• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

AMD acknowledges driver stuttering issues

GotNoRice said:
Yes I did, very interesting link. Let's explore it a bit.

frametimes_bf3.png


So this is the example you claimed where AMD has "better" frame-times? Even then it's clear that the Nvidia hardware is not experiencing any sort of issue in terms of frame latency. At that high resolution, in the most VRam intensive game yet released, you would expect a card with an extra GB of VRam to start showing an advantage. Even then the two are basically dead even.
Click to expand...

Read my post again:

Tamlin_WSGF said:
Didn't you catch the post earlier in this thread, showing one of the games that had biggest increase in 12.11 beta, which has both better framerate and frametimes with 7970 vs. the 680 according to Nordichardware's microstutter article?
Click to expand...

Lets examine the example:

Your conspiracy theory is based on AMD deliberately introduced microstutter in games in order to get higher framerates.

Battlefield 3 is one of the games with largest improvements in 12.11 Beta. It doesn't have microstutter. Its also one of the most benchmarked games out there.

Shouldn't evil AMD introduce microstutter in BF3, so they could take over the world, instead of already buggy Skyrim which you need to break game physics and timing in order to benchmark, since its linked to the ingame sync? AMD had a lightning bug fix in 12.11 Beta which might have broken the game.

You have no evidence other then Skyrim which worked before, but didn't in the new driver set. Borderlands 2 doesn't have a "before 12.11 Beta" test. This means we are talking about a conspiracy theory that are build around a driver resession in a single game? Are you being serious? :confused:
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
This means we are talking about a conspiracy theory that are build around a driver resession in a single game? Are you being serious? :confused:
Click to expand...

David Baumann @ AMD said:
Over the early part of the year you'll see a few driver updates help this across a variety of games.
Click to expand...

I guess he never got the memo that this problem only affects one game.
 
GotNoRice said:
I guess he never got the memo that this problem only affects one game.
Click to expand...

Please read my posts a bit more.

There is one game you have presented as a driver regression. You present your whole conspiracy case based upon AMD breaking games with the performance improvements introducing microstutter and that single game is your evidence.

Your case:

Skyrim didn't have microstutter before 12.11 Beta, ergo AMD has sacrificed smoothness in all the improvements they made in 12.11 for performance to increase holiday sales.

You are presenting that one game as evidence and are building your whole case around driver regession in a single game.

I can't understand why your are presenting such conspiracy theory when so little points towards it. Its also counterproductive, since it muds the whole discussion taking away the focus from microstuttering over to tin-foil hat theories.

In the real world:
There are a handfull of games tested for microstutter. A few of them have microstutter. There is no evidence supporting conspiracy theories that AMD deliberately introduced microstutter so they could get higher framerates. Infact, a game like Battlefield 3 that has been tested for microstutter with large improvements in the 12.11 has shown smooth and without microstutter.

AMD has found that the new memory management for GCN arch they have been working on could fix some of those games and even improve further on the performance.
 
Last edited:
Tamlin_WSGF said:
You are presenting that one game as evidence and are building your whole case around driver regession in a single game.
Click to expand...

You seem to desperately want to put words in my mouth about this being about one game, when it clearly is not.

AMD has found that the new memory management for GCN arch they have been working on could fix some of those games and even improve further on the performance.
Click to expand...

Again, talk is cheap. I eagerly await new drivers just like everyone else. We'll see if they actually come through. One thing is for sure though, they are sure taking their time...
 
GotNoRice said:
You seem to desperately want to put words in my mouth about this being about one game, when it clearly is not.



Again, talk is cheap. I eagerly await new drivers just like everyone else. We'll see if they actually come through. One thing is for sure though, they are sure taking their time...
Click to expand...

Its one game you have presented as evidence that there has been a driver regression, namely Skyrim. You build your conspiracy case upon a single game performing better in older drivers and therefore AMD must have deliberately fucked up smoothness for higher performance.

I also look forward to the new drivers. :)
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
Its one game you have presented as evidence that there has been a driver regression, namely Skyrim.
Click to expand...

We've already seen terrible frame latency issues in both Skyrim and Borderlands2. Of course those two and BF3 were the only three games that nordichardware even tested... and 2/3 of them had serious issues. Who's to say what they would come up with if they tested more games?

TechReport found similar issues on many different games. Skyrim and Borderlands2 of course, but also several others.

gw2-99th.gif

gw2-beyond-50.gif

Again, one or two bumps in the road like this wouldn't be anything to worry about, but when those blips are everywhere, they begin to matter. Subjectively, the Radeon's performance doesn't feel horrible, but if you were play back to back versus the GeForce, you'd end up picking the GTX 660 Ti as the better option.
Click to expand...

ac3-99th.gif

the 7950 struggles more in AC3 in Windows 8. Then again, the 7950 doesn't perform especially well in this game in either version of Windows—not compared to the GTX 660 Ti.
Click to expand...

dogs-beyond-50.gif

As in Win8, the 7950 posts a higher FPS average than the GeForce, but a small number of high-latency frames detracts from the 7950's performance.
Click to expand...

One game?
 
Oh my, all I see in this thread is the same problems with Skyrim, from TechReport. And somehow this has turned into an ancient, widespread AMD problem we've all always had to deal with.

Get real people. Crossfire has had issues. That doesn't relate remotely to single-card frame time latency.
 
GotNoRice said:
We've already seen terrible frame latency issues in both Skyrim and Borderlands2. Of course those two and BF3 were the only three games that nordichardware even tested... and 2/3 of them had serious issues. Who's to say what they would come up with if they tested more games?

TechReport found similar issues on many different games. Skyrim and Borderlands2 of course, but also several others.
One game?
Click to expand...

You are referring to games that has microstutter. We have no dispute there. I even want you to stop with the ridiculous thin conspiracy theory, because its mudding the whole discussion about microstutter. On the last pages, we have derailed the thread discussing your theory and even though you've had ample chance, you haven't provided any solid evidence to support such a claim, so its been a waste of time.

Your claim is that the performance improvements were at the cost of microstutter, where you claim AMD deliberately sacrificed smoothness to get higher framerates before holiday sales.

This you base on a driver regression on a single game: Skyrim. Skyrim worked earlier smoothly, but in the 12.11 beta, it had microstutter. This is the single evidence you have presented towards your conspiracy theory.

I thought I'd write some more, but I really don't have the time to waste on your conspiracy theory anymore, so unless you actually have something substancial, I'm done with it.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
You are referring to games that has microstutter. We have no dispute there. I even want you to stop with the ridiculous thin conspiracy theory, because its mudding the whole discussion about microstutter. On the last pages, we have derailed the thread discussing your theory and even though you've had ample chance, you haven't provided any solid evidence to support such a claim, so its been a waste of time.

Your claim is that the performance improvements were at the cost of microstutter, where you claim AMD deliberately sacrificed smoothness to get higher framerates before holiday sales.

This you base on a driver regression on a single game: Skyrim. Skyrim worked earlier smoothly, but in the 12.11 beta, it had microstutter. This is the single evidence you have presented towards your conspiracy theory.

I thought I'd write some more, but I really don't have the time to waste on your conspiracy theory anymore, so unless you actually have something substancial, I'm done with it.
Click to expand...


Don't worry, GotNoRice is wrong. He is just being a crazy nVidiot at this point. It's pretty obvious to most people that the microstutter was an unintended consequence of something they did in these drivers. It does NOT at all seem like they said should we optimize for smoothness or for fps, and chose to optimize for fps at the cost of smoothness. The just did some work on the drivers, this is the result that we got, they then identified that they can make more improvements with the memory controller stuff so they are working on that now. Both the fact that BF3 saw large FPS increase and NO stuttering/ling frame times, PLUS the fact that AMD has straight up said the drivers which resolve the stuttering issues should see fps INCREASES, and NOT decreases support this conclusion.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
You are referring to games that has microstutter. We have no dispute there. I even want you to stop with the ridiculous thin conspiracy theory, because its mudding the whole discussion about microstutter. On the last pages, we have derailed the thread discussing your theory and even though you've had ample chance, you haven't provided any solid evidence to support such a claim, so its been a waste of time.

Your claim is that the performance improvements were at the cost of microstutter, where you claim AMD deliberately sacrificed smoothness to get higher framerates before holiday sales.

This you base on a driver regression on a single game: Skyrim. Skyrim worked earlier smoothly, but in the 12.11 beta, it had microstutter. This is the single evidence you have presented towards your conspiracy theory.

I thought I'd write some more, but I really don't have the time to waste on your conspiracy theory anymore, so unless you actually have something substancial, I'm done with it.
Click to expand...

There was the same stutter in Skyrim before the 12.11 beta driver. It wasn't introduced with it.
 
Since Day one with 3 Gigabyte Reference 7970s in Tri-Fire i have ran them at 1100/1700 24/7 with pretty much every driver AMD has released and can honestly say after CAT 12.4s the compatibilty and smoothness in my games has decreased. In Fact F1 2011 has lost support for my Tri-Fire since Cat 12.4s Why? Crysis 2 did not work for me after 12.4s untill Catt 12.11s why? BF3 has been a game that has at least always worked for me thank god, Skyrim has always stuttered ( JUST LIKE FARCRY 3 ) and the only way to fix it was with a FPS limiter. Overall im really hoping NVidia releases some thing thats great next Gen so i can switch, Im fed up with the Clowns at AMD not ever responding properly in there drivers.
 
extide said:
Don't worry, GotNoRice is wrong. He is just being a crazy nVidiot at this point. It's pretty obvious to most people that the microstutter was an unintended consequence of something they did in these drivers.
Click to expand...

In Skyrim maybe. For the most part this seems to be a problem in other newer games that they tested like Hitman and Borderlands 2. I'm sure that this would show up in earlier drivers too.

This is by no means an across the board issue like some people want to make it out to be. Most games don't appear to have an issue. For example I've found Metro 2033 to have better frametimes with 12.11.

Additionally, when we switched from the old VLIW architecture to the GCN core there was a significant updates to all parts of the driver was needed – although not really spoken about the entire memory management on GCN is different to prior GPU's and the initial software management for that was primarily driven by schedule and in the meantime we've been rewriting it again and we have discovered that the new version has also improved frame latency in a number of cases so we are accelerating the QA and implementation of that.
Click to expand...

Also a lot of people seem to be misinterpreting this quote. He is not saying that the memory management system was rewritten in the last driver. He is just saying that some tweaks in upcoming drivers seem to improve frame latency.

lavaheadache said:
There was the same stutter in Skyrim before the 12.11 beta driver. It wasn't introduced with it.
Click to expand...


Yeah, I haven't played Skyrim on my 7950s but I've heard nothing but complaints from AMD owners with this game on the forums. I've heard of a lot of weird issues.
 
I discovered another way to further smooth performance with an HD 7950 outdoors in Skyrim.

Besides limiting your FPS to one below your refresh rate with AB use ultra quality settings with high distances.

Just use the high preset so all distances are set to high then manually max; AA|AF, texture quality, radial blur quality, shadow detail, and check reflect sky to add it to the other water options that should already be selected. That way you get ultra detail and high distance. Those are all under the advanced area.

FPS limiting with AB does a darn good job of squashing a great deal of the skipping and what I outlined makes it even more smooth outdoors.

For example, I was getting two hard hitches when running across the bridge up to Broken Tower Redoubt, now they're gone.
 
Last edited:
ICDP said:
Agreed but unfortunately the nature of PC games/hardware means AMD or Nvidia cannot guarantee every game will work perfectly. That is why both AMD and Nivida issue new driver releases regularly. It is also the reason why it is possible to create your own game profiles using the built in GPU control panel or 3rd party software such as RadeonPro or Nvidiainspector. Practically every one of us use 3rd party tools to overclock our cards and think nothing of it. I gaurantee there is not a single Nvidia GPU owner out there who has never had to create a custom profile to get the best out of some game or another. I know I have to make custom game profiles to get the best out of a lot of my games for my GTX 680. Witcher 2 is unplayable without an FPS cap for example.



[H] has been bitching for years about multi GPU Crossfire stuttering, not single GPU. For the vast majority this latency issue has never been an issue. My own testing in Skyrim showed a simple tweak to the flip queue size cured all stuttering.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2289641&highlight=

Hitman Absolution Frame Times

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34376473&postcount=550



Agreed.
Click to expand...

i've had to this more than a few times with nvidia SLI profiles. hell even in games nvidia has profiles for that don't even correctly work which requires me to create my own profile in nvidiainspector using a profile from another game.
 
KENNYB said:
*adjusting_ma_tin_foil_hat_and_googles*
I remember an OpenGL on Linux performance review on Linux from a couple of years ago that tracked AMD "performance" increases/decreases. Performance increases went hand-in-hand with bugs. Fixing bugs again decreased performance. Hopefully this won't occur again.
Click to expand...

Tamlin_WSGF said:
You put your tin_foil_hat on backwards. You should have said "AMD increased performance knowing it was causing bugs in Linux, so they could take over the world!"! :D Now thats a juicy conspiracy theory!

DotT%20-%20Purple%20Tentacle-550x.jpg


In Linux however, bugs go hand-in-hand with bugs when it comes to drivers. That goes for Nvidia too. The performance review on Linux you saw years ago isn't something I can comment on as long as you don't link up to the review.

The fix spoken of here in this thread, is about rewriting the memory management to suit the GCM architecture better. AMD/Dave Baumann implied that we will see performance improvements as result of this in games that has been optimized.

As you can see from the Nordichardware microstutter test, Battlefield 3 doesn't show any microstuttering and is infact both marginally better in frametimes AND framerate on 7970 vs. 680. That was one of the games that had the largest increase in framerate in 12.11.

That said, I care less about getting less FPS then getting smoother gameplay. This is one of the reasons I actually READ [H]'s reviews. Their reviews are about highest playable settings and they nudge down settings if they feel gameplay isn't smooth enough, even when framerate should suggest they could use a higher settings.

Except for FPS gaming where higher framerate can help response time, I only need higher framerates to get smoother gameplay.

Thats why kudos to Techreport for making a buzz about this and also kudos to [H] for their reviews which focus on gameplay and not only pure framerates.

Don't put a marketing spin on this with conspiracy theories and all, turning it into an AMD vs. Nvidia war like they have on Anandtech forums. That will only mud the issue.

PCPER is now also going over to a new performance metric that focus on smoothness :) :
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-New-Graphics-Performance-Metric
Click to expand...


I'm not going to fix the funny typo in my original post. I *did* put on my tin plated goggles and ear muffs so no interference will seep into my dome.

The article I was thinking about was this:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_firepro_history&num=8

Hearing Gabe talk about a Linux steam box makes me wonder. How is AMD and probably nVidia going to deliver consistent performance on Linux? I know 2 years is a long time. Fool me twice you can't fool me again.
 
This is all so confusing.

So,.... Triple buffering should be always on for all games ? Articles say it don't hurt performance with either vsync enabled or disabled but help to smooth out framerate.

Vsync should also be enabled and 59fps cap too. In that case I get no stutter at all. Fallout 3 is like a totally different game
 
Looks like the 13.1 WHQL's are out...

Time to see if they had to slow the games back down to fix the stuttering or not....

I am betting that the didn't. I bet we see perf increases and stutter decreases.
 
13.1 whql is just 12.11b11 with a whql signature.

You can also just look at the techreport testing of 13.2b. There is no performance decrease. Sadly these fixes are on a per game basis so the games that do have this issue like Stalker Clear Sky will probably never get fixed.
 
HiCZoK said:
Vsync should also be enabled and 59fps cap too. In that case I get no stutter at all. Fallout 3 is like a totally different game
Click to expand...

Thats a different issue. Google the 64hz bug with gamebyro. It annoys the piss out me. Somehow most people don't see it though. I don't understand how.

You really should try Fallout stutter remover to completely get rid of the stutter or at least set "ifpsclamp" in the Fallout 3 ini to whatever you are using for your cap. Thats what I used to use before Fallout stutter remover.

That issue was in oblivion too.
 
Exactly, and it basically proves this wrong:

GotNoRice said:
They released betas that increased the performance of GCN hardware at the expense of smoothness and did so conveniently right before the holiday shopping season where they sell more cards than any other time of year by far; knowing that people make purchases based on benchmarks.

No WHQL drivers since October... pretty clear that the betas would NOT pass WHQL certification, and it's pretty clear why.

Now it's January. The Holiday shopping season is over. Like clockwork they now "acknowledge" the problem. :rolleyes:

The final test will be to see if they can actually come out with a set of WHQL drivers that somehow retain the performance increase of the betas while also eliminating the frame latency issue. I personally don't believe this is something we will ever see.
Click to expand...

I still have not see whether the stuttering is resolved or changed in any way, but to say that the drivers were not WHQL certified because of the stuttering is just wrong,
 
extide said:
I still have not see whether the stuttering is resolved or changed in any way, but to say that the drivers were not WHQL certified because of the stuttering is just wrong,
Click to expand...

Exactly what do you think the purpose of WHQL is, if not to prevent flaws in drivers from going live?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top