AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta 9.4

RagingRaven said:
Although I get what your trying to point out, why is it that it is normal in the computer industry that you have to accept going through a 'test' phase as an early adopter?

Think about any other industry and it would seem silly, for instance take the car industry, would it be 'normal' if you bought a new car and you have to wait weeks if not months before you can use the brakes or steering wheel correctly ?

So why is it that when we buy a product costing over $400, we can't expect it to work correctly? Wouldn't it be more reasonable that they had a non-beta driver available at launch?

Of course problems can occur, but releasing a card that doesn't even have a release driver, seems to me like they were rushing the card.
For me there is no excuse of releasing a card with beta drivers.

Beta=test != ready for release.
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Your analogy of cars would be spot on if you didn't purchase your cars whole but instead picked and choose the parts from different vendors. How many problems do you think you would have if you steering wheel came from Ford, brakes from Toyota, and ect.? When purchasing items as a whole unit the manufacturer can have most of the bugs worked out of it.

Since that is not the case you are stuck in the position that we are in now. With so many motherboard manufacturers and models each with their own bios, that can cause compatibility problems. You get to also throw in all the different versions of operating systems. I am also pretty sure there are some programs and drivers out there that could be causing problems too. The proof to all that would be the fact that not everyone is having problems with drivers. For some the drivers and improving their overall experience.
 
bigbeard86 said:
that's funny. I noticed a slight performance increase in BF4. no issues with the drivers so far. I am using a pair of 290's.
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I haven't had any problems either so far with them, I install all beta drivers without uninstalling the old ones first. Dunno if uninstalling and installing new would change anything like that.
 
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dcds1 said:
Your analogy of cars would be spot on if you didn't purchase your cars whole but instead picked and choose the parts from different vendors. How many problems do you think you would have if you steering wheel came from Ford, brakes from Toyota, and ect.? When purchasing items as a whole unit the manufacturer can have most of the bugs worked out of it.

Since that is not the case you are stuck in the position that we are in now. With so many motherboard manufacturers and models each with their own bios, that can cause compatibility problems. You get to also throw in all the different versions of operating systems. I am also pretty sure there are some programs and drivers out there that could be causing problems too. The proof to all that would be the fact that not everyone is having problems with drivers. For some the drivers and improving their overall experience.
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I understand that it's not the same as cars ofcourse, but it was just to point out that we seem to tolerate these issues, where I think we shouldn't.
There's probably no other industry where there are the amount of different configurations they would have to test as in the computer industry and this makes it impossible to test for all combinations.
That there's going to be problems with some configurations is then also not really all that strange, but what I do think is strange is that in this specific case it looks to me like they rushed the card.
This problem does not appear to be specific to any configuration, but looks to me more like a general card-driver issue.
From all the information posted in the different forums and topics about this issue it appears to me like they should have done some more testing with their drivers.
They (AMD) even appear to confirm this by labeling their own drivers as Beta-Drivers.

This is the thing I have issues with and it appears to be happening more frequently as well which makes me think companies like AMD are taking risks by bringing out cards too soon hoping that everything is going to be fine.

It might not be true, but this is just what it looks like to me.
 
Car analogies aside, I installed the 9.4 beta drivers this weekend for my 290 and so far so good. No more random Black screens, no more sudden Windows BSOD's, both of which I was plagued with when using the 9.2 beta drivers.
 
RagingRaven said:
I understand that it's not the same as cars ofcourse, but it was just to point out that we seem to tolerate these issues, where I think we shouldn't.
There's probably no other industry where there are the amount of different configurations they would have to test as in the computer industry and this makes it impossible to test for all combinations.
That there's going to be problems with some configurations is then also not really all that strange, but what I do think is strange is that in this specific case it looks to me like they rushed the card.
This problem does not appear to be specific to any configuration, but looks to me more like a general card-driver issue.
From all the information posted in the different forums and topics about this issue it appears to me like they should have done some more testing with their drivers.
They (AMD) even appear to confirm this by labeling their own drivers as Beta-Drivers.

This is the thing I have issues with and it appears to be happening more frequently as well which makes me think companies like AMD are taking risks by bringing out cards too soon hoping that everything is going to be fine.

It might not be true, but this is just what it looks like to me.
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The problem is, you are making your observations based on a TINY fraction of the overall user base.

People who have no issues don't report problems.

Of the people who DO have problems, again, only a small portion ahve the forbearance to report it here.

So what you get is is a infinitesimally small percentage of tech knowledgeable people seeming like its a large population.

Thats why they call it the Vocal Minority.

If say, 50 people here have issues, what percentage of the installed base do you really think that is?
 
The Mac said:
The problem is, you are making your observations based on a TINY fraction of the overall user base.

People who have no issues don't report problems.

Of the people who DO have problems, again, only a small portion ahve the forbearance to report it here.

So what you get is is a infinitesimally small percentage of tech knowledgeable people seeming like its a large population.

Thats why they call it the Vocal Minority.

If say, 50 people here have issues, what percentage of the installed base do you really think that is?
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That is indeed a good point, but on the other hand I don't think there really are that many people out there that buy a 290 card that aren't tech knowledgeable ;)
Guess we'll just have to wait a bit longer for another driver update, which hopefully fixes things for everybody instead of just a few.
 
Matija said:
Ugh... I had kernel crashes with 13.9 (minidump written in LiveKernelReports\WATCHDOG, instead of its usual place) and had to revert to the "7790 performance driver". That one sometimes gives me a BSOD or a non-minidump crash on shutdown.

I was hoping for 13.11 to finally be stable, but your post makes me sad :(
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what is the performance driver?

don't be too disheartened, this is one funky old motherboard that doesn't even have win7 drivers as far as i know.
 
Been (Trying) to do some experimenting with the latest batch of drivers from 13.11 v7 to 9.4

The fact that AMD doesn't even make all their drivers available is pissing me off -- on their site "click here for previous versions" and it just takes me to a page where all I can get is 13.9 or 12.X drivers

Seriously? With their reputation of putting out drivers that fix one thing and break two others, you would figure they would make ALL their versions available for people who have issues. The latest 13.11 v9.4 cause massive audio glitching/loading/texture issues for me, currently on 13.11 v9.2

It sends the message to me that "we are only going to make this latest BETA driver available, and if it happens to screw up your system more, then too damn bad" I really hate having to pick and choose what features I get to play with. "Do i want the massive audio corruption with performance boost" or do I want the working audio version with texture pop and vsync bug?
 
R3MF said:
what is the performance driver?
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The 7790 had a "performance driver" half a year ago, before there was official support in 13.9 for the card.

This version isn't available on AMD's site any more during the regular download process. It was there a month ago, and you could specifically select the 7790 instead of "HD 7xxx series".

But still, after eight days of working correctly, I had two freezes last night. It makes no god damn sense, and I'm just sick and tired of this. It's been 25 days since I put this computer together and I still can't consider it stable. I need to install software, repartition my old hard drives, move data around... But how am I supposed to do that when atikmpag.sys will randomly crash the kernel? Should I run FurMark in the background while I'm doing that, because the card works fine under load and only crashes on 2D when mostly idle?
 
I went back to the latest WHQL's and they work fine for me at least, no bf4 crashing.
 
Matija said:
The 7790 had a "performance driver" half a year ago, before there was official support in 13.9 for the card.

This version isn't available on AMD's site any more during the regular download process. It was there a month ago, and you could specifically select the 7790 instead of "HD 7xxx series".

But still, after eight days of working correctly, I had two freezes last night. It makes no god damn sense, and I'm just sick and tired of this. It's been 25 days since I put this computer together and I still can't consider it stable. I need to install software, repartition my old hard drives, move data around... But how am I supposed to do that when atikmpag.sys will randomly crash the kernel? Should I run FurMark in the background while I'm doing that, because the card works fine under load and only crashes on 2D when mostly idle?
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sounds very similar. :(

is the performance driver the same one that ships in the box on the driver disk?
 
No idea. Never checked the disc :)

What I do know is that I'm getting a bugcheck 0x141 VIDEO_ENGINE_TIMEOUT_DETECTED, which has a whopping 10 hits on Google. It's not even listed as a valid kernel bugcheck on Microsoft's site. As you can imagine, trying to fix an error that only a couple more people on the internet have, isn't an easy task.
 
Running my first AMD card (R9 290) since ATI days and the drivers are broken.
Installed beta 9.2 and had multiple hangs and black screens during installation.
Once installed, some options in CCC resulted in a black screen and immediate hang the moment I clicked them.

Upgraded to beta 9.4 and had even worse problems installing, had to reboot multiple times mainly due to Hydravision not allowing for my Firewalls file defense requesting permission, it made the machine stop accepting any input requiring a reboot.
The only way to make any progress was to open multiple task managers (couldnt use them but could CTRL ALT DEL and open more than one), then tell the machine to shut down from CTRL ALT DEL screen.
THEN, very quickly cancel the shutdown and get it to continue installing, the multiple task managers I opened gave more more time to catch it.

Got the driver into some form of working shape, havent dared click the things that made it black screen hang.

Now I cant change the power target in Overdrive so cant test my newly fitted Xtreme III cooler, grrrr.
Many people have this issue with the 9.4 beta driver.

I really hoped for a better experience with your latest card AMD.
I stopped using you nearly 3 years ago due to serious driver issues. It got to the point that I didnt dare change driver and only used a modded driver made by an enterprising user as that gave me the best experience.
I didnt ever have issues like this installing and using NVidia drivers.

Please dont make me regret my latest purchase, sort your drivers out !!
 
Things have improved in one way but seem worse in another, I'm marginally happier.
13.11 beta 9.2 re-installed without a hitch, took me by surprise. My firewall/HIPS is used to it now.
But changing Overdrive settings didnt stick. Tried resetting to defaults, didnt help.
Uninstalled the driver using the standard uninstaller, loaded 9.2 beta back in and voila working Overdrive...

Well it looks like it works, but GPU use still jumps all over the place with +50% power limit, at standard clocks, for anything except Unigine Heaven.
Running Crysis Warhead with +50% power limit, clocks reduced -20%, I got slightly faster framerate than with stock clocks!
At -50% clock speed, the GPU is flat out most of the time but there are still a few dips.

How do you get this card not to throttle without running at 30% of default clocks? :p

It can run unthrottled because Unigine Heaven 4.0 flatlines the GPU clockspeed and usage at maximum, no jumping around.



I took some Afterburner screen caps of Crysis Warhead benching
-50% and -20% clocks, the gpu hardly throttles at -50% clocks
h5y3i.jpg


Default clocks, slightly slower average performance than -20% clocks by 1fps
gwgbr.jpg
 
I tried these and not happy with the inability to overclock via CCC Overdrive. Went Back to 13.11 WHQL's and all is great on dual 290's.
 
do we have 13.11 WHQL's yet?

this being the middle of the beta process n'all...?
 
The only issue I have with these drivers is no crossfire profile for assassins creed iv. The should have focused on that instead of need for speed.
 
Anyone have trouble with these drivers botching their windows install?

When I first upgraded to an SSD I went with W8.1 since I actually like it on my laptop. I tried installing 13.11 9.2 (I think), but both attempts made it no boot and i had to reformat. I just let W8 install whatever the default drivers are and they're fine but I'd like to get the performance boosts from these betas, also would like CCC.
 
Is this missing Overdrive issue specific to R9 users? I still have Overdrive in my CCC after installing this beta on HD6970s...
 
The Overdrive options are there (in my case) but making a change to the power level doesnt stick.
If I click apply, the apply button stays green instead of going white and the power level goes back to zero when the screen is refreshed (like when exiting a game) as it never was changed.
Changing the overclocks etc works properly though.

Some others have the Overdrive section completely disappear.
 
Ah, interesting, I never really play with the power level setting, only the fan speeds, and that bit at least 'works'. Inverted commas because even today you still can't adjust the fan speed on the second card if CrossfireX is not enabled. (In case anybody wonders why - LTC mining was running, but fortunately you can adjust the fan speed using the application, so it turned out not to be necessary).
 
Just wanted to chime in with some interesting things I have been seeing since going 2-way xfire 290s this week. I am running 13.11 9.4beta:

1. To get these guys installed I HAD to do the following:
a.Remove my existing 290s drivers w/ only one 290 installed.
b.Boot into safe mode and follow the driver uninstall utility procedure (still just one 290).
c.Install the 13.11 9.4beta with both cards now enabled.
d.Then manually enable xfire before the first reboot after the driver install.
2. Fullscreen on many games gets choppy. However "borderless windowed" is the ULTRA setting eyegasm I had been hoping for, so no biggy.
3.Overdrive is gone for me too.

On a side note. Anyone been OCing these guys with MSI Afterburner at all?
 
Yeah Afterburner works, it controls the fan ok as well.
 
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