Longtime PC enthusiast here just looking to vent on the HD 7970. I've always been an early adopter of the new iterations of PC hardware. I've never been loyal to a side (Intel vs AMD, Nvidia vs ATI); I always purchased whichever product was the best performing, usually on day 1. So when AMD recently released the 7970, I read the reviews at midnight and ordered a pair of 7970's since they nicely outperformed (~20%) the setup I had at the time, a pair of GTX 580's in SLI. I unboxed the cards, backed up up my machine, secure erased the SSD's and was primed for a fun day of re-installs, benchmarking, overclocking, and gaming. Over the last ~4 months, I've had nothing but frustration and poor performance. Some examples:
Instead of enjoying my games, I've spent the last 4 months tirelessly tweaking and tinkering. This has really soured the experience with AMD for me and, from what I've read, others as well.
Last Thursday I ordered a pair of GTX 680's and performed my normal fresh install on Friday night. There were WHQL drivers for all operating systems available on day 1. Over the weekend, I have had nothing but a fast, smooth, and trouble free experience in each game that I've played. No config file tweaking, no stutters, no graphical glitches... just great performance, and more importantly, an enjoyable gaming experience!
TLDR: The HD 7970 launch was filled with numerous issues and the last 4 months of driver releases have only partially remedied the situation. AMD could stand to learn a lot from Nvidia's GTX 680 launch as SLI performance out of the box is excellent and trouble free.
- Upon initial install of the drivers downloaded from AMD, which were only available as a beta for Win 7 64bit on release day, the PC BSOD'ed during the installation. I ended up having to use the drivers provided on disk and run a custom install deselecting the sound drivers to get them to simply install correctly. Subsequent driver releases were met with additional bugs including uninstall / install issues and CAP install issues.
- The Catalyst control center had numerous bugs throughout the driver releases such as Crossfire not staying enabled, CAP profiles not working correctly, power control settings not applying, and manual fan speeds not applying to both cards. Sometimes there was a work-a-round for an issue while other times I had to wait a month or more for a new driver release and hope it fixed the issue.
- BF3 stuttered, had flashing textures, and had a large amount of screen tearing. Over the months I updated drivers, added tweaks to the user.cfg, and edited AMD control center profiles. Constant tweaking upon every driver release to try and get a trouble free playable experience.
- Almost every other game that I played had some sort of issue. Rage had terrible tearing and texture pop in issues. Medal of Honor required ini file tweaks to stop a memory leak in the catalyst drivers that still isnt fixed today. Crysis 2 required multiple custom lines in the config file to stop the stuttering and bring performance to an acceptable level in DX11 mode. BF:BC2 had horrible black flashing screen issue that required console commands to resolve.
- Games and benchmarks, while putting up a good FPS, would not translate into a good viewing or gaming experience. There were always stutters and graphical anomalies. Drivers improved these anomalies over time but there were usually work-a-rounds involved.
Instead of enjoying my games, I've spent the last 4 months tirelessly tweaking and tinkering. This has really soured the experience with AMD for me and, from what I've read, others as well.
Last Thursday I ordered a pair of GTX 680's and performed my normal fresh install on Friday night. There were WHQL drivers for all operating systems available on day 1. Over the weekend, I have had nothing but a fast, smooth, and trouble free experience in each game that I've played. No config file tweaking, no stutters, no graphical glitches... just great performance, and more importantly, an enjoyable gaming experience!
TLDR: The HD 7970 launch was filled with numerous issues and the last 4 months of driver releases have only partially remedied the situation. AMD could stand to learn a lot from Nvidia's GTX 680 launch as SLI performance out of the box is excellent and trouble free.