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AMD's 'Crimson' Driver Software Released (anandtech.com)
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."
Phoronix comes to the same conclusion:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-crimson-linux&num=1
Maybe this is why Windows 10 removed the old Catalyst Control Center a few days ago? A bit early, sure, but still...
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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!).
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.
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?
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.
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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
According to the article it's written in Qt. Maybe it's just the legacy part that's done in .NET
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...