Despite Game-Related Glitches, AMD Discontinues Monthly Driver Updates 213
MojoKid writes "Recently AMD announced that it would cease offering monthly graphics driver updates, and instead issue Catalyst versions only 'when it makes sense.' That statement would be a good deal more comforting if it didn't 'make sense' to upgrade AMD's drivers nearly every single month. From 2010 through 2011, AMD released a new Catalyst driver every month like clockwork. Starting last summer, however, AMD began having trouble with high-profile game releases that performed badly or had visual artifacts. Rage was one high-profile example, but there have been launch-day issues with a number of other titles, including Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, Bat Man: Arkham City, and Battlefield 3. The company responded to these problems by quickly releasing out-of-band driver updates. In addition, AMD's recent Catalyst 12.6 beta driver also fixes random BSODs on the desktop, poor Crossfire scaling in Skyrim and random hangs in Crysis 2 in DX9. In other words, AMD is still working to resolve important problems in games that launched more than six months ago. It's hard to put a positive spin on slower driver releases given just how often those releases are necessary."
Is this nvidia spin? (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, of course frequent updates are desirable. On the other hand, every release produces overhead which could be used to fix the problems at hand. In my experience, monthly update schedules are a terrible waste of valuable time.
Personally, I'm an nvidia user, since I hate the driver issues of AMD... but this news sounds like nvidia spin to me.
Re:The NVIDIA Transition? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd consider buying Nvidia but (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:5, Interesting)
nVidia is so much better at drivers than AMD that your comment looks like the insane rantings of a madman.
Oh, yeah? I program 3D graphics for a living so I have to deal with this stuff on a daily basis. I'm working around a bug right now.
Question: Are occlusion queries supposed to return number of samples or number of pixels in Direct3D?
A certain company's "pro" graphics cards seem to differ from their "consumer" graphics cards over this.
The only way I've found to get my program working is to do a dummy occlusion query when I create the framebuffer and see what happens.
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:5, Interesting)
Even more unfortunately, NVidia have realised this and have been paying off video game developers not to test their games on AMD graphics cards prior to release and not to allow AMD access to pre-release versions to do it themselves.
Considering nVidia's actions, do you feel safe? (Score:4, Interesting)
The way nVidia has acted in the past is an indication of how it may act in the future. See one of the many articles, for example: Dell and HP balk at replacing bad Nvidia chip. [windowssecrets.com]
If you buy something with an nVidia product in it, you may get involved with enormous hassles like that. People who weren't following the sneakiness and dishonesty closely didn't get their computers replaced because there was a very limited period in which customers needed to act.
Both AMD and nVidia need better management, in my opinion.
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not always driver bugs. Many of the fixes are things that tapdance around bad, buggy code within the game itself. Oftentimes the studio's devs play fast and loose with shader parameters or API compliance- and NVidia does it differently than AMD, etc.
Any time you see a "MAY" within a standards document, it really ought to be treated as a "SHALL" unless you know you're working on ONLY a target environment that the "MAY" doesn't affect you. Prime example would be something along the lines of VBO mapping to host addressing space. The spec says that it MAY stall the pipeline if you do this while you're in the middle of a rendering pass. Well...NVidia's implementation knows what VBOs are in-flight with a rendering pass and will stall only if it's known to be about to be used by the current pass in progress. AMD's drivers took the other, in fact, sensible approach because it's easier to implement and gains you performance overall if you don't have devs doing stupid things- they stalled ANY time you mapped any VBOs involved with the rendering pass in progress.
A major studio (Who shall not be named, nor shall the game...who knows, maybe you can guess the title...) did this in their GL code- they recycled VBOs, but did it intra -frame instead of inter -frame. The first is realtively safe, producing pretty good performance, the other's very much not so, based on the lead-in I gave just now. I should know, I've used it with some of the games I've done porting work on (Because the studio did the same thing in DirectX...which has the same restrictions here...). When you do it intra-frame, on NVidia, it slows the render pass down, but not unacceptably because it only stalls as long as needed to assure you're not corrupting the render pass. AMD, until they re-worked their VBO implementation would plummet to seconds per frame slide-show renderings on an X1950XTX card when it was THE hottest, fastest card out there- because it would stall the pipeline, taking milliseconds to recover, each and every time they re-mapped the VBO they were re-using to conserve on card memory on the frame's rendering pass.
Was it the driver's fault? Not even remotely close to the truth there. But...people will blame the driver, calling it "buggy". In fact, that's what happend, even.
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? Bitcoin mining??? You think people are buying ATI cards to mine bitcoins? And not for gaming? Maybe a few people are reusing their old cards for mining, but the bitcoin fad has pretty much passed... I'd be shocked if even .1% of the AMD graphics cards sold are for bitcoin.
Re:The NVIDIA Transition? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's irony for you:
-AMD supposedly releases driver updates on a monthly basis, though they haven't quite managed it for the last couple years, sometimes not making the deadline, sometimes just releasing basically the same driver two months in a row, then releasing out-of-band updates when games break their cards.)
-nVIDIA has always released drivers "as needed'.
-AMD switches to releasing drivers "as needed".
-Everyone complains, and threatens to switch to nVIDIA.
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is this nvidia spin? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hah, I was waiting for it. Waiting for the first post to bring up your argument. I've been reading slashdot for way too long.
Don't forget that console games have tons of bugs now too. And big huge flaws. The Skyrim save game issue? Bioshock always messing up widescreen? Rockstar grand theft everything. Silent Hill Downpour--the entire freaking game is full of bugs and hard locks.
Anyway, I go back and forth on this. I don't know which solution is better. I think it's gotta be down to simply personal preference. I think both sides has it's flaws.
PC flaws:
- I swear to god I'm so sick of updating drivers, for anything. Graphics drivers should just be auto-updated, period. Not even to have a button in the ATI/Nvidia control panel is good enough. As it stands now, there are too many steps. Yea yea it's more safe to do it this way now, where if a driver is broke they can revoke it. But it's the same issue windows was having. Either deal with that, or deal with most users not upgrading at all.
- All games should have built in patching mechanisms. Steam does this right now, as do EA games or GFWL. But what if a game isn't? Or what if I want to buy a game from say GOG or Gamersgate. They don't auto patch. So ur stuck back in the days of yore, hunting down patches from fileplanet or something. That's bull and I flat out refuse.
-Small dev Q&A problems. I love freakin Red Orchestra 2 and Arma 2. Amazing games. But the bugs. Oh the bugs. Jesus it's terrible. Don't even bother playing a game until it's been out 6 months.
Console flaws:
- No support of alternative games. Read: MMO or F2P. Short of DC universe for PS3 or free realms, it's out. But that's a big segment of the future and part of the solution to keeping online communities big and a steady, not one-off, revenue stream. And consoles could OWN this market, but they don't. They could make a badass-looking (compared to the PC F2P's right now which have to be simple enough to run on IGP's) MMO's or F2P's. But nooo.
- No digital downloads for everything. There are a few games I want. Can't get em. Both ps3 and xbox only have like 20% of their titles available. Even on the ps3, you can't download most sony games. Pathetic (resistance 3 I'm looking at u). And the prices are atrocious. $60 or $40 for games that are only $30 or $15-20 online retail. And more money for a game without shipping or physical presence AND is locked to an account? Who in their right mind would buy it?
- No mouse/keyboard support. I'm not saying they should do it across the board like most people who throw out this argument do. No, consoles are meant to be played with a controller. HOWEVER, make keyboard support only for some genres, like strategy. There are barely any RTS games. This would allow them access to the market.
Re:Let me get this straight: (Score:4, Interesting)
This needs to be modded up ^^
The dollars put into this amount to approximately 40% of nvidias entire "marketing" budget.
Basically they've started doing something that changes the industry even more to be in the hands of the content providers... When previously the hardware vendors had a bit more pull.
Back in the days of Voodoo and even for the first while of the ATI vs Nvidia era it was normal for game vendors to approach card makers for help debugging their games but there was no way in hell a card maker would pay for the privilege. Hell, back in the voodoo days they even PAID for the extra help making their games compatible with the cards in some cases.
ATI started caving and doing the same thing, which is part of what reduced their margins to the point where they just said the hell with it and sold out to AMD. AMD is refusing to play the game now so you get 1-2 week post-release bug fixes.