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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.
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).
This only applies to the new GCN architecture (most high end 7000 series cards) and not the older VLIW4/5 cards (which includes low end 7000 series cards and 6000 series cards)
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.
http://saveie6.com/
Toms hardware answer this.
Since when is disk I/O speed or access time relevant to frame rates in a game?
Disk I/O determines how fast a game loads, or how short the wait between levels in a game etc. Frame rates (or latencies) are determined by the trio CPU + memory bandwidth + GPU. Sure some games may load data while you're in the midst of the action, but in that case likely bite-size chunks that shouldn't affect frame rates significantly (and unrelated to the issue discussed here).
Since when is disk I/O speed or access time relevant to frame rates in a game?
When the engine is trying to grab data in real time from disk.
This is most assuredly *not* every game. But it is some games, or games in some scenarios. In MMO's you don't have enough RAM memory of all of the possible character armours these days, so you have to dynamically grab only that which will be on screen, same with any zone streaming in data from whatever area you have around you.
I can see why people would think this is a HDD speed issue. If you have burst loads of up to say 200 MB/s on a HDD, but average around 20, well then a regular drive will hiccup periodically whereas the SSD won't even bat an eye. As you say, that isn't actually *this* issue.
I use AMD graphics on Windows 8 and haven't had a single BSOD or desktop application crash on me thus far. However, I have had a few "Metro" apps crash and the AMD driver looked like a prime suspect from the call stack... (namely the Weather app and the Store app)
Shitty console ports love to stream textures
And it took them YEARS to work this out? And only really weeks to "fix"?
Just because it is obvious to you doesn't mean that it is obvious to others. Really.
If there's a problem, kick up a fuss, complain, let someone know who can do something about it. This is true whether it is software, hardware, real life services, etc. There's always plenty for the people doing support to do, so if you want YOUR issues to be the ones fixed then you'd better sing up about them so that they get some priority. If you say nothing, everyone else will assume you're doing fine with no problems at all. That's the way the world works.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
All memory in Windows is virtual. The swapping uses a page or paging file.
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
If your game didnt suck balls - it was already preloaded into RAM, which was loading textures and stuff into VRAM.
You are presuming that all the data for the gaming environment will fit in memory at the same time. These days this is quite often not the case. A game like GTA4 doesnt have any loading screens but its a large world with many gigabytes of texture data.
...but the person you are replying to doesnt make much sense for sure.. these frame latency issues have to do with the memory management of the video card, where the variance of the time per frame for condensing free blocks and garbage collection was quite high. They were trying to be too clever, minimizing wasted memory by using often expensive alloc/free semantics. This is the correct thing to do when being clever means that everything will fit in VRAM so not much alloc/free going on, but becomes a problem when thats not the case (see any managed programming languages garbage collector for other examples of this problem.. they work great until they tank hard)
"His name was James Damore."
Only if you are running something like furmark 24/7 for the whole year. Most games will not even remotely stress the card so hard. Your card will mostly be in idle most of the time and in the case of new AMD cards they can even go to deep sleep when not in use and only burn 3W (useful for 24/7 machines such a s mine).
Im not getting any crashes on my win8/AMD machine. Have you tried upgrading your motherboard BIOS? There were some problems with old BIOS versions and the 7xxx series when going to sleep mode.
Just because it is obvious to you doesn't mean that it is obvious to others. Really.
It's their job to get this right. ATI's only job, in fact, was to make GPUs and produce drivers which make them work properly. They made the hardware, but they still couldn't make the driver for their own hardware, and have been doing it wrong for years. That means they're incompetent. That's the way the world works.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, they built and tested their drivers internally to match the expectations of the public. The public was testing min/avg/max FPS, so that's what ATI built. In other words, shitty benchmarks result in shitty drivers.
And to call ATI incompetent because they didn't notice an issue almost nobody else did is quite arrogant. Especially since once the issue was discovered, they promptly fixed it. That's not even remotely incompetent, that's fantastic support and I'd love it if most companies were that responsive and that aware of what their target audience wants.
Oh, and the part where you claim ATI can't make a driver or that they are doing it wrong is flat out not true, not even close. Kindly go fuck yourself