AMD's Major Radeon Software Graphics Driver Update Goes Live With Gameplay Capture, More (venturebeat.com)

Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD is launching an update for its Radeon graphics drivers that will help PC gamers enjoy more power-efficient gameplay during the holiday season. Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition offers high-performance gaming and better stability for consumers, professionals, and developers. From a report on VentureBeat: The new edition enables power-efficient gameplay with Radeon Chill and seamless in-game screen capture and streaming with Radeon ReLive. For designers, content creators, and game developers, Radeon Pro Software Crimson ReLive Edition delivers productivity and stability with up to 30 percent performance improvements in key applications. With Radeon ReLive, gamers can "relive" their gameplay by capturing, streaming, and sharing recorded gaming sessions. Highly efficient with minimal impact to gameplay, Radeon ReLive enables seamless playback of ReLive recordings via an easily accessible in-game toolbar, and offers quick and convenient customizable settings, custom scene layouts, and more, AMD said. With Radeon ReLive, gamers now have a way to capture gaming highlights, and share their gaming exploits and conquests with online friends and competitors -- all integrated within Radeon Software.

Comments

God no

[Billly Gates]

Just last night I downgraded my driver's due to a black screen freeze after a sleep. This is for a new card too.

Their drivers are crap and sooo horrible that you cannot even upgrade their drivers. It will bsod. If you need to update your drivers you go to the internet on some questionable websites to download a 3rd party utility called DU written by some guy to uninstall the old driver first.

Yep AMD is so crappy you cannot even remove the drivers under add or remove programs?!

I wish I paid for the Nvidia premium tax so I could get something that worked! When was the last time you heard of an Nvidia crash? Never.

If this auto update breaks my computer every week I will certainly buy Nvidia and put AMD in my do not buy list

Re:God no

[Osgeld]

I have 2 AMD cards on a windows 10 and windows 7 machines, never had any of these issues. Sounds like you just suck

Re:God no

[drinkypoo]

I have 2 AMD cards on a windows 10 and windows 7 machines, never had any of these issues. Sounds like you just suck

I've never not had these problems. I've never had AMD drivers work properly without being hacked up by DnA. AMD has been crashing Windows for me since the Mach32 and Windows 3.1. (Don't even get me started on all the different Mach64 chipsets with different drivers.)

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time you heard of an Nvidia crash? Never.

Err, not that long ago actually.

Yep AMD is so crappy you cannot even remove the drivers under add or remove programs?!

I'm 99% certain that is how I've done it every time I've needed to.

you cannot even upgrade their drivers. It will bsod.

I've also had absolutely no issues with this when upgrading my AMD drivers.

Anecdote is not evidence etc. etc. but it sounds more like an issue with your system specifically rather than AMD in general.

Re:God no

[admin7087]

I don't understand AMD. Their drivers and software are bloatware and at the same time they don't allow you to tweak many settings by hand. Isn't it obvious that the vast majority of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on a high-end graphics card want the exact opposite? At least that seems obvious to me, and I've been gaming for more then twenty years.

Re: God no

[Billly Gates]

I give AMD credit. At least they don't install a bloated appstore and cloud streaming service like Nvidia. But Nvidia actually works!

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

"$5 has been deposited in your account"

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur. I haven't had any trouble with the recent AMD cards and Radeon Crimson drivers.

Learn to use a computer?

Re:God no

[vyvepe]

I do not have problems with AMD drivers (Win7, HD7970). Though I did not update them for a long time. But I never had the strange problems with AMD drivers people seem to report.

Re:God no

[Moheeheeko]

that's because they don't exist.

Re: God no

[Moheeheeko]

Except when it doesn't, and your card re flows the soldier holding it together because the drivers suck. There's a reason nVidia was synonymous with house fires for about 5 years.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you understand? This "article" is an ad, with all the buzzwords: *high-performance gaming and better stability for consumers, professionals, and developers. for a better user experience* UGH! all this bullshit for a middle of the road product (for AMD, by Nvidia's standards it's definitely low end). What garbage! Their products make for a good hotplate, not much else. We need competition in the field, but AMD needs to die, or at least admit they're only good for cheap Chinese knockoffs. The pro markets are way out of their league, an impossible dream. They make me wanna puke!

Re: God no

[Billly Gates]

Uh yeah Ok.

Also the 7890 uses the older better catalyst drivers

Re:God no

[PopeRatzo]

I've never not had these problems. I've never had AMD drivers work properly

Same here. This was the year I bought my first nVidia card (a 970) and have not looked back.

I was always suckered in by the fact that generally the AMD drivers are a few dollars cheaper. Never again.

Re:God no

[PopeRatzo]

Learn to use a computer?

Says the guy who still hasn't figured out how to make a Slashdot account.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time you heard of an Nvidia crash? Never.

Are you joking? I have a GTX 960, and only recently* did they release updated drivers that actually work with my card. This is after months of playing the Install New Drivers, Revert To Last Known Good Version game. This isn't a particularly rare problem, either.

*For some value of recent; I eventually gave up and stuck with an older driver version.

Re:God no

[SubtleGuest]

Why are you buying drivers?

Re:God no

[ledow]

In this day and age, any hardware causing a BSOD or freeze, I will assume faulty and remove.

I can't honestly remember the last time I saw one that wasn't caused by that.

The last BSOD I saw was 3 years ago while building a set of IBM BladeCenter blades. Their RAID card crashes if the default MS driver loads on 2012R2. 2012R2 wasn't officially supported at that point, so it was fair enough, but even then all I had to do was create an install disk with the IBM-supplied drivers (many YEARS ahead of the default MS ones) and it's worked flawlessly for years since on a number of BladeCenters without a problem under 2012R2 and heavy load.

As a programmer, I can justify that - literally the MS driver is so out of date it can't have been written when that hardware was made, and it's not as "compatible" as the 2012 driver, or the 2008 driver but advertises itself to be and the vanilla Windows Setup (which has nothing else compatible with that hardware) tries to load it but BSOD because the hardware isn't what it was expecting. It was instant (on loading the driver via Windows Setup), reproducible, and obvious.

Slipstream the Windows install and supplement the MS driver with anything written SINCE then and it picks the better driver and just works. That's fine by me. And an issue you'd only experience when doing major system upgrades or first-installs.

But a BSOD other than that? I can't even remember. Had a couple of client drive failures and still no BSOD (wouldn't boot, but you'd expect problems beforehand). I would have to say it's been probably 8-9 years since any BSOD that wasn't obviously explainable (hardware obviously failing, computer overheating, or problems like the above).

But a BSOD just because you updated a driver and reboot? No way. Why would you tolerate that on even a personal machine? That's data loss just waiting to happen.

BSOD my machine without an obvious reason why (and not just "it's a new driver" or "it's not the latest driver") and your hardware will be replaced.

I have a gaming laptop. I update the nVidia drivers precisely "when required" (i.e. a new game literally won't load without an update). That means I'm miles behind on versions. I kill all the taskbar apps and get rid of the dual-driver junk and whatever else, in any way I can. Still no BSOD. And when I update, the worst I expect is - very briefly - running on the internal Intel graphics until the new driver kicks in after a reboot.

BSOD died with Windows XP, and those were mainly because it was hard to isolate processes from each other etc. If you have ANY piece of kit that still gives you them in anything even approaching a reproducible or frequent way, ditch it and buy something else.

Same for kernel dumps (unless you've been fiddling with the kernel, they shouldn't happen) or whatever equivalent on Mac.

Re: God no

[Billly Gates]

Bahaha

Go use Windows 10 and your opinion will rapidly change. Also video drivers run in ring 0 so yes they still can take down a system

Re: God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you've got a source on that, I believe that as of Windows Vista, video drivers were removed from ring 0. This was true prior to Vista, but I don't believe it to be true any more. The worst I've had is corruption where the entire screen became unreadable, but the entire system did not crash. It was unusable, but still required a manual reset. This was on my current box, running an nVidia 970 GTX btw.

Re:God no

[war4peace]

The post above was originally written in 2002.

Re: God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Some driver components are managed by the kernel so if they crash 'wrong' they can crash the kernel also in some cases, but you're right. The entire graphics subsystem is not ring 0.

Re:God no

[0100010001010011]

Turns out Nvidia takes those few extra dollars and spends money making drivers that work

Even on platforms that AMD won't touch like Solaris and FreeBSD. I just wish they'd port CUDA to FreeBSD.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I have major problem with two nvidia cards. Never going to buy nvisuck again.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

says the guy who hates anonymity because he likes to name and shame.

Re:God no

[Bigbutt]

I've had 2 AMD 4870 cards on Windows 7 and they kept blue screening on boot pointing to the driver as the problem in the dumps. Upgrading was fun as well including one upgrade that forced a reinstall of Windows 7 to recover. I finally replaced them with slightly less powerful nVidia 560 cards (which brand I was using prior to the AMD cards) and while there were driver issues (driver has been restarted), I never had blue screens. My current system has a pair of nNivdia 970's and no issues since I bought them.

[John]

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have nvidia driver remnants installed on my machine after upgrading my video card to an amd, because the nvidia uninstall refused to run unless it detected nvidia hardware. So I just went through and cleaned out the files I could and called it done.

Re:God no

[phorm]

So while nVidia is working on Solaris and FreeBSD, their newest driver won't work for recent cards on recent kernels. Meanwhile their old cards get stuck without support in their problem, leaving you with nouveau (which is kinda like having a procotological exam with a glove dipped in wasabi).

I weighed heavily between both cards, and went with AMD since the OPEN SOURCE drivers have been given a *lot* of support by AMD, and work nicely without any third-party binary bullshit needed.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't had any trouble with the recent AMD cards and Radeon Crimson drivers.

The very fact you've said that, doesn't say much for AMD's drivers.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had 2 AMD 4870 cards on Windows 7 and they kept blue screening on boot pointing to the driver as the problem in the dumps. Upgrading was fun as well including one upgrade that forced a reinstall of Windows 7 to recover. I finally replaced them with slightly less powerful nVidia 560 cards (which brand I was using prior to the AMD cards) and while there were driver issues (driver has been restarted), I never had blue screens. My current system has a pair of nNivdia 970's and no issues since I bought them.

[John]

So you just said that irrespective of the video card, you have driver crashes. That kind of eliminates the video card as a cause, does it not? I suspect that frequent video crashes are caused by other things.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Mach32

That was long ago.. with Windows far, far away.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

HD 4870 was a Windows Vista era card. You got the end of life driver on Windows 7 and should have sold that card on FleaBay while you had the chance, or given it to an Windows XP enthusiast.

Re: God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Vista introduced WDDM 1.0 which used a miniport kernel driver (Ring 0) to manage low level rendering command packets, presentation/back-buffer flipping and interrupt handling. All graphics API specific code (Direct 3D, OpenGL) lives in user mode drivers (Ring 3) that communicate with the kernel mode display miniport driver via the Direct X Graphics Kernel (Dxgkrnl) port driver. Newer versions of WDDM still use this partitioning. In the dark ages of Windows XP everything was in the kernel mode driver, and shit hit the fan whenever you ran out of memory. IIRC, Windows Vista also supported installation of legacy XP display drivers but did nothing to mitigate the issues that arise from having the entire display driver stack running as part of the kernel.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I use both AMD / Nvidia GPUs, although I tend to favour AMD where possible. Prefer to have a viable competitor to nvidia + I dont have issues since the Radeon 48xx days. I do recall occasional issues during the Mach64 days .......

I have not gotten a BSOD in the pass 2-3 years, till a month ago.

That BSOD was caused by a Windows 10 update, for which I had to reinstall the OS / software again.

And this was on a laptop with an nvidia gpu.

I think there is a higher chance that MS will cause you to experience BSODs nowadays then GPU drivers. At least from my personal experience .....

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I always have gone with ATI cards, and always will go with AMD cards because of their Open Source drivers.
I also have never, not once, had a single problem with their WHQL Windows drivers.
I have fiddled with their "Beta" (now known as "Hotfix") drivers, which have had problems Billly Gates mentioned above. But they are clearly labeled "BETA" for a reason.

CAPTCHA: feminism: Now includes bitching about Beta software and drivers.

Re: God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us really don't give a shit about circlejerking around for mod points, sorry.

Re:God no

[drinkypoo]

That was long ago.. with Windows far, far away.

Yes. And look how little has changed. ATI didn't know how to write drivers. Now, AMD doesn't know how to write drivers. So what's changed? Two letters.

Re: God no

[PopeRatzo]

Some of us really don't give a shit about circlejerking around for mod points, sorry.

You just circlejerk around for free?

Re:God no

[strikethree]

BSOD my machine without an obvious reason why (and not just "it's a new driver" or "it's not the latest driver") and your hardware will be replaced.

Actually, when this happened to me with Windows 10 about a year ago, it was the trigger that woke me up and allowed me to honestly re-evaluate my life choices. I never tried to recover... upon reboot, instead of troubleshooting, I stuck in a bootable USB stick of Linux Mint 17.

The closest I get to Windows on my personal computers now is to play Skyrim under Wine.

I guess what I am saying is that I agree with your stance on BSOD; however, in this case, it was not hardware that was faulty but software. Windows 10 is terrible software regardless of the telemetry (which alone is reason enough to toss the garbage out).

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Been saying this for years. When you buy AMD you might be saving money up front, but what you gain in savings you lose in quality.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

"I use microsoft works and lotus 1-2-3, AMD cards have never caused me any problems!"

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD is not a viable competitor to nVidia, and they never will be. They're constantly a generation or two behind the times.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro tip: you're not supposed to jiz on top of them.

Re: God no

[kuzb]

They were? That sounds a lot like something you made up.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD has been crashing Windows for me since the Mach32 and Windows 3.1.

Not AMD.

ATI.

Re:God no

[drinkypoo]

Not AMD.
ATI.

Yes yes, obvious mistake. I said when AMD acquired ATI and announced they would eventually bring the products under their name that it would be confusing, and it is.

Re:God no

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same experience with a Quadro card, instant blue screen as soon as Windows finished booting. And it was a fucking Quadro, they are supposed to have certified drivers and be more stable than normal cards. Funnily enough, it only happened on Windows, it worked perfectly on Linux. For my next (current) computer I bought a Radeon, and it has worked flawlessly for almost 3 years, in both Windows and Linux, with AMD official drivers.

Found the LUDDITE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only LUDDITES expect LUDDITE drivers that work properly. Modern app appers use apps that app other apps like Appbook and Appstagram!

Apps!

God no

[Anonymous Coward]

Their drivers have been awful since forever. Instead of fixing them they just keep cramming more "social" into their drivers. Wtf?!?!?! Wouldn't you like some more Cloud in your McDonald's food? You could upload our transfat laden sandwich to the CLOUUUUuUuUUUUD!

I gave up AMD...

[Anonymous Coward]

And went with Nvidia. Cheaper, more stable, better bang for the buck, and much better Linux support.

Re:I gave up AMD...

[Moheeheeko]

And went with Nvidia. Cheaper, more stable, better bang for the buck

in what universe?

Re:I gave up AMD...

[Anonymous Coward]

The real universe, not the make believe one AMD lives in.

Re:I gave up AMD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheaper,

Nvidia re-sellers charge according to performance. That is, the Pascal models from mid to top are more expensive. But these are strange times we live in as all new cards and brands are expensive, probably due to flushing of the old stock.

Re:I gave up AMD...

[tepples]

NVIDIA wins in the universe where people treat the loss of freedom caused by a proprietary device driver as an acceptable cost of doing business.

Re:I gave up AMD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of us run the big 3... FreeBSD has better support with the nvidia binary blob. It's just how it is.

I buy nvidia because they support FreeBSD. I've been considering going back to AMD, but first I must learn how to port the linux DRI/DRM code over and that is a lot of work.

The open source argument doesn't work because it only applies to linux. NVIDIA has better support for open source operating systems despite the non free nature because FreeBSD is supported too.

Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[BenJeremy]

Say what you want about nvidia's bloatware, the driver installs are smooth as silk. AMD sends me to a browser page where I must try and figure out what download to select (considering the version numbers never match), then I have to download and install manually.

Ugh. It's 2016, right? AMD's driver updates make me feel like I've timewarped to 1997.

Re: Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Billly Gates]

ATI catalyst has been replaced by Crimson. They auto update and break your system each update unless you turn it off manually.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just not ignore the auto-detect function.

What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[Kartu]

What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!
As of 2016, AMD drivers are better than nVidias.
Crimson is rock solid and we'll see how Crimson ReLive will go.

Re: What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[Billly Gates]

Yep made it all up.

My Nvidia 770 gtx was solid. AMD is a nightmare of never ending driver problems. I have owned ATI 5750, 7850, and now an Rx 470. Drivers break is a fact of life and you need certain ones that never change for a stable system.

Yes, I reimaged my computer so it's not my system.

Looks like I got a -1 and hey it worked on my computer there you must be stupid replies from the ATI fanboys.

Re: What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You love to rehash the 5-year-ago past as some sort of argument about one of two graphics card platforms... do you have a psychiatrist or are you looking?

Re:What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking asshole, shut the fuck up. Billy Gates has a hell of a lot more credibility than you, idiot. AMD sucks donkey cock, but ignorant stupid mother fuckers like you were dumb enough to buy one of their cards. Now that you've been maid the fool the ONLY thing you can do is spread lies to make yourself believe that you're better off. By the way, in-game video recording? Been an Nvidia feature for years now. Go fuck yourself.

Re:What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[Darinbob]

Existing games run fine. New drivers always are chock full of crap I don't want. No need to upgrade.

As far as preferences go, the AMD vs Nvidia fans trolling each other is just as moronic as the Democrat vs Republican fans trolling each other. Sure, buy and or vote for one, but don't make it your life's mission to attack someone with a different choice.

Re: What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[phorm]

Binary drivers break, but a lot of semi-recent and newer cards are actually supported by the in-kernel driver which should not break in most cases (usually the drivers breakage = won't build with current kernel or xorg).

Re:What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[kuzb]

LOL, ok. You keep telling yourself that. AMD consistently fails in every category except price when it comes to video cards. There's a reason nVidia dominates that landscape, and it has everything to do with the fact that when the chips are down it's hardware and software that works reliably.

Re:What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[Kartu]

Maybe you should stop living in a shack out there somewhere.
4 month after launch 480 pulled ahead of 1060:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com...

470 trounced 1050Ti (30% faster) from the very beginning;

Re:What year it is, you fucking paid shill?!!

[kuzb]

Meanwhile every other benchmark tells a different story. Of course, there's the best benchmark too - real world usage where it consistently exposes AMD as awful. AMD is shit. It's your right to buy it, but don't try to tell me it's good. It isn't.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Kartu]

No they aren't. From the major gaming forum:

WARNING: Don't update your NVIDIA drivers, breaks memory speed, more
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/sh...

Nvidia 372.54 drivers are bugged (video, games, textures, etc)
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/sh...

Nvidia drivers 375.70 killed HDMI
http://neogaf.site/forum/showt...

Is the latest Nvidia Driver still fucked?
http://assets.neogafllc.netdna...

the latest:
NVIDIA drivers are disappointing.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/sh...

Does my 390x save on heating costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to know if my AMD r390x saves on heating expenses.

The rates I pay for electricity are as follows:

Fixed charge per day in the consumption period: 40.64
Price of energy for energy consumption up to 30 kilowatthours (kWh) times the number of days in the consumption period: 5.71/kWh
Price of energy for the remaining energy consumption: 8.68/kWh
Charge for demand exceeding 50 kilowatts (kW), in winter: 6.21$/kW
Charge for demand exceeding 50 kilowatts (kW), in summer: 3.78$/kW

From what I can find the r390x uses 342w of power when fully stressed, that is, when I'm playing GTA V on full settings. MSI Afterburner says GPU is regularly hitting 80c.

I have no idea what my electric baseboard heaters consume and no idea what even a good estimate of that is.

Re:Does my 390x save on heating costs?

[Fwipp]

Electric heaters are electric heaters.

Your GPU is just an electric heater that happens to do computation as well.

Re:Does my 390x save on heating costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Set a man a fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man afire or give him an AMD GPU and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Re:Does my 390x save on heating costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the machine in a relatively small room and dont have open windows, yes it WILL increase the ambient temperature in that root!
After about 1 hour of Doom i have to take off a sweater ;)

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

The AMD Crimson drivers have an auto-updater, that you failed to find it just shows you suck at computers.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[tginouye]

We'll see how it goes! I just had to downgrade from a GTX 970 to a pair of old Sapphire 6950's Crossfired. First AMD/ATI card since my old 9800 I had to buy to run Neverwinter Nights. At least they're old and I wont have to worry about new drivers every day? Wish me luck! (I haven't really had issues with AMD or Nvidia though, so perhaps I'm lucky, or AMD sees that I'm running an AMD CPU in this machine, and decides to play nice)

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

this x100. I havent once seen an alert of "DONT UPDATE YOUR AMD DRIVERS THEY BRICK YOUR SYSTEM" while nJewdia has one every other update.

Works under Linux?

[OneHundredAndTen]

For, after many attempts, I have yet to get any AMD binary blob to work under Linux for any AMD card.

Re:Works under Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way I got one working was by installing an older kernel. AMD support for Linux sucks.

Re:Works under Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Torvalds should have said "Fuck you, AMD!"

Their drivers have always been laughably bad on Linux.
If you're going for relative open source purity then use Intel.
If you're OK with binary blobs then use Nvidia.
If you love pain and don't plan on using your computer then use AMD.

Re:Works under Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah if you like binary blobs you can use Intel. You know that they stopped being fully open source right?

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take any time a real installer over a thin downloading online "installer".
I don't want each shit program to have net connection(unless absolutely necessary). Fuck that.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Blue Stone]

Oh yeah, nVidia drivers:

Install 'nVidia Experience' to download them smoothly, but have to sign up with nVidia to use it and then get your privacy shredded as they harvest pretty much anything they want (seemingly) from your computer and its activity to do (seemingly) whatever they want with your data.

Or don't install the nVidia Experience software and download the drivers yourself (searching their website for the right version and installing it manually ... in 2016!!) and have to hunt around your computer to turn off their spyware telemetry ... just to get the harware you bought (and when you thought nVidia weren't pulling shady shit) to function.

Oh yeah. That smooth as silk nVidia experience. Must be the lube they use as they probe your private areas.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

196.75

captcha: botched

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD...

First of all, this is Slashdot. You don't have to explain what AMD means. If someone reading this doesn't know this by now, they're on the wrong website to get their news.

Secondly, the proper form would have been "AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)..."

Are they making the Nvidia Experience mistake?

[Rmorph]

Genuine question - I don't know AMD products that well - My last 2 cards have been Nvidia and its time for an upgrade (I'm chugging on a gtx 780). Geforce Experience has a lot of these features that are being talked about - tied up in a ridiculous bloatware bundle - but they made it a sign-in service in the latest version. I've never seen such a stupid decision in my life. It was the easiest uninstall choice I ever make. Think about it.. they want you to login to a cloud service to use functions on your fucking graphics card. I couldn't believe it when I did the driver update and suddenly it wanted me to register my personal information. I will very seriously consider AMD the next time I do an upgrade -but I have to say that this news that AMD are going the bloatware route as well kind of alarms me because it sounds like AMD are looking at Nvidia's bloatware and thinking "Oh we should do that!" Are they? What's the difference between this and NV experience pre-signup.

Re:Are they making the Nvidia Experience mistake?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Nvidia doesn't require any personal information so the solution is simple: create an Nvidia account using a mailinator e-mail address. Worked for me.

Re:Are they making the Nvidia Experience mistake?

[Kartu]

AMD is going the opposite of "bloatware". Crimson drivers are sleek and small.

Re:Are they making the Nvidia Experience mistake?

[Kartu]

Oh, and 480 just took over 1060, 4 months after release:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com...

470 wiped the floor with 1050Ti (+30%-ish perf) upfront.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

And read the comments here today from people who just downloaded it? It seems besides Billy another user had to use DDU to stop the crashing and he still had problems installing the latest driver.

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I avoid all of that trouble with this:
          sudo apt-get install nvidia-367

Just the driver, no bloatware. Works great for my games.

can they catch nvidia

[bobmajdakjr]

but does it force me to create an online account randomly one day to use the app i been using and use the desktop recording? does the recording break ctrl 1-3 because if not screw that geforce experience for lyfe.

Depends on your distro.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had lots of problems with Ubuntu for instance.

Gentoo worked the last time I used AMD proprietary drivers, although now that there is OpenCL support (redwood and 2 others) and D3D support under wine via the open source radeon drivers, I haven't had a reason to test proprietary drivers in a number of years, but the last version I needed worked just fine for the entire 3.4 series of linux kernels. (All ~100 of them.)

PLP eyefinity?

[Anonymous Coward]

did they finally fix the bezel setting application that they manage to break with crimson??

Yah but

[m.dillon]

They turned all this crap on by default along with annoying auto-run apps. To say that I am unamused would be an understatement. However, I was able to fix the issue trivially by blowing away ALL of AMD's radeon junk, ripping out the radeon card, and buying a nice cheap little Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060.

Problem solved.

-Matt

Re:Yah but

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you use with DragonFly?

Re:Will it feature almost daily awkward updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can back this up. I have an nvidia gtx 960 on windows 10. Every other driver causes Overwatch to crash, windows to blue screen or random artifacts. I figured out that some of the updates caused overheating problems. They would push my card to 69C and it would blue screen. If it ramped up past 69C it would kick on the fan and be ok but if it stays there I'm toast. Have to manually run a fan utillty to kick up the cooling to keep it stable when i'm playing comp so i don't get a ban. Really frustrating.

I'll either go AMD or waiting for the series after 10 since that's known to have cooling problems with several cards in my price range too.

Using it Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry about your experience. I am using it right now in Mint 17.3

$ glxinfo
name of display: :0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: ATI
server glx version string: 1.4

$ lspci
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Pitcairn PRO [Radeon HD 7850 / R7 265 / R9 270 1024SP]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 7700/7800 Series]

Installation could not have been easier. Use Driver Manager or type:

sudo driver-manager

Select the fglrx-updates and apply changes.

Be warned that AMD proprietary drivers do not work on Mint 18 or the most recent Ubuntu because of a conflict with XOrg. That means no Steam, no StepMania, etc. I understand that the open source driver is quickly improving though.

Anecdotal Story Time!

[Anonymous Coward]

i ditched ATi cards in the early 2000s because new drivers introduced errors and decreased performance. forcing graphics setting via control panel worked maybe 30% of the time. and i had one GPU that would produce artifacts, and ATi tech support had no idea why - turns out, it had a steep 12v rail requirement that was poorly documented.

i moved to nvidia for driver stability and performance. ive enjoyed my time with nvidia, except i no longer expect better performance from new drivers. ever since my gtx 470, my nvidia GPUs seem to be a bit picky with drivers (across mult. mobo/CPUs). new drivers could introduce new frametime variance, random stutters, etc. again, my time with nvidia has been overall much more pleasant than ATi/AMD, but it aint all roses.

good to see AMD bringing strong dx12/compute performance (from what i can see) and releasing drivers more frequently (though the last few years nvidia released way more drivers), but i still tend to see nvidia as the "premium" choice. and CF/SLi solutions are still crap compared to a single GPU; comparing 2 AMD cards in CF to one high end nvidia GPU is laughable.

Now It Makes Sense

[Vince Ferg]

So I built my first PC since 2006 this year using the new RX480 in my new build. I work in IT and we use generic AMD cards in Dell computers at work all the time and don't really see any issues with blue screens but I am assuming they are more stable than the new cutting edge cards are. After reading through these comments I can now understand why my computer has blue screened twice since its build back in September. The error points at the video card so I didn't doubt it was the problem but seeing how common it is is also kind of scary... These 2 blue screens are literally the only times I have ever seen a Windows 8 or 10 device blue screen so it was a shock to see. I guess ill have to get this update later tonight but seeing all these comments I guess I shouldn't hold my breath for a permanent solution to the cards stability. Guess next time I should save my money for the more pricier Nvidea card like I did in 2006 if I want to enjoy stability.