AMD/ATI - Hardware vs Software support

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hafiqb

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 5, 2008
Messages
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AMD is in trouble...their hardware is good but the software (aka the driver support) leaves much to be desired.

I have two 5870's in crossfire which were recently beaten in performance by two GTX460 in SLI. Now I would not care for brand, but the fact that a GTX460 is almost half the price of a 5870 makes my mouth sour. This is poor value for money.

Additionally when I installed the new 10.8 drivers my HDMI scaling does not stuck. What is wrong with the ATI driver team? A few years ago this could have been understandable, but now? It seems that they do not test the drivers for even obvious bugs.

I am working in the semicon industry and usually the demands are very high. Usually also if someone does not provide the results after a certain period of time there will be changes...

It seems that either the ATI driver team has not enough skill, not enough manpower or just does not care about ensuring that the drivers match the hardware, Crossfire performance is just not up to the mark.

I am wondering if and when the AMD management finally will do measures and initiate some changes to ensure that the driver team is serious about improving on their results.
 
Make sure you are using 10.4 or 10.5a drivers because lots of people say that was the last driver release that worked well with Crossfire. If you have 10.8, then use 10.8a profiles. Also, report your bug or problem on this thread; an AMD driver developer is on there (Terry Makedon aka CATALYST_MAKER): http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1542635

But single-GPU drivers are fine, and let's not pretend that NV's drivers are perfect; google for complaints about GTX 460 bugs, errors, lockups, problems with SLI, etc. and you will see what I mean.

You might want to get a single-GPU 6xxx series. The flagship chip will be about as fast as a GTX 460 SLI setup, if it's really 30% faster than the HD5870.
 
Do you know if the HDMI scaling bug is a known bug or just an isolated issue? Did you install over your old drivers, if so, have you tried completely uninstalling/cleaning and re-installing 10.8? Have you googled the issue and try to come up with a fix or search out other users with the same issue? I understand that you're frustrated but making a thread about this issue isn't the best solution, you should try and be a little bit more proactive. Drivers are hit and miss on both sides with anomalies popping up all over.

I can't tell you though how many threads/posts I've seen specifically about ATI where people are swearing up and down at ATI's driver team and how they make shit drivers/whatever to come back and say it was either a) user error or b) another non-driver related issue

I've been running a single 5870 since launch and everything has been pretty peachy for me across a wide number of games with the exception of the OpenGL issues present from 10.4-10.7 and I personally didn't mind waiting on the fix.

It's a shitty situation to be in but take a stab at isolating and figuring this shit out. Ideally you want to be running 10.8 and the 10.8 caps. [H] seemed to enjoy the 10.8 combo and I've heard nothing but good things about them. Best of luck to you in getting this issue sorted my friend.
 
I am aware of the 10.5 drivers and yes this is not an isolated issue and yes I know how to use Driver cleaner....

Come on! That is not the issue I am raising here. I have not opened this thread to get the usual workarounds or people challenging "this your hardware" or "your are a noob with pc's". I want to voice out an issue which needs to be solved at the ground level.

Why do I need to revert back to older drivers if I have crossfire, shouldn't driver improve from revision to revision? If they are not, the driver team has an issue it needs to work out asap.

Also why do I need to upgrade to the new graphics card. I have my two 5870's now and they are enough, but again why two cards from a competitor perform better for almost half the price comparing crossfire vs SLI?

You see the problem is that if people are willing to accept such workarounds nothing will change and the actual root cause which seems to lie within the ATI driver team capability will never be resolved.

So what is AMD going to do about it? On one hand they seem to have quite a capable hardware team, but the software on the other...

Frankly this is not acceptable, so stop being a good consumer accepting this crap and voice out, maybe someone will listen.
 
Sorry, don't want to come to hard across, but at my work if I would deliver such performance & results I would better take some time and think if I am at the right place. And If I don't do it by myself, my Boss will do it for me.
 
I wasn't questioning your abilities, I was questioning how self sufficient you are and if you actually took some problem solving steps before putting this thread up. I went back and read through the [H] article thread and it does indeed seem that the OverScan issue is known bug in the community, if this is indeed the issue you are having.

I agree with you that switching to a single 68**/480 is silly and shouldn't be your solution. The issues you are having, like others issues are probably not driver specific per-say but more to do with your overall hardware config coupled with the drivers. I've seen plenty of people mention the mouse cursor bug but I've never seen it on about 6 different systems that I regularly update/manage catalyst on for myself, family and friends.

I'm sure there's a large handful people who have had Catalyst 10.8, and other driver sets for that matter "just work". You likely won't hear about those though, as people are more prone to voice their problems than their successes. This forum is a great tool for getting shit like this done. AMD/Nvidia have both stepped in and utilized Kyle and our community to help better their product and our end user experience. Terry Makedon is afloat somewhere on this forum why don't you shoot him a PM inquiring about the issue or direct him to this thread. Kyle could also be of some help, why not send him a PM. He has a good way of getting things done.
 
@ the OP

You have been thinking exactly what I have been thinking. AMD is purely a hardware company. They have inherited this attitude from the CPU division which frankly hasn't made a good CPU for 5 years....

I have my doubts about their commitment to software as a whole.

I speak from experience of programming for OpenCL and ATI Stream as well as gaming and compared to Nvidia's support for CUDA and games, AMD need to step up.

Their philosophy from what I can see form owning previously 3870x2 Quadfire, 4870X2, and 5870 Crossfire is that AMD build hardware. The software and drivers they could care less about.

AMD needs to learn that hardware runs software, not hardware runs hardware. Games are software AMD, and I hope Terry Makedon can read this.

Kyle has addressed the AMD driver issues recently (again!) and it is frustrating as AMD have excellent hardware but inferior software and drivers in my experience.
 
TheBlueChanell, don't worry I have been self-sufficient for years and I know that for any issue on PC the best and only tool is Google (to get to the forums providing experiences and info on how to solve the issue).

Before opening up this thread I have searched answers to the issue with the HDMI scanning and there are several options/workarounds brought up. What I have done now is to revert back to 10.7 (have also run 10.5 for a few days).

Keep in mind that I am addressing by when the driver team will get their cat together. If Terry Makedon is on the forums I hope he got something to say to explain his teams track record.
 
blastingcap said:
Make sure you are using 10.4 or 10.5a drivers because lots of people say that was the last driver release that worked well with Crossfire. If you have 10.8, then use 10.8a profiles. Also, report your bug or problem on this thread; an AMD driver developer is on there (Terry Makedon aka CATALYST_MAKER): http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1542635
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That thread is about finally getting increased performance out of almost year-old hardware on half-yr-old games? Am I actually reading that right?

blastingcap said:
You might want to get a single-GPU 6xxx series. The flagship chip will be about as fast as a GTX 460 SLI setup, if it's really 30% faster than the HD5870.
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What is the incentive to put more money into a company that has a track record for their last two generations of hardware to not resolve issues?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Do not buy AMD.

hafiqb said:
Why do I need to revert back to older drivers if I have crossfire, shouldn't driver improve from revision to revision? If they are not, the driver team has an issue it needs to work out asap.
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Back at the beginning of the year when AMD was trying to figure out the horrendous GSOD issue, things would routinely be broken with the next driver. Idle clock speeds being wrong for dual-monitor configs, dual-monitor configs not sleeping properly.

hafiqb said:
Also why do I need to upgrade to the new graphics card. I have my two 5870's now and they are enough, but again why two cards from a competitor perform better for almost half the price comparing crossfire vs SLI?
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Why would you even consider it? Apparently they're still fixing (or breaking then needing to re-fix, even worse...) driver problems on last-gen hardware.

hafiqb said:
You see the problem is that if people are willing to accept such workarounds nothing will change and the actual root cause which seems to lie within the ATI driver team capability will never be resolved.
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Continually reverting back to month's-old drivers is a workaround?

hafiqb said:
So what is AMD going to do about it? On one hand they seem to have quite a capable hardware team, but the software on the other...

Frankly this is not acceptable, so stop being a good consumer accepting this crap and voice out, maybe someone will listen.
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Voice out? Hello? helllloo...... hellllooo.....

Anybody here??? annnyyybooodddyyy herrrreeee?

echo? echhhhoo eeeccchhooo...

Look, put simply: AMD's still raking in the buck. There's no incentive to give a f***.

Don't buy AMD. Period.

It won't happen, of course. But if their 6xxx series had serious issues with being sold on the market, they'd have to do something.

I already got rid of my 5870 months ago. My GTX 480 SLI config has been butter-smooth sailing.

There's no incentive to go 6xxx. They also continue to lack 3-D. While they're calling it a "gimmick" and thus ignoring it, the sad truth is that their driver team just can't cut it, so they're not even making an attempt to try and implement it.

If AMD cost significantly less, I could argue gambling with their product. But they cost more.

Don't buy AMD.
 
Tolyngee I completely agree with you.

My experiences and the amount of money I have put down on AMD hardware meant that I now run only on Intel + Nvidia rigs and that is not likely to change.

AMD only care about the latest gen of GPU's. I experienced this with my 4870X2 when the 5870 series came out. Crossfire profiles broken, stutter that was not present before being introduced. This will repeat with the coming launch of the 6870.

The GSOD issue was also incredibly annoying as well and thanks to Kyle and [H] for getting AMD in gear.

In fact AMD only seem to address a driver issue if Kyle or Brent make a huge song and dance about it. So they rely on [H] and other enthusiast sites to do their QA testing?

Really AMD need to invest less into pointless stuff like Fusion and more in QA for their drivers imho. If they sorted their driver support I really think Nvidia would be in huge trouble.

Like you tolyngee my GTX 470 SLI has been problem free and butter smooth with the latest games like Starcraft 2 and Mafia 2 supported from day one.
 
The last two posts have made my point clear. People will shy away from AMD or even go back to Nvidia if driver team does not get their act together.

This is not anymore about supporting the underdog. AMD hardware is good and more important the development cycle well in control. It is a shame that the management let's the driver team kind of screw things up.

As was mentioned some posts ago rightly hardware is run by software. There will always be an Achilles heel if AMD does not take some drastic measures and patch things up.
 
Grass is always greener.

Lets face it, both sides have issues, and Crossfire/SLI has never been particuarly well supported in either camp because it's so niche in the overall market. Yes more support would be nice and some games lack good scaling which is always a continual improvement.

But the fact is that Nvidia drivers don't always have great scaling in games with SLI and they have their own fair share of problems, nothing you have said about AMD/ATI is really very specific to them, both camps suffer problems.

You go from GSOD in one camp to driver has stopped responding in another camp, you go from poor scaling in one game in one camp to another game in another camp.

Honestly I approve of the idea of putting more effort into improving drivers, but trying to isolate this general issue with ATI alone is unreasonable.
 
I haven't been happy with single-card support either.
The one thing making me keep my 5870 is the lossless audio codec support.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
But the fact is that Nvidia drivers don't always have great scaling in games with SLI and they have their own fair share of problems, nothing you have said about AMD/ATI is really very specific to them, both camps suffer problems.
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I've owned both camps ever since they existed. For the life of me I can't remember ever reverting back to drivers from several months back to get performance that's lacked for the last few driver releases.

We're not just talking about poor driver peformance; for some, it's crippling.

And we're talking about almost year-old tech on games that came out a full half-year ago.

PrincessFrosty said:
You go from GSOD in one camp to driver has stopped responding in another camp, you go from poor scaling in one game in one camp to another game in another camp.

Honestly I approve of the idea of putting more effort into improving drivers, but trying to isolate this general issue with ATI alone is unreasonable.
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I finally dropped my 5870 after six months of GSOD issues. First two months was major problems with games, last four months was problems with the desktop. AMD also kept breaking things in new drivers, fixing it in hotfixes, just to bring back the broken part in the next official driver, thus releasing another hotfix, or just ignoring it.

I can't remember this happening with Nvidia. Not that long of a time.

It's not like my 4870x2 was without issue.

But for someone with a dual-GPU card, you really should care about them working on scaling. Otherwise, why waste money on dual-GPU?


http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf-gtx460-sli_6.html#sect1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gf-gtx460-sli_8.html

Newer games like JC2 giving a 20% increase in performance from a 5870 to a 5970.

But one thing you see in the above is that a cheap pair of GTX 460s almost always beat a 5970. How's the 5970 a good value?

I certainly would hope you approve of them putting effort into improving their drivers. Otherwise, I'd suggest you're obviously in denial. (May still be, but not so clear-cut...)

But, I bought a 5870 at release with the thought of doing a two-way or three-way crossfire with them, and I bought a big enough case (supports 17" video cards) with the thought of maybe doing a dual-5970 config.

A half-year's worth of GSOD issues and AMD not working on crossfire issues (never mind scaling issues, just crippling issues) absolutely killed my desire to buy any more AMD product.

So, I went from one 5870, to hopes of two/three 5870s and dual-5970s if need be, so not owning a single AMD product.

Pretty damn sad if I may say so myself.

No, I don't remember Nvidia ever dropping the ball like this. And again, I admit, I don't remember AMD being this bad before either, though my 4870x2 had problems as well.

But, given that the 6xxx series is right around the corner, I wouldn't expect much improvement to come, if recent history stays its course.

Right now, it's the definition of insanity to think that buying more AMD product is the fix to their current product.
 
I myself come from Nvidia after having a 8800GTX, followed by a GTX280. Then I waited for Nvidia's next gen and as the info's trickled out of high heat/power consumption, I decided to try ATI since the reviews of their hardware were very favourable.

So I am able to compare the drivers and Nvidia has a clear lead here. Should imagine what if Nvidias driver team meet up with AMD hardware...call it the dream team.
 
I couldn't agree more with you.
I have CF and EyeFinity using 5870 E6 models.

Crossfire is frustrating at best. It is really good when it works, the recent 10.8a CAP release shows that ATI is really asleep at the switch or just doesn't give a flying shit. One day they release a driver set and CAP, and then less than 24 hours later......"oh wait, we have something better....watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat...."

I'm so tired of this crap.....I've tried to be patient....starting with the 3870, and every series we get more and more shit that just isn't quite right.

I've gone back to my GTX 260 SLi and find even Surround performance to be acceptable.

Sure the 5870 is really good when it works, but it just isn't reliable enough for the money I've invested.....and problems just seem to go on without resolution....bah.:mad:
 
TheBlueChanell said:
with the exception of the OpenGL issues present from 10.4-10.7 and I personally didn't mind waiting on the fix.
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That is pretty bad if they have release after release of broken OGL. I play mainly older games, and a few use OGL. Does this mean they won't work with an ATI card and haven't for several releases. If so that his downright pathetic.
 
I just had to add my $0.02... Over the years that I have built my own computers, I have mainly used nVidia, I have only used 2 ATi cards, the original Radeon/7200 and the 5850 that I own now. I still have a 9600GT that I can't really use, because I can't use any driver newer than 190.38, EVERY newer driver causes instant crash during install or as soon as I boot into Windows. I can "use" the 197 and higher drivers, but the stopped fan issue would cause my card to overheat and crash.

The funny thing is that there was some kind of compatibility issue between my card, the 190-series drivers and any AMD 7-series chipset that has only one pci-e slot, it even happens on my 790X-UD4P when I have it in the primary x16 slot. So, I decided that I wanted to upgrade, and I saw on Newegg this 5850 for $260, bought it, and still do not regret it. The OpenGL issue was resolved by myself.

In closing, both AMD/ATi and nVidia have had their hits and misses on both hardware and software, so neither is better than the other. I really wish this whole pissing match would end.
 
Nvidia must really be worried if they are sending their armies of forum marketers and trolls to post preemptive damage control.
 
Tolyngee said:
What is the incentive to put more money into a company that has a track record for their last two generations of hardware to not resolve issues?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Do not buy AMD.
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I bought a 4850 a month after it launched, and bought a 5870 a week after it launched. Never had a *single* issue with either of them across dozens of drivers.

Why should I avoid AMD? I loved my 4850 (damn good card), and I love my 5870 (damn good card + eyefinity). When the 6xxx series launches, I'll probably be all over it. Not because I'm an AMD fanboi, but because Nvidia just doesn't have anything worth my money. I loved my 7900GT as well - which is also the only video card I've had die on me (9700Pro still works! w00t!), which ended up being replaced with a 7950GT.

In my experience, I've had 1 hardware issue and numerous BSODs (during the early Vista days - god that was a nightmare) with *NVIDIA*, and 0 hardware or software issues with ATI.

Don't buy Nvidia - they BSOD like crazy :p

Back at the beginning of the year when AMD was trying to figure out the horrendous GSOD issue, things would routinely be broken with the next driver. Idle clock speeds being wrong for dual-monitor configs, dual-monitor configs not sleeping properly.
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Been running dual monitors on my 5870 since day 1, followed by triple monitors. Sleep never broke - not once. No idle clock problems either.

My card was never fried either - oh wait, that was an Nvidia problem :p

If AMD cost significantly less, I could argue gambling with their product. But they cost more.
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No they don't... How on earth do you get AMD costing more? I guess if you only compare CF to SLI then yes, Nvidia has a clear lead. Compare single cards, though, and it's the complete opposite.
 
You guys think driver support is bad? Try getting even 2D multi-monitor (> 2 monitors) working under linux with either red OR green team. It's a huge cluster-f*.

I'm still using Intel integrated on one box and a 7800GT I already had on a new build, because newer hardware DOESN'T fix my 2d problems.

There are hacks & workarounds to deal with it but they are 1) not optimal, 2) don't enable all features, 3) slow down the system significantly (I'm specifcally looking at Xinerama + Twinview...)

btw: The system I'm using 4 monitors on that slows down significantly is a dual xeon 55xx (nehalem based) with 12G ram...so it's not my system.
 
i sold my second 5870 until ati fixes crossfire (and maybe i can get a cheaper 5870 down the line than what i paid for i now). i'm enjoying eyefinity without having to buy 2 cards. also, tolyngee, i remember you acted when i asked you a warranty question. you are one to expect support from ati :p ;) :D.

i might even sell my desktop 5870, unsure yet, cause i can game on my laptop's 5870, and not have to worry about the gpu dying like it did twice on 2 nvidia laptops i've owned. everex xt5000t rest in piece.

this is all bleeding edge stuff and while driver support should be better for both camps, i doubt we would get video cards as fast as we do if they tested them properly. oh well. i'll hope for better but until then oh well.


also, i upgraded the laptop drivers to 10.8 with no issues. i hope i don't find out it has problems, but i think it would have been a problem if the install did not work but everything seems good after reboot (and even after installing).


bottom line, i'll take working hardware that doesn't have a great chance of dying with so so driver support vs hardware that has a great chance of dying and better driver support.
lets not forget, ahem *cough* the 'better' driver support helped the hardware die faster recently as well. heh
 
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Im a fan of neither one. I am fan of the one I see working the most. Im in the middle of building a surround/eyefinity rig. As it stands right now I will be heading to Nvidia, and this is why. My brother in law, who bought an alienware with a 5970 was having constant crashes playing Borderlands on his 5970. I was at his house and helped him troubleshoot the problem. He was running the latest release of 10.6 so I did some testing. (at the time) If I disabled the crossfire, no crashes but the game would run like crap because it was a single 5850 at 1080p. So finally I downgraded from 10.6 to 10.4 and everything was solid and he was a very happy gamer. He could play without worrying about crashes. Broderlands in case you dont know, you cant save at any point only in certain spots of the game. He would do things over and over. So now that his computer is stable playing Borderlands, 10.7 came out. I was excited when I read in the notes, "increased fps in Borderlands". I got excited and told myself they must have fix the random crashes, I keep reading the release notes, and at the very end it states, Borderlands can crash at random in crossfire. I was WTF is the point of the increase fps. So if your going to run only 1 card, Amd is fine, if you want two, from my experience I would not go anything but Nvidia.
 
Agreed. I just installed Borderlands again after changing my SSD and encountered the same issue using 10.7. Now I switched back to 10.4 a few month old driver...what a screw up, really someone needs to go/replaced to bring fresh wind into this driver team fiasco.

As of now I am thinking very hard to skip over next gen ATI and wait for the green goblin instead. It is of no use to have the best hardware if the driver support is weak.
 
matrix563 said:
i sold my second 5870 until ati fixes crossfire (and maybe i can get a cheaper 5870 down the line than what i paid for i now). i'm enjoying eyefinity without having to buy 2 cards. also, tolyngee, i remember you acted when i asked you a warranty question. you are one to expect support from ati :p ;) :D.

i might even sell my desktop 5870, unsure yet, cause i can game on my laptop's 5870, and not have to worry about the gpu dying like it did twice on 2 nvidia laptops i've owned. everex xt5000t rest in piece.

this is all bleeding edge stuff and while driver support should be better for both camps, i doubt we would get video cards as fast as we do if they tested them properly. oh well. i'll hope for better but until then oh well.


also, i upgraded the laptop drivers to 10.8 with no issues. i hope i don't find out it has problems, but i think it would have been a problem if the install did not work but everything seems good after reboot (and even after installing).


bottom line, i'll take working hardware that doesn't have a great chance of dying with so so driver support vs hardware that has a great chance of dying and better driver support.
lets not forget, ahem *cough* the 'better' driver support helped the hardware die faster recently as well. heh
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Speaking of dying, at least AMD didn't have a bumpgate fiasco and then deny it and try to cover it up, only to have to grudgingly pay out $500 million over several years to those companies who sued them over it. The little guys--the consumers? Shit outta luck. Better luck next bump.

Nobody's perfect. And don't confuse xfire with single-GPU drivers.

Note however that NV will almost certainly have better multi-GPU support from now if they didn't before (and I suspect they had better support BEFORE, too). Why? Because Surround REQUIRES SLI, and EyeFinity does not. So there is even more pressure to make SLI perform well.
 
uh no its not more pressure. its to make you buy a second card so they have to make sure it works. and i didn't confuse the drivers for single vs multi. reread my post. you will see i said i sold my second 5870 :p.
 
hafiqb said:
Agreed. I just installed Borderlands again after changing my SSD and encountered the same issue using 10.7. Now I switched back to 10.4 a few month old driver...what a screw up, really someone needs to go/replaced to bring fresh wind into this driver team fiasco.

As of now I am thinking very hard to skip over next gen ATI and wait for the green goblin instead. It is of no use to have the best hardware if the driver support is weak.
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+1. I didn't buy into the driver issue at first until I experienced problems first hand. It didn't help that I had to RMA two ATI cards, one for GSOD issues (it was perfect outside of that) and one that went flicker-crazy in multi-screen mode plus the fan was rattling. I think ATI is a fine recommendation for a single card solution. But for multi-gpu their drivers absolutely blow speaking just from personal experience.
 
The troll is the one who does not actually bothers to understand the argument brought forward and states meaningless platitudes.

Answer to the points brought forward (I say it again for you: Poor Crossfire performance after many month + driver regression). You got something meaningful to say then shoot otherwise just read.
 
hafiqb said:
The troll is the one who does not actually bothers to understand the argument brought forward and states meaningless platitudes.

Answer to the points brought forward (I say it again for you: Poor Crossfire performance after many month + driver regression). You got something meaningful to say then shoot otherwise just read.
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Have you PM'd or in any way contacted Terry Makedon (aka CATALYST_MAKER) or are you just whining to the void? Because if you don't contact him he's probably not going to see your complaints. And if you keep not-contacting him then I think it IS fair to say you're just trolling by making this thread and telling people not to buy AMD. I think if you really cared about driver matters you would take this great opportunity to PM Terry while he's active on the board.

Also, don't act like NV has been some choir boy about drivers, it burned out some cards recently and had more than its market share's worth of Vista driver crashes. Have you seen the threads popping up all over the net about GTX 460 problems?

And if you want to talk hardware, NV had bumpgate which killed a ton of cards and led to ~$500 million in litigation/settlement costs to date. Does this excuse AMD's shoddy CF? No. But buyer beware, don't buy AMD with CF in mind. Their single-GPU drivers are fine.

The grass is always greener. I've used both sides before, and I can't say I saw much of a difference in single-GPU drivers.
 
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These threads always bring out the trolls...

I bought my 5870 late last year, and the only real issue I have had, has been the GSOD. (I also had that bit with dual monitors where it was clocking down to 157mhz when I OC, causing flickering, which they fixed by locking the idle clocks at 400)

Each subsequent Catalyst release reduced the number of GSOD's I got (when the card was new, I had one every few days, after a few months, it was maybe once a week)

Finally when I got an updated BIOS for my 5870, all my GSOD's went away.

I have been upgrading to each new Catalyst release as they come out, and have not had any issues. Each one seems to better and better

ATI has had their share of driver bugs I don't deny, but I do think that the "ati's drivers suck" opinion is a little skewed

(remember that the number of people with 5970's or 4870x2's are a tiny portion of their user base, crossfire users too)

My biggest complaint about ATI's drivers in general, is Catalyst control Center, that really needs to be updated and I want my per game profiles!!! I miss that from my nvidia card (atitraytools is good yes)

Now that Nvidia has the 460 out there, and is finally competitive again (great card!), I really do hope that the competition results it greater strides in terms of support and drivers from both companies

EDIT: I've been running Windows 7 64bit since release, new OS does equal new pains. (Nvidia's late launch also helped their driver teams get a handle on the new OS I'm sure)
 
blastingcap said:
Have you PM'd or in any way contacted Terry Makedon (aka CATALYST_MAKER) or are you just whining to the void? Because if you don't contact him he's probably not going to see your complaints. And if you keep not-contacting him then I think it IS fair to say you're just trolling by making this thread and telling people not to buy AMD.

Thanks for the advice. Its actually not bad just whether it is practical. If everyone who has issues with ATI drivers PM to him I guess he needs a bigger mailbox.

Instead I opened this thread to point out that the driver team should improve their work w/o the need of other people to tell them what is wrong this time with their drivers. If you want to declare this as whining that's your opinion to which you are entitled.

BTW for all who feedback no issues with their cards, take note that I specifically mentioned crossfire performance issues.
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Add a second 5870 to your setup and let me know how you feel. It's been stated many times single cards are fine. Issues arrise in crossfire and let's not add crossfire and eyefinity together. That will become another thread.

SoulWind said:
These threads always bring out the trolls...

I bought my 5870 late last year, and the only real issue I have had, has been the GSOD. (I also had that bit with dual monitors where it was clocking down to 157mhz when I OC, causing flickering, which they fixed by locking the idle clocks at 400)

Each subsequent Catalyst release reduced the number of GSOD's I got (when the card was new, I had one every few days, after a few months, it was maybe once a week)

Finally when I got an updated BIOS for my 5870, all my GSOD's went away.

I have been upgrading to each new Catalyst release as they come out, and have not had any issues. Each one seems to better and better

ATI has had their share of driver bugs I don't deny, but I do think that the "ati's drivers suck" opinion is a little skewed

(remember that the number of people with 5970's or 4870x2's are a tiny portion of their user base, crossfire users too)

My biggest complaint about ATI's drivers in general, is Catalyst control Center, that really needs to be updated and I want my per game profiles!!! I miss that from my nvidia card (atitraytools is good yes)

Now that Nvidia has the 460 out there, and is finally competitive again (great card!), I really do hope that the competition results it greater strides in terms of support and drivers from both companies

EDIT: I've been running Windows 7 64bit since release, new OS does equal new pains. (Nvidia's late launch also helped their driver teams get a handle on the new OS I'm sure)
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I've been a NVIDIA graphics card user since the RIVA TNT in the late 1990s, apart from a very brief stint with the ATI HD 3850 AGP, and only switched to ATI when it became clear that the NVIDIA GTX 480 wasn't going to be all that wonderful. I took the decision to switch to the HD 5870 from a GTX 280 knowing that ATI's drivers were going to be somewhat lacking compared with NVIDIA's.

Initially I was concerned about losing Physx but I've now come to realise it was overrated considering the hardware you need to run games smoothly and how few games even use it properly so I don't miss it at all. For a month I ran games on one card and everything was fine albeit the lack of per-game profiles in the CCC was hard to swallow, especially when you consider it was over FIVE years ago that NVIDIA introduced them! I think the CCC's profile are beyond awful and if it wasn't for third-party tools like RadeonPro and ATI Tray Tools I'd be a lot unhappier than I am now. It seems to me that ATI do what is expected of them but no more whereas NVIDIA go that bit further to offer extras, e.g. AA support for BioShock/BioShock 2 in DX10, Ambient Occlusion for older games via the aforementioned profiles, per-game profiles, etc., etc.

I think my mistake though was buying a second HD 5870. Now I've never used SLI or CrossFireX before as I was always a strong believer in single GPU cards, knowing full well that multi-GPU setups have various issues and are heavily reliant on driver updates. However, the HD 5870 was less powerful than the GTX 480 I had my eyes on so I decided to buy a second card in the hope that multi-GPU support was better than I thought it would be. The announcement by ATI of separate Application Profiles made it sound like they were copying NVIDIA so that helped convince me it would be worthwhile.

Unfortunately, it wasn't.

When CrossFireX is supported then games run great even if the scaling is somewhat disappointing compared with NVIDIA. What is annoying is that ATI don't appear to be very committed to CrossFireX, sometimes taking months to support new games and more often than not disabling CrossFireX if issues are reported for it. I kid you not but four out of the last five games I've bought do not support CrossFireX properly. Blur has CrossFireX disabled now as it slows down if you drive through water with two GPUs, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands slows down if the prince dies, Kane & Lynch 2 ran slower on two cards than one with 10.7 and appears to only use one card with 10.8, etc., etc.

I'm quite frankly disappointed in CrossFireX because I either have to disable the second GPU to get acceptable performance (e.g. Prince of Persia: TFS) or ATI go and do it for me (e.g. Blur)! Either way, it means the second card I bought spends much of the time going to waste. All this could be solved just by ATI working more closely with developers to ensure games are supported before or shortly after they're released. It is not acceptable to me to have to wait three or four months to play a game properly on my system. I thought the whole concept of separate Catalyst Application Profiles was to allow for speedy, regular updates for new games but so far ATI release them monthly along with the drivers, which is a total waste IMO.
 
hafiqb said:
Agreed. I just installed Borderlands again after changing my SSD and encountered the same issue using 10.7. Now I switched back to 10.4 a few month old driver...what a screw up, really someone needs to go/replaced to bring fresh wind into this driver team fiasco.
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-1. I played Borderlands 6 hours yesterday without a single crash or any other problems. Rock-solid with 10.8 and 10.8a profile.

BTW, I'm in TRI-Crossfire (5970+5870) at 1000/1200, and everything is rock-stable for me. Scaling is really good, and all the games I have installed (over 50) are all working fine with 10.8.
 
I just had to roll back to 10.5 to fix the amazingly crappy issues I was having with my 5970.

  • SC2 boot up screen would go into acid mode where the geometry of the ship flying by would stretch to infinity and little dot textures would blink. Then my box hard froze. It was pretty funny, I lol'd and then QQ'd.
  • Basically my box would crash in 1 second after loading any game, I'd reboot and it'd be fine. This is also true of sleep mode. So I'd never sleep. This is how I've been running for months.
  • 10.8 came out which promised AA support of SC2. It did but the performance is horrible because SC2 doesn't do CF or whatever.
  • I started having worse issues with 10.8. Box wouldn't boot. My one-crash fix wouldn't work, ie: games would lock in one second every time.
  • This is all after having the 2d idle clock bugs, like I can't watch youtube without a GSOD.

With the 10.8 thing I even put my 4870x2 back in and that locked too. That's when I realized it was a driver thing. I rolled back to 10.5 and so far (one day) no problems. I had never tried 10.5 until now (I checked my downloads folder) but some threads on this forum had suggested it as the "last best version" for the 5970.

Now I'm hoping to get a new card so I don't feel like I'm walking on eggshells. Eggshells meaning: my 2d clocks have to be just right so I don't GSOD and I have to stay on 10.5 apparently. But what is the next gen going to look like? If my 4870x2 has issues with the driver, how is a new gen going to fix anything? I think that the 6970 isn't going to fix jack and I'll be switching teams again. I'd like to get a 6970 because it'll be out sooner but I doubt it'll fix my driver problems.
 
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