct, let alone performant. I personally know for a fact that the shader compiler team is totally dedicated to correctness and high performance. But when they are [under] staffed at N, while the UI portion of the Catalyst driver is staffed at N^2 (or greater) the end result is inevitable. Goals are set on how "pretty" it is, rather than on performance and correctness.