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AMD To Retire Catalyst Control Center Drivers, Rolling Out New Crimson Platform (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD has gone through significant changes as a company over the last few months. Recently, we've seen them enter into a joint venture with Nantong Fujitsu for final assembly and test operations. They've also formed the new Radeon Technologies Group, led by longtime graphics guru Raja Koduri. Today, AMD is announcing another big change, and this one affects a piece of software that you may have running on your systems right now, if there's a Radeon graphics card on board. AMD is ditching Catalyst Control Center in favor of software dubbed Radeon Settings, which is a critical part of what AMD is calling the Radeon Software Crimson Edition. Radeon Software Crimson Edition is completely re-architected and is claimed to offer new features, improvements to stability and responsiveness, and performance improvements as well. The update will include a new Game Manager, video quality presets, social media integration, simplified EF setup, a system notifications tab, and more. It looks as though the first version of the software will be out this month.
I've always wanted Facebook in my drivers. Now I can automate the process of telling me when my AMD card shits out. That should make for a fast paced news feed...
A friggen video driver with 'social integration' and 'system notification' - and then they cannot understand why their driver runs slow, is full of bugs and users prefer the Free driver.
I don't want a control center, and I certainly don't want a "game manager". Tell your marketing critters to focus on the bitmaps on the cardboard carton the hardware ships in.
I just want a driver. Hint: that's not a 100 Mb downloaded installer.
Just what my graphics driver needs.
I'd stop to post about how useful social network integration will be for my graphics driver's settings manager prog but I need to go visit the bike shop to buy some birthday presents for my koi.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
i dont even look at amd cards BECAUSE of their drivers, id rather get aids than have amd drivers in my computer, thank you
I've always removed CCC from my startups, I'm sure I'll do the same with Crimson.
Game Manager, social media integration, system notifications tab...
Seems to be ticking all the right boxes on my graphic driver customization shit list. Please bring more clutter to an already confusing piece of software that should have as main focus its simplicity, transparency, and not meddling in tasks my OS and Browser are supposed to be doing...
... until the 'social network interaction' bit. For a moment there, I thought they were getting rid of the bloat that has been plaguing these drivers for years.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Between this and the geforce experience, now I'll have to go to some shady 3rd party to get my graphic drivers.
Integration of social networking into my fucking graphics driver? No but fuck no! Hopefully team green doesn't follow them like this is some sort of good idea.
Why can't they just provide a working graphics card driver and a simple, straightforward and working settings manager for it? What is wrong with AMD?
My next graphics card will be an Nvidia for sure.
Something less that a 1 gig download.
10 megs at most to configure your card.
Have I misunderstood what they could do with social media integration? I wouldn't mind being able to link it to my YouTube or Fb account and then get my gameplay or sketching recorded and posted up with a quick click.
/emacs
Seriously WTF. I never forgave AMD/ATI for the OpenGL Rage driver debacle in the late 90s. Haven't looked back. nVidia, for their sins, at least have decent and timely driver updates.
..don't panic
Re-Archtitected? Architected isn't even a word.
No. Just....no.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
AMD knows that only apps can app apps, so they're apping their LUDDITE Video Driver to turn it into a modern appy app!
Apps!
A bigger pile of steaming horse droppings by any other name, will still smell...
Not much real news here. The only thing that sounds good here is that they are unifying the UI on a cross platform toolkit. Instead of using .net (and some odd port to linux) they are going to be using QT.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Or will they make all the same mistakes all over again? A big part of what was wrong with CCC is that it was super-bloated. I understand when a driver package has a large footprint because it supports a lot of hardware. I don't understand when it has a large footprint because the configuration GUI is a gigantic turd.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
After the Windows 10 roll-out all my Radeon supported video on my laptop is junk.
Huge buffering issues, audio no longer synced to video - this is across all software and streaming video.
Finding updated driver led to this crazy install of Catalyst which slowed and confused everything more.
I just wanted to play a Youtube video and now all THIS?
Might be a death rattle at AMD.
What is this madness? Why is everybody trying to push stupid shit on me? I've been avoiding the Gaming Evolved app for years now. Why do I need this? Has the world gone mad?
If you don't pay attention in class, then you can't write the part of the video driver that drives video. The good news is, you can still get a job writing drivers for ATI! But not nVidia.
Trust me, I speak as one who knows. I didn't work hard enough nor take graduate courses. :(
It makes me sad about the world that people capable of writing useless software are:
- indistinguishable from programmers with a more grounded profession. Both are treated as autistic freaks by "normal" people who are useless at programming.
- still paid really well. In fact they might even be paid more because game development has a burnout / glamour tax on it.
- hyped _more_ than legitimate programmers. Pet food ordering "Apps," connect4 clones, and OS updates that distractingly rearrange a bunch of UI wallpaper are all the hotness. Graphics drivers? meh, so what. will it be done before christmas? Then go back to the basement and get to work.
Have to agree wholeheartedly with the other people commenting here who dislike the social media integration aspect of these new drivers!
IMO, this sort of functionality NEVER belongs in a device driver package (even IF the package also bundles related applications such as control panels or optimization tools). Social media integration should be handled at the application level, by the games or other software someone chooses to install on a machine.
I'm even willing to go so far as to accept than an operating system itself might embrace social media, in the sense that it provides "hooks" so popular social media services can OPTIONALLY pop notifications on an all-purpose status bar or screen. (Apple and Microsoft both do some of this now. I dislike it in the sense that you're now developed an OS that has ties to 3rd. party services outside of the direct control of the people coding the OS. History shows us that this leads to broken features in the OS down the road. At the very least, this looks "ugly" when someone wishes to keep using an older operating system and now has entire menu configuration options that simply don't work when clicked. But at the end of the day, I suppose an OS should offer whatever functionality its users find useful. And enough people use Twitter or Facebook that they'd like their OS's notification bar to incorporate those updates.)
I just don't see where any value is added by rolling this stuff into the device drivers that make hardware "go", though? If I want to discuss my driver settings with other people, I'll visit an online support forum to do that. I don't need bloated drivers providing built in windows to do that stuff!
WTF, why would anyone want this in a video driver?
Change the name of the software, add some obnoxious and invasive "features" = Profit????
Why can't I just have an AMD property sheet/page in display settings and be done with it? I'm hoping this is optional like the existing control center.
The problem is "graphics mini operating system" koolaid drunk by AMD. I just want to run my shit and not be hampered by delusions of grandeur and scope creep of vendors. As a consumer I don't want an operating system I want a driver. Sure as heck won't stand for graphics drivers communicating with Facebook.
For years I made a point of staying away from AMD because their drivers have always sucked/crashed and CCC is a bloated piece of crap. It is good they want to focus on fixing these problems yet all I really want are drivers that work. Social media integration is evidence AMD has no discipline and will continue to annoy people away from its products with unnecessary bullshit.
About freaking time. Software has always been ATI/AMD's biggest problem, and the Catalyst Control Center at this point is ancient and awful. They've just been tacking new stuff on to it, kludging together something for each successive release to try and keep up with Nvidia, but making it worse each time. All they're doing here is integrating the Gaming Evolved Experience features into the software for manually controlling the GPU. It's to simplify things for the majority of people who wouldn't know the difference between Anti-Aliasing and Ambient Occlusion. The Game Manager is no big deal. They've been trying to do that for a little bit, but Nvidia has been mopping the floor in that department with the GeForce Experience. It's just optimal settings for people who don't have the know-how to hand optimize games, which is probably the majority of PC gamers; not the PC gaming enthusiasts who know what they're doing, but people who buy a PC and play games on it. I also don't get why people are so bent out of shape about the "social integration." That's been a part of the Radeon software ever since AMD bought up Raptr. Chances are they'll roll in support for Twitch or YouTube or something, too. Streaming gameplay has become such an enormous thing that they'd be foolish not to get in there, because Lord knows Nvidia isn't, but Microsoft is (see: Xbox One streaming). If you don't like it, don't use it. Same thing I do with the Nvidia equivalent.
Rawr
Lures you in with cheaper prices...
Screws you over with buggy drivers...
Will it tweet @AMD every time the gpu driver crashes?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
In the days of yore, ATI Radeon drivers were easy to work with - a simple, clearly labeled set of tabs that allowed monitors and GPU settings to be manipulated in the least amount of time possible...and the files were >50MB.
The latest iterations of the Catalyst Control Center are highly convoluted, poorly labeled, oversized, and just generally terrible to work with. If the interface from the Radeon 9000 series made a comeback with nothing but the required INF/CAT/CAB files for the new cards, that would be the single greatest thing they could do, and I see no reason why this isn't completely possible.
I'm unopposed to there being a "Radeon Studio", where other functionality can be used. If they made it a place to use their hardware accelerated video transcoder and allowed the creation of a RAM disk (and provided a place to put a Twitter feed, I guess...), that would be wonderful. There is not, however, a need for these functions in the drivers.
This really isn't that complicated.
Would rather just use generic drivers
Does ATI have the longest history of producing crap software/firmware of any company in existence? I mean even Microsoft eventually fixes their stuff for the most part. Why do they refuse to hire people that know how to develop software? They continuously rely are what are essentially hardware engineers to write all their code. The result is shit.
They produce some of the best hardware in the market yet it's always broken by shit software. They continue to do this, decade after decade. I believe whoever is in charge over there must be clinically insane to continue the same stupid path for this long.
The only benefit I can see of trying to get people to socialize via their video software is warnings to not install a new version that causes problems, or maybe to share optimal game settings with people who have the same video card. I suppose it's also one more outlet for miserable people to spew hate, like on all the social websites.
Game Manager, social media integration, system notifications - Are you fing kidding me?
All the things I don't want in a video driver installation.
So basically AMD is saying we're going from rather bad to much worse!
Thanks AMD! /s
It would be one thing if they said they were moving to a new platform that focuses more on improved drivers, improved\cleaner install\re-installation experience, and one that didn't force me to use third party to actually set my cards settings the way I want for particular game, but I any of those three are the focus.
I've been an AMD user for some time, and I can only describe their drivers as bloated and clunky. So it is good that it is getting replaced. That said, it sounds like they are replacing it with something even more bloated. Hopefully it works better. What they really need to work on is getting it to actually run video well, and handle basic features like multi-monitor setup well. Some improvements might include an install process and upgrade process that doesn't require some sort of voodoo dance, reading the necronomicon backwards. while praying to the elder gods that it doesn't totally screw your system. Like codecs, I've found once you get it working, don't effing touch it ever again if you can help it. Still better than nVIDIA, but they have some of the same issues.
All those great new features... "and more"! I can't just wait to install the very first version of their completely re-architected software on my system to find out what "more" they will do to me!
Can we have just the drivers, and none of the other bloat shiteware that you package into the distrubution?
No? Then fuck off.
Wikipedia had a good explanation for that. Microsoft, as M$ is wont to do, changed the way NT5/2000 enumerated PCI bus devices between 9x and NT such that it was either impossible, or an entire rewrite to provide an NT5 driver for the Rage Fury MAXX on Windows due to the altered design. Given that the MAXX was merely a stopgap solution before the Radeon came out, it made no financial sense for ATI to even attempt to work around the new NT design and rather focused on the single chip drivers which would actually make them new sales.
That said, I'm not sure why you couldn't install a driver, as far as I was lead to understand, it would run as a single GPU card and simply lose half the ram/performance.
I don't care how suucky it is. We can't fix what we don't really own or control.
What is the point of bloating drivers with some social networking crap when you are unable to get simple things like reliable HDMI sound after windows wakes from sleep?
Because the software to run my graphics card needs fucking social media integration. Next thing you know, im going to need to sign in with facebook to change my display settings and it will auto-tweet my configuration settings. Srsly AMD, get fucked. Stop putting shit in your software that nobody fucking needs or wants.