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AMD's 'Crimson' Driver Software Released (anandtech.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the gee-i-hope-it-integrates-with-social-media dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday marked the launch of AMD's 'Crimson' driver software. It replaces the old Catalyst driver software, and represents a change in how AMD develops bug fixes, improves performance, and adds features. AnandTech took a detailed look at the new driver software. They say, "By focusing feature releases around the end of the year driver, AMD is able to cut down on what parts of the driver they change (and thereby can possibly break) at other times of the year, and try to knock out all of their feature-related bugs at once. At the same time it makes the annual driver release a significant event, as AMD releases a number of new features all at once. However on the other hand this means that AMD has few features launching any other time of the year, which can make it look like they're not heavily invested in feature development at those points." On a more positive note, the article adds, "Looking under the hood there's no single feature that's going to blow every Radeon user away at once, but overall there are a number of neat features here that should be welcomed by various user groups. ... Meanwhile AMD's radical overhaul of their control panel via the new Radeon Settings application will be quickly noticed by everyone."

50 comments

  1. Bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    These Crimson drivers didn't suck.

  2. Still Crap on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    And unfortunately this new Crimson driver barely improves performance on Linux...
    http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-new-crimson-amd-driver-tested-on-r7-370-4g.6274

    1. Re:Still Crap on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Phoronix comes to the same conclusion:
      http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-crimson-linux&num=1

    2. Re:Still Crap on Linux by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 2

      It wouldn't surprise me if at some point the open source driver would catch up to the closed source one. AMD would do well to direct their driver-related efforts in converging the two. That is: if they feel a closed source driver is needed, base it on open source components as much as practical. And put improvements back into those open source parts where possible.

      From what I've read, AMD has already made some moves in that direction. Which is a good thing. Shared effort (community <-> AMD), limited resources, etc. Regardless of what products AMD kicks out, software is a significant part of making those products successful. And the open source crowd should NOT be ignored in that process (luckily that's not the case, but hey there's always room for improvement :-). Even if it were just a way to offload some of the work to 3rd parties.

    3. Re:Still Crap on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The 99.99999981% gamers that don't use Linux don't care.

    4. Re:Still Crap on Linux by ledow · · Score: 2

      The problem is that the "driver" nowadays isn't really a driver. The hardware still pushes the same shaders etc. to the card, over a standardised bus.

      The problem is that the "driver" nowadays is a bunch of shortcuts and re-optimised shaders for particular operations, which are heavily dependent on how the games operate and basically "overrules" what the game wants the shaders to do, for the sake of per-game performance increases by sacrificing things that are sub-optimal on that particular card / game combination. Why else do you think that "new game X" suddenly needs a driver update to work when the game is using DirectX and the card is compliant with that level of DirectX?

      In essence, this is tied quite tightly to DirectX. So the reason that the "drivers" often suck is that they are Windows-specific bodges to increase performance for individual games. That won't translate to even a Linux/OpenGL port of the same game on the same hardware, let alone for EVERY OpenGL game on EVERY Linux on ALL supported hardware.

      And the investment is not in making a particular hardware faster, or pushing more texels over the standardised buses than before, but in optimising the hardware response for a particular game - which is labour-intensive and has to be redone for every game on every platform for each supported card.

    5. Re:Still Crap on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So it's the game manufacturers' faults for making games that don't really adhere to any standard at all? Why is it the driver's responsibility to make sure the game runs properly?

    6. Re:Still Crap on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "So it's the game manufacturers' faults for making games that don't really adhere to any standard at all?"

      Yes, but they don't ultimately take all the blame.

      There are two primary 3D standards. OpenGL, and Direct3D (there used to be more.)

      The only things the drivers should need to do is pass the standardized information along to the hardware for processing or display.

      Game manufacturers are clueless about standards implementations, which is why we have such horrifically buggy messes such as just about any Bethesda game.

      The engine makers have plenty of blame to share, as well.

    7. Re:Still Crap on Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Linux is just not well designed to handle graphics. That's why it fails hard against Windows in almost every benchmark and game, no matter the GPU or driver used.

    8. Re:Still Crap on Linux by rioki · · Score: 1

      I would not say game devs are clueless. The key point is that they try to get the most out of the hardware as possible and to do that they are ready to do anything, even a pact with the devil. I have seen the most abhorrent code in game engines and shaders and all in the effort of a few frames per second more. The key problem is that the hack that worked one generation of hardware is broken in the next. When game development spans years, in which multiple hardware generations may come out, this creates are huge mess...

  3. Windows 10 by Meneth · · Score: 2

    Maybe this is why Windows 10 removed the old Catalyst Control Center a few days ago? A bit early, sure, but still...

    1. Re:Windows 10 by Mashiki · · Score: 1

      Maybe, but the only reason I can think of is because people have it set to automatically install drivers. That's easy enough to turn off.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    2. Re:Windows 10 by wkwilley2 · · Score: 1

      That would just be Windows 10 being a dick about "incompatibility issues"

      --
      Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
    3. Re:Windows 10 by evultrole · · Score: 1

      You'd think that, wouldn't you? But have you actually tried it?

      Windows 10 just does whatever it feels like with driver upgrades, regardless of what the settings are. I have problems with older intel graphics chips because of that all the time, old chips won't run new drivers without bios upgrades, the manufacturers won't release bios fixes, so no matter how many times you boot safe mode, blacklist the driver update, tell windows not to download drivers from windows update, etc. Windows 10 still just downloads a non-working driver version and clobbers the computer.

      Again, and again, and again.

    4. Re:Windows 10 by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Caveat: I don't own a Windows computer and haven't used Windows 10 for more than five minutes. However, I read that you could install the drivers in safe mode and change the settings from within safe mode and that they'd stick. The person that mentioned it, here on this site, is a fairly reputable person.

      --
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  4. Very poor article by drinkypoo · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I know, TFA? WTF? But I did, and boy is it horrible. They need an editor now. Also, it doesn't tell us what we really want to know: is the new driver GUI a gigantic, memory-sucking, crashy turd like CCC?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  5. I'll believe it when I see it by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not the driver, that's out, but that they are going to change how they do drivers. They've said that numerous times before, and always the situation is the same. They are very slow at getting actual release drivers out (they are forever beta versions) and their OpenGL performance and support is garbage (to the point that HFSS would fail to run on systems with AMD cards).

    So AMD: Less talk, more good drivers. I want to support you, I really do, but I've been burned too many times.

    1. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      (to the point that HFSS would fail to run on systems with AMD cards

      Are you talking about FirePro cards? Older software seems to detect Nvidia drivers as supporting higher OpenGL version numbers, at least with the consumer cards. Even if the card and the driver supports OpenGL 4.5, the software might detect 3.3 support only, for example.
      Anyway, these "Crimson" drivers seem nice but the control panel crashes every time I log out with something that looks like a use of uninitialized memory. So no Crimson for me, just the drivers. My anecdotal experience of old Nvidia drivers was similarly bad (Blue Screen Galore), but the latest WU drivers for GTX950 seem to work very nicely in another machine.

    2. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Informative

      You say that as a bad thing.

      Read a game developer comment on here and they will say AMD hardware is a joy to use. Especially on the XBOXONE... but on Windows it is hell due to bugs and workarounds due to optimizations from 15 years worth of games loading up.

      Consider it like IE 6 where you need work arounds on work arounds and each new release adds more changes to make some new game cheat on benchmarks. Nvidia is now falling under this trap too. The great thing about FirePro and Quadro cards is the hardware is almost identical to the gaming cards except with ECC ram. It is the drivers that make them pro.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    3. Re: I'll believe it when I see it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Men, AMD, a company poorly managed for its entire existence. Now it's got a petty and ineffective CEO, and the mismanagement continues. Too bad, given the potential.

    4. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

      And yet for all your misdirected Windows whining DirectX for Windows is the only area that AMD cards perform well. Their Linux drivers blow, as noted by other posts here, and that is because AMD can't write OpenGL drivers to save their life.

      nVidia, on the other hand, has extremely fast and solid drivers for Linux.

    5. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Not really.

      Arstechnica.com just a few days ago posted some benchmarks with Steam. With nvidia hardware even it is about 40% slower than Windows.

      I am not an AMD fanboy at all. I have an nvidia 770 on my system at home and an ATI 7850 before then. I hate both companies actually but for different reasons. Alot has to do with games too. Even if you had a solid driver for Linux the game is designed and only tested with Windows and they use some 3rd rate outsourcer overseas to port it to Linux ... or even WIndows as the game is optimized only for the Xbox and Playstation and not on Windows .... and even worse Linux. EA is known for this.

      So that and DirectX is more tied to the OS than OpenGL so it is faster unless you do tricks. Vulcan may fix this but DirectX 12 will have hardware access. FYI AMD invented Mantle which turned up the heat and gave console like performance on the desktop as game makers have direct hardware access that is lacking on the PC.

      On my system I only use Nvidia drivers that come with WIndows. I get corruption if I use the latest ones from nvidia. I figured out when my computer went to sleep it would crash before saving everything to the hiber.sys file.

      I wish Matrox and PowerVR were still making PC graphics :-(. Some competition is lacking and would add fire to AMD and Nvidia to improve their products and drivers.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    6. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OpenGL support has to do with the way games are written, since OpenGL, unlike Direct3D, is hardly a standard of anything. Everyone can do their implementation differently with no regard of expected performance characteristics for any part of the standard, and there are tons of vendor-specific extensions which modern games cannot work without.

      I don't think they're interested in pushing games to optimize for their version of OpenGL anyway, given that they started a new low-level API which while non-cross-vendor is what PC games should have been using.

  6. Radeon drivers were shit for decades by sinij · · Score: 0

    Radeon drivers were shit for decades, before they morphed into AMD shit drivers. If you have generation-old GPU, you won't get any support for modern titles.

    While I understand there are a lot of cloak and dagger going on with standards and implementations, AMD is consistently on the losing end.

    1. Re:Radeon drivers were shit for decades by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have generation-old GPU, you won't get any support for modern titles.

      And historically, if you have a current-generation GPU, it doesn't work yet. So choose between "doesn't work" and "unsupported." Once you decide AMD, you're doomed in some way, and then it's just about figure out which kind of getting-fucked is going to hurt the least for your situation.

  7. Too much hypey superlatives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    what does it really bring? Every generaiton of video card driver seems to be development in an even bloatier control panel. Same goes for Nvidia.

    I'd love it if AMD went back to those simple tabbed panels with the big round blue buttons.

  8. The CRIMSON DRIVER! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not sure whether The Crimson Driver should be a hero of villain.
    I guess AMD will answer for us in due course.

  9. I want stability by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    Especially with older games. I've yet to hear anyone say AMD has ever returned to the glory days of my 1650X where I could boot up any old game and have a reasonable expectation it wouldn't crash. I tried the 4000 series years ago. Worked fine with Call of Duty, crash city with Psychonauts. I switched to nVidia, but I can't say I haven't looked back...

    --
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    1. Re:I want stability by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      I have games from Win9X through 2015 and I have no issues playing them on my R9 280, in fact the only issues I have playing older games is I often have to bypass the shitastic DRM they used them like Starfuck and SecuSUC which will if you aren't careful try to shoehorn a 32bit kernel driver into a 64bit kernel and fuck the OS. Luckily most of the companies making that shit were so damned cheap they kept their piss poor 16bit installers way into the 32bit era and thus won't be able to run the installer.

      But since they switched away from VLIW to GCN things have been nothing but candy and puppies and say what you will but you have to give 'em credit, when they EOLed the old VLIW cards and APUs when they released Crimson? They were at least decent enough to release a beta of Crimson specifically for these older chips that not only gives them any Crimson features that those chips will support but also runs on Win 7-10 so any of the older chips that didn't have Win 10 drivers? Well they do now. I installed it on my E350 netbook from 2011, runs great and even improved my hardware video acceleration.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  10. Well of course, because Linux is OpenGL by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    And AMD can't handle OpenGL. I don't know why, I'm not sure what's so hard, I'm not sure if there's a monster that guards the OpenGL specs in the AMD office or something, but they have sucked at GL for over a decade, and show no signs of getting any better. They can't claim it is because of an API limitation either. For whatever you want to say about the mess that is OpenGL, nVidia makes their GL drivers dead even with their DX drivers. You can use either rendering path and can't tell the difference in features or speed.

    That is also why I'm real skeptical that Vulkan is going to do anything for AMD. While they are heavily involved in the development, they are involved with OpenGL's development too (ATi was a voting member on the ARB and is a promoter with Khronos Group). Given that Vulkan is heavily GL based, originally being named glNext, I worry that AMD will suck at performance with it as well.

  11. Also worth noting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    With the new release, AMD has effectively ended support for all non-GCN architecture GPUs.

    According to Tom's Hardware: "The affected products include AMD Radeon HD 8400 and lower 8000-series cards, and Radeon HD 7600 and below. The entire line of Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 cards have also been added to the legacy support list."

    As an owner of an HD6970 (which still runs great, mind you), this news was quite disappointing.

  12. money badly spent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Shouldn't they focus on writing DRIVERs. ?

    An html5 interface would be more than enough for tweaking the settings

  13. Because it will make you SEE RED by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 0

    >> AMD's 'Crimson' Driver Software Released

    Because it will make you SEE RED. Heh heh hee. Thank you I'll be here all week.

  14. I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monkeys by dinfinity · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What a terrible clusterfuck this 'revamp' is.
    1. Only half of the settings are 'ported'. The other half (including Crossfire) can only be found when pressing 'additional settings', which opens (a stripped version of) the old AMD Catalyst Control Center. Shit, I get that some projects require having legacy code and new code next to each other, but for a tool that does fuck-all and is produced by a multinational company it is inexcusable.
    2. The UI is a classic 'looks shiny, works like crap' with a myriad of 100% custom touch sized interface elements in grey and grey strewn across an anemically small window with multiple navigational blocks and random bits of hidden functionality. I'm surprised they didn't replace all text buttons with grey meaningless icons.
    3. It is unstable as fuck.
    4. It has fucking ad banners and social media crap rammed in there.
    5. It has custom fucking animations of UI elements and weird 'read more...' links.

    The only good thing about this bit of software is that they actually named it AMD Settings (and/or Radeon Settings), which at the very least reflects its function. Other than that it is a downgrade (which is saying a lot, considering that the previous version was the CCC!).

  15. Sigh by ledow · · Score: 1

    What with this, nVidia Shield (rubbish but still in the market) and Steamboxes being virtually all nVidia, I can't help but carry on doing what I've done for many years now.

    ATI for 2D graphics on servers, if it's pre-integrated.
    Intel for 2D graphics for clients, if it's pre-integrated.

    Everything else (i.e. the whole point of having a 3D graphics card) has to be nVidia.

  16. Re:I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just wait until they get into "like & follow AMD and watch this ad to download the newest drivers!!!1". Welcome to the future, where everything from hardware accessories to peripherals and basic OS software has a facebook button and flashy blinky lights to entice you to click on them.

  17. Is there a 'true' test for performance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    AMD gets knocked for their drivers, but you have to wonder how much is due to intervention from the competition? I still remember Unreal Tournament 2003 would start the game with a character breaking through an nVidia logo. If games are optimized for nVidia hardware, can we really tell if performance of AMD is that much worse? Is there a test that is guaranteed not to favor any card?

    1. Re:Is there a 'true' test for performance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would guess you'd have to use an OSS benchmarking tool. Some of the more popular benchmark tools I see are not open source, so your paranoia may vary. That said, Fallout 4 was recently released with poor performance on AMD/older Nvidia cards, and Nvidia supposedly had a hand in helping to develop graphics improvements bolted onto the engine. People point to ridiculous tesselation (completely overkill, well beyond the point of diminishing visual returns for most players), and Gameworks brings its own performance issues. That said, we don't know how much is potentially shady business dealings, and how much is poor Bethesda coding combined with bolting on intensive graphical features to an engine that no longer excels at the things that made it attractive for the type of games Bethesda makes; there are other engines that can now handle open-world sandbox games more efficiently, though a relatively static engine aids modding.

  18. Re:I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monk by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 1

    Take a look at the Windows event log, you should have a section where the driver puts events caused by .NET. Each time I open the CCC (I plan to test the Crimson today) I see dozens and dozens of error warnings suggesting how crap and poorly programmed is the CCC. I do not understand how AMD can not find better developers to do something as important as a device driver.

    --
    Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
  19. Re:I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monk by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 1

    Corretion: Where the driver puts events caused by CCC (On reading them becomes clear that the driver or at least the interface is done in .NET)

    --
    Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
  20. Re:I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just wait until they get into "like & follow AMD and watch this ad to download the newest drivers!!!1". Welcome to the future, where everything from hardware accessories to peripherals and basic OS software has a facebook button and flashy blinky lights to entice you to click on them.

    Yep. Nvidia's already started down that path

  21. Re:I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monk by edxwelch · · Score: 1

    According to the article it's written in Qt. Maybe it's just the legacy part that's done in .NET

  22. Re:AMD is for cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MooooooooOOOOOOOOOOooooooooOoooooo

    A10-7700k says MooooooOOOOOOoooooooooooOOOoooo

  23. Re:I think it is safe to say that AMD employs monk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Each time I open the CCC (I plan to test the Crimson today) I see dozens and dozens of error warnings suggesting how crap and poorly programmed is the CCC

    The AMD Catalyst Control Center is on of the most complex .NET applications available to the general public, and as such it touches more of .NET API and loads far more .NET runtime components (owned and maintained by M$) than anything else on a typical Windows PC. What you are seeing logged are likely unavoidable runtime errors for which M$ has long since decided it has no interest in fixing. Is AMD a bit lately in waking up to the reality that the M$ implementation of .NET is complete crap? Quite possibly yes.