Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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'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...
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.
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?
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.'"
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?
What the fuck, right?
I just want to get the drivers installed on my Mint system that will allow me to use my R280X for rendering in Blender. No games, just Blender.
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!
But that would mean having to write in a "non-cool" language that just integrates and does stuff.
How else are they going to write one line of code instead of two if not to bundle the entire Microsoft .NET Framework in several versions, Silverlight for good measure, complete installs of DirectX for those people on computers so old they don't have them, several versions of the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes, etc.?
This is the thing that drives me mad about modern computing. I get a game having 60Gb of content. 3D models and HD textures are huge. I get a large program needing support libraries,etc. But when something is more than 100-200 Mb of download just to install some tiny freeware utility, you have to consider what the hell you are doing wrong to get that far.
X needs runtime Y? Write an installer that downloads that if its really needed rather than bundling it by default. But to do that, of course, you need to be able to write in a language that needs no runtimes but the built-in Windows ones.
Change the name of the software, add some obnoxious and invasive "features" = Profit????
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.
It couldn't possibly be something else causing the problem.... I'm not saying it's definitely not AMD, but you having trouble doesn't instantly mean it's AMD's fault.
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.
Don't you want the world to immediately know what you are using your video card for....hmm, Big&Black&RoughAllOver.mp4 is currently fullscreen.
OK, so maybe not everything.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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!
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?
2K was the future of Windows. Microsoft was attempting to move everyone from the old 9x architecture to NT. Yes, it uses different drivers (it's a different operating system altogether, just with some compatability stuff and the Win32 API), but your average user didn't know that. Microsoft went to great pains to make the transition between 9x and NT as transparent as possible.
ATI effectively abandoned the product when they didn't write drivers for it. That decision had consequences - one of which was losing me as a customer.
I didn't think of trying a driver for just one of the chips. Nothing showed up in any of my searches talking about that. Of course, that was fifteen years ago, so I don't remember everything I tried.
It's not the reason I don't buy AMD cards. It's not even the same company making them. But since I don't use them myself, I only have the word of other people to go on, and I haven't heard very many people saying good things about AMD video.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.