It's been 2 months, do we get a new driver?

But 2 months and there was no game tweak or CrossFire profile (one that don’t just turn off the other GPUs) to be published? Didn't they have game profile updates outside of driver updates at one time?

Far Cry 4 was on sale on Amazon for $30 the other day but I did a quick check and yep, it’s a mess and no CrossFire. They need to stop advertising CrossFire until they maintain a list of games that get a solid 25%+ boost and without micro pauses, glitches, flashing textures and other bugs.
 
Fry Cry 4 sucks though....

and last i heard it was ubisoft that had to make changes on their end according to AMD.
 
I liked the last one and wanted to try it on sale. I'd never pay $59.99 or whatever is is now days.

I know but that is just feels like an excuse. AMD is running the show here and needs to fix it. If they can’t take a Windows Direct X game and get it to run on their GPUs it sounds like their problem not mine or UBISoft’s.

They need to give up on this pipe dream of getting game developers to write their code just so and move to a RAID type model were the OS or at least the applications don’t even know there is another one or ten GPUs at work. I guess they just don’t have the R&D for that. It’s too bad true SLI did not take over.
 
Tanquen said:
I liked the last one and wanted to try it on sale. I'd never pay $59.99 or whatever is is now days.

I know but that is just feels like an excuse. AMD is running the show here and needs to fix it. If they can’t take a Windows Direct X game and get it to run on their GPUs it sounds like their problem not mine or UBISoft’s.

They need to give up on this pipe dream of getting game developers to write their code just so and move to a RAID type model were the OS or at least the applications don’t even know there is another one or ten GPUs at work. I guess they just don’t have the R&D for that. It’s too bad true SLI did not take over.
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Good thing you understand all the issues involved in driver development and are here to set AMD straight. Hopefully they listen to you.
 
Tanquen said:
I know but that is just feels like an excuse. AMD is running the show here and needs to fix it. If they can’t take a Windows Direct X game and get it to run on their GPUs it sounds like their problem not mine or UBISoft’s.
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If Dying Light is any indication, there is certainly a lot the game devs can do to ensure their game performs well on both AMD and NV hardware. Before the 1.4 patch it was a stutterfest on my 290x, now its running great and any driver improvement will just be icing on the cake.
 
haz_mat said:
If Dying Light is any indication, there is certainly a lot the game devs can do to ensure their game performs well on both AMD and NV hardware. Before the 1.4 patch it was a stutterfest on my 290x, now its running great and any driver improvement will just be icing on the cake.
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I would agree, its just too often that you buy a game and even if you wait a few/many months they’ll be issues. The dev and AMD/Nvidia just act surprised or say they are working on it or point the finger at each other or say you are the only one it must be your power supply.

I guess every system I’ve built with many different manufactures has had a bad power supply or GPU or CPU or Ram etc. :)
 
AMD will have some new Beta drives due out soon. They "FINIALLY" have a fix for the Crossfire/Battlefield 4/Mantle memory bug.
 
The Cobra said:
AMD will have some new Beta drives due out soon. They "FINIALLY" have a fix for the Crossfire/Battlefield 4/Mantle memory bug.
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You got a source on that? Not that I'm doubting you or anything, I'm just really curious. I really hope VSR comes soon for 280X's, too :( AMD's general support/feature set with drivers is downright appalling/appallingly slow.
 
ebduncan said:
Fry Cry 4 sucks though....

and last i heard it was ubisoft that had to make changes on their end according to AMD.
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this shit reminds me of "step aside money" in boxing, where promoters/managers pay off mandatory challengers to step aside and allow someone of the promoters choosing to get a shot at their fighter

i'm guessing Nvidia paid Ubisoft additional royalties to keep FarCry4 a better experience on NV hardware
 
GameWorks titles always rub like trash on AMD hardware because Nvidia has to write the generic driver interface for AMD. AMD is not responsible for optimizations as Nvidia obfuscates the code. Avoid them until a report comes out that says Nvidia or the game developer has fixed the code to run properly on AMD hardware.

GameWorks is proprietary like PhysX. AMD users should skip games that use either technology as they are NOT there to benefit gamers. All of the crap in those libraries can be done in DirectCompute where it would run equally well on AMD's hardware as it does on Nvidia's hardware.

Case in point is [H]ardocp's evaluation of Alien Isolation. Notice how well both camps handle the DirectCompute effects. An even more recent one is Warframe. I suppose that the PhysX licensing agreement where Nvidia helped pay to develop Warframe has worn off. So the developers finally gave AMD users "PhysX like effects".

My buddy has a 4GB GTX 670. When he enables PhysX his framerate tanks. If he doesn't enable it then he's well above 60 fps. When the Warframe developers enabled AMD effects I experienced zero frame loss. Same turbulence effects as him. He has a 3770K OC'd to 4.5GHz to boot. And he struggles with PhysX effects where I play the game at 70 - 160 fps depending on how many enemies explode at once on my screen.

In short, don't blame AMD for Nvidia's mess. Hell Nvidia even contributes to DirectCompute. So why feed us that proprietary GameWorks / PhysX trash?
 
I'm still waiting for AMD to fix mantle in Battlefield 4. It's still completely unplayable. Works perfectly in dx 11, stuttering POS using mantle, and it's been like that since it was implemented. Seems like it's been getting worse with each driver release.
 
Gameworks shouldn't be around, it just hurts AMD gamers. I know Nvidia wants market-share but underhanded tactics like this should be universally spoken out against. Some may consider that a fanboy talking but I just feel like these companies should compete on their own merits and not with artificial roadblocks that were paid for.
 
The Mac said:
so use dx11 then.
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I have been, it's the only way the game is playable. The point is, it's an AMD sponsored game, that was supposed to show off how great Mantle is. It's the reason I got an AMD card over the NVIDIA equivalent. So far it's been a joke.
 
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Is it the Windows 8. 1 Mantle Bug?
Because for me Mantle worked perfectly fine in BF4, no issues whatsoever.
I want to note that AMD gets lots of shit for driver issues and then I see Nvidia issues largely glossed over and forgiven as users frantically attempt to fix the problems with their own user created solutions.
 
It does the same in windows 7 and windows 8.1, I've tried fresh OS installs, numerous different drivers, and swapping components with other systems. Even tried a different AMD GPU, and nothing makes a difference. The game runs flawlessly using dx11, locked at a steady 60fps, switch to mantle and it's a mess. Hitches every 2 or 3 seconds, frame rates all over the place, it's completely unplayable. This is with everything set to low except textures, no AA, and at 1080p. Using the same card I can run everything on ultra with 2xAA using DX11, at 60fps.
 
xLokiX said:
It does the same in windows 7 and windows 8.1, I've tried fresh OS installs, numerous different drivers, and swapping components with other systems. Even tried a different AMD GPU, and nothing makes a difference. The game runs flawlessly using dx11, locked at a steady 60fps, switch to mantle and it's a mess. Hitches every 2 or 3 seconds, frame rates all over the place, it's completely unplayable. This is with everything set to low except textures, no AA, and at 1080p. Using the same card I can run everything on ultra with 2xAA using DX11, at 60fps.
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I never had a issue in bf4 with mantle. I have played recently but worked just fine on the 13.12 drivers. Back when i played it.
 
For me, personally, as a long time Nvidia user converted to AMD to just outright insane prices for 280X's last year ($150 or less!), my main beef with their drivers has nothing to do with how they run games. Not at all. What I have beef with is that AMD seems to give VERY few options with these drivers. Nvidia has had the ability to downsample and put in custom resolutions like.. for freaking ever, it seems, and something that basic isn't even doable without tinkering or freaking HEX EDITING. That's just pathetic. They only just recently rolled out VSR as a half baked attempt to complete with Nvidia's DSR, and barely anything even supports that :/ Their GeForce Experience equivalent is something from a third party that's chock full of social media crap and ads.

To me, game support is fine. Actually product experience and support, and extras is downright lousy at best, and absurdly pathetic and slow at worst.

I recall someone having a twitter exchange a year or two ago with some guy who worked on drivers with AMD, and he didn't even understand what downsampling was. That's just sad.

Still, that being said, for $150, to get a 280X, that was an insane deal. Paying nearly DOUBLE that price to of gotten something equivalent from Nvidia just for better drivers would not, and could not, be justified by me. Financially or otherwise. But if I could spend the money on it today, (I really can't justify it) I'd jump to a GTX 970 or something like that in a heartbeat, and 75% of that reason would be the better driver ecosystem, and only 25% of it would be because of a graphics power increase. AMD drivers are fine if all you want to do is turn on a game and play it. It's when you feel you want to do more than just that that it becomes apparent just how lacking they really are.
 
The other common complaint I've read is that CF profiles take forever to come out, like 6 months after game release. Yeah VSR does seem a bit restrictive at the moment since only Tonga and Hawaii support it for now, and only Tonga supports up to 4x downsampling. But supposedly AMD will add R7 series support in the next driver update (hence this thread I guess?)

But thanks for sharing your experience, and since 95% of the time I simply "turn on a game and play it" sounds like I'll be totally fine with AMD, especially since I've decided to go single GPU next round. Multi-GPU setups are awesome for laptops (because you are so, so GPU bound 99% of the time), but for desktops it's just not worth the headache anymore.

As for Geforce Experience, I liken it to the last 500MB of 970's vram -- vestigial, irrelevant, useless, and actually slows things down. :D It was on my system for all of 5 minutes, so I sure as hell won't miss it lol
 
I haven't had any issues with Mantle + BF4 and I played a good 20-30 hours in the past month or so.

I do hope the driver adds CrossFireX support for Evolve.
 
Ive had no problems with any of the mantle games (bf4, DAI, CIV:BE, and Theif: dont have PVZ, or Sniper Elite)

The've all given significant performance uplift from DX.
 
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