Yeah I mean, it's only been three years of crossfire being noticeably worse then SLI when used outside of artificial benchmarking. What's a couple more months
Exactly! It illustrates how serious a technical problem they have had in the multi GPU area that its taken so long and STILL no absolute remedy. The way AMD handled it also left a lot to be desired. Selling a flagship product that actually didn't work properly for years is not a way to improve one's reputation.
Seems like they acted pretty quickly to me once enough was known. Since you're complaining about 3 years, where were you to call them on it over those 3 years?
It depends on whether switching graphics between APU and discrete invokes this effect too. It shouldn't as the APU is only handling management of outputting frames passed to it by the dGPU rather than sharing any of the rendering itself, but I can't recall any testing done on this.
Although linux is never covered at AT, it should be noted that despite still being lower performance, AMDs open source linux driver is much smoothier with regard to frame latency than catalyst. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...
This is ridiculous. It's been almost a year since AMD talked about introducing frame pacing, and yet it's still extremely limited in scope. As an owner of three 7970s and three monitors, I couldn't be more frustrated. AMD has been this way for most of the products in the past half decade - make a promise about performance or release schedule, then not hold up to that promise and pretend nothing is wrong. If it weren't for AMD's advantage in cryptocurrency mining I would have ditched these cards long ago.
What's even more worrying is that AMD is making its graphics drivers even more complicated with Mantle support and TrueAudio. The company can't even fix issues in its current features and it's putting more duties on its driver team?!
Litecoin is getting some traction and is still pretty easy for high end GPUs to mine (no ASICs are shipping for it yet). Also bitcoin profitability only looks at current prices, who knows what it will be if you just break even for now then sit on your wallet for 5 years.
"bitcoin profitability only looks at current prices, who knows what it will be if you just break even for now then sit on your wallet for 5 years."
National currencies are backed by the full faith and credit of the national government, which essentially means confidence in their ability to collect taxes from their citizens, and the viability of their national economy.
What exactly is backing up the value of a bitcoin?
The fact that no government interferes with its international value is worth enough to make Cryptocurrency hold value, period. If you actually have faith in the credit of any national government you need to open your eyes and read outside the tabloids. I think the US national debt is around 20,000,000,000,000 - another way to put that is that every US taxpayer is somehow taking a $140,000 share of the $20trillion national debt. Do you still have faith in the value of a dollar?
AMD's latest drivers for the 290x were locking up my machine on a regular basis, so I had to roll back to the certified driver, which lacks some of their latest fixes and improvements. Hopefully they can get that stuff sorted out soon.
I find AMD's driver's quite buggy... but at least I have more stability now that I don't use monitor sleep anymore. Really ridiculous that they can't get this stuff fixed and it's been a problem for a LONG time. Plus, my mouse cursor still screws up sometimes... and I don't even game.
I only get micro-stutter rarely, but when I do it ruins games for me. Thankfully I only get it with really bad games, or bad ports so for me I really do not care, just hope it doesn't happen with a game I really like but by then I should have sold my crossfire HD 7850's for a high end next gen card R9 3xx series :)
I've had crossfire 7850s for about 6 months now and with frame pacing coming in I have just noticed another layer of difficulty in getting some titles to run smoothly without stutter. Especially with frostbite engine games. My general workaround has been to disable frame pacing and run MSI afterburner, setting the FPS limit to 60. With framepacing on I usually see less stutter than having it off without afterburner but it's still not nearly as smooth as framepacing off with afterburner running. I always get the latest drivers in hope that this will be easier but I have been telling friends looking to buy crossfire setups that unless they're willing to tinker with some games to get it right, avoid crossfire.
This is what happens when you lay off most of your driver development team and leave a skeleton crew in charge of the leftovers.
This is probably why Mantle is so important, too. It should help them reduce the load on their own driver teams (if Mantle were to take off) and put the emphasis squarely on the developers to make their games work.
Unfortunately, in the short term all we'll see is AMD having to support both Mantle's light driver, DirectX, now OpenGL with more gusto, AND help developers who DO dare try to use Mantle to keep the early games from representing the technology in some bad light.
So a strategy that should have made it easier on AMD's already strained resources is going to wind up putting extra load that isn't on nVidia or Intel's driver teams. They just have to support DirectX and OpenGL. AMD gave themselves a third API to support.
I'd expect updates specific to the 7xxx series to dry up just as soon as the Rx series are not mostly secret versions of the 7xxx series. I guess 7xxx owners are lucky that the Rx series is mostly a refresh of their old cards or else they'd never get any support.
Rather a lot like how AMD treats all their old lines that aren't the basis of current sales.
In fairness, AMD has seen some pretty dramatic improvements under Rory Read. He seems to have restored resources to the places where AMD needed them most (re-hiring Jim Keller and Raja Koduri--two of the best engineers in the world in CPUs and GPUs respectively), and the driver improvements in that last year and a half (essentially once Rory had taken the reins and figured out what was really going on) have been quite substantial. One important example of this new emphasis on getting the drivers right is this snippet from here (http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/11/22/jo...
"Most notably, we've heard that one of AMD's best driver guys has moved back into helping to make drivers. That guy is none other than Terry Makedon, also known as Catalystmaker. He spent the last two years at AMD managing software marketing, while 10 years before that he spent as the manager of product management for Catalyst and all Radeon related software. Now he's back in a more familiar title as the manager of roadmap and strategy for AMD software. What this should mean is that Terry is back with helping with drivers and making sure that they live up to his expectations. Considering that AMD's drivers were at their best under his helm, I believe that we could see days where AMD's drivers are once again very good, if he gets the people he needs to make it happen."
I can only see things getting better and better for AMD, both in terms of hardware products and software support.
I'm still pissed about no Crossfire support for <=4xxx series in Windows 8.1. I have a Core 2 Quad computer rocking 1 Gib 4870s that I can't take of 7 now. (And before the haters go 'woooo, 7 4 eva!' I like 8.1)
4xxx wasn't launched after Win8. If you're referring to the LESS FREQUENT driver updates for them, there isn't much they can do to optimize drivers for old cards that are already pretty much tapped out. They still do roughly quarterly releases. I've still got one machine with a 4850 and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. The drivers for that are already nailed down as good as they're gonna get. The thing is ancient in the PC world.
I just switched from a GTX 670 to an R9 290 and I have to say it was a wonderful upgrade. All of the weird Nvidia driver issues I had with bitstreaming audio and crashing in BF4 vanished. I have had more problems with Nvidia drivers in the last year than ever before. They keep screwing with their monitor overclocking implementation too which drives me crazy.
"They keep screwing with their monitor overclocking implementation too which drives me crazy."
No kidding. I bought a GTX670 last year, and sold it again less than a month later. Every time I installed a new nVidia driver, it broke my 3 monitor setup, and I had to go through a 17 step procedure to get the clock timings back to the correct settings so all 3 displays would show up. Sold the card for close to the $400 I paid for it, and bought a Gigabyte Windforce 7950 for $319. Not only did the Radeon drivers set up eyefinity in under 5 minutes without issue, and the 7950 has 3GB of memory vs. only 2GB on the GTX670, but I was also able to safely flash the bios on the 7950 (dual-bios feature) using a Gigabyte 7970 bios, which boosted the default clock rate from 900MHz to 1000MHz, and the memory clock from 1250MHz to 14750MHz. The card is still running flawlessly in my FX-8350 rig (4.5GHz using a measly $55 Antec Kuhler 620 CLW cooler), and the fact that my favourite RTS Company of Heroes 2 runs on my 7950 faster than it does on a GTX770 is just icing on the cake. Everybody I know who's buying a new graphics card right now is going AMD in one version or another. I might upgrade to a Gigabyte Windforce R9 290 myself if I can even remotely justfiy the performance improvement over the 7950
At this point, nVidia looks to me like it's simply being beaten into submission by a surprisingly powerful AMD in the gaming graphics area. AMD finally seems deadly serious about dominating the gaming/graphics arena. The gaming console sweep, the R9 290(X) and now Mantle are proof of this.
You're using one desktop GPU, which has never been a problem with AMD. Try using multiple AMD GPUs or AMD's mobile discrete graphics, and you will encounter a plethora of problems.
Personally I think AMD are right to focus their manpower on Mantle and 290 issues. If the Steam Hardware Survey is representative of the consumer market as a whole, Crossfire is such a tiny percentage of the market that it may as well not exist. Mantle, on the other hand, may well affect 25-35% of the entire gaming market - and more specifically it will benefit the low-end most where it's really needed.
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S3anister - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
All's well in the end, I suppose. A month or two really isn't that long to wait especially with the holidays here.DarkStryke - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
Yeah I mean, it's only been three years of crossfire being noticeably worse then SLI when used outside of artificial benchmarking. What's a couple more monthsbeck2050 - Sunday, December 15, 2013 - link
Exactly! It illustrates how serious a technical problem they have had in the multi GPU area that its taken so long and STILL no absolute remedy. The way AMD handled it also left a lot to be desired.Selling a flagship product that actually didn't work properly for years is not a way to improve one's reputation.
mikato - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
Seems like they acted pretty quickly to me once enough was known. Since you're complaining about 3 years, where were you to call them on it over those 3 years?milli - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
Is APU frame pacing also taken care of in phase 2 or that's for phase 3?Despoiler - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
Frame pacing is for Crossfire setups so neither.psuedonymous - Thursday, December 12, 2013 - link
It depends on whether switching graphics between APU and discrete invokes this effect too. It shouldn't as the APU is only handling management of outputting frames passed to it by the dGPU rather than sharing any of the rendering itself, but I can't recall any testing done on this.For APU-only setups things should be fine though.
PerroLito - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
Although linux is never covered at AT, it should be noted that despite still being lower performance, AMDs open source linux driver is much smoothier with regard to frame latency than catalyst.http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&...
The Von Matrices - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
Thank you for checking into this Ryan.No thank you to AMD.
This is ridiculous. It's been almost a year since AMD talked about introducing frame pacing, and yet it's still extremely limited in scope. As an owner of three 7970s and three monitors, I couldn't be more frustrated. AMD has been this way for most of the products in the past half decade - make a promise about performance or release schedule, then not hold up to that promise and pretend nothing is wrong. If it weren't for AMD's advantage in cryptocurrency mining I would have ditched these cards long ago.
What's even more worrying is that AMD is making its graphics drivers even more complicated with Mantle support and TrueAudio. The company can't even fix issues in its current features and it's putting more duties on its driver team?!
jasonelmore - Thursday, December 12, 2013 - link
you still mine cryptocurrency with Graphics Cards? i thought it was pointless. at least bitcoin is pointless.The Von Matrices - Thursday, December 12, 2013 - link
You can't profitably mine Bitcoin using GPUs, but you you can profitably mine Litecoin and other Scrypt currencies.tipoo - Thursday, December 12, 2013 - link
Litecoin is getting some traction and is still pretty easy for high end GPUs to mine (no ASICs are shipping for it yet). Also bitcoin profitability only looks at current prices, who knows what it will be if you just break even for now then sit on your wallet for 5 years.anubis44 - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
"bitcoin profitability only looks at current prices, who knows what it will be if you just break even for now then sit on your wallet for 5 years."National currencies are backed by the full faith and credit of the national government, which essentially means confidence in their ability to collect taxes from their citizens, and the viability of their national economy.
What exactly is backing up the value of a bitcoin?
Chrispy_ - Friday, December 27, 2013 - link
The fact that no government interferes with its international value is worth enough to make Cryptocurrency hold value, period. If you actually have faith in the credit of any national government you need to open your eyes and read outside the tabloids. I think the US national debt is around 20,000,000,000,000 - another way to put that is that every US taxpayer is somehow taking a $140,000 share of the $20trillion national debt. Do you still have faith in the value of a dollar?twtech - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
AMD's latest drivers for the 290x were locking up my machine on a regular basis, so I had to roll back to the certified driver, which lacks some of their latest fixes and improvements. Hopefully they can get that stuff sorted out soon.TidalWaveOne - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
I find AMD's driver's quite buggy... but at least I have more stability now that I don't use monitor sleep anymore. Really ridiculous that they can't get this stuff fixed and it's been a problem for a LONG time. Plus, my mouse cursor still screws up sometimes... and I don't even game.spat55 - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
I only get micro-stutter rarely, but when I do it ruins games for me. Thankfully I only get it with really bad games, or bad ports so for me I really do not care, just hope it doesn't happen with a game I really like but by then I should have sold my crossfire HD 7850's for a high end next gen card R9 3xx series :)Jackatron - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
I've had crossfire 7850s for about 6 months now and with frame pacing coming in I have just noticed another layer of difficulty in getting some titles to run smoothly without stutter. Especially with frostbite engine games. My general workaround has been to disable frame pacing and run MSI afterburner, setting the FPS limit to 60. With framepacing on I usually see less stutter than having it off without afterburner but it's still not nearly as smooth as framepacing off with afterburner running. I always get the latest drivers in hope that this will be easier but I have been telling friends looking to buy crossfire setups that unless they're willing to tinker with some games to get it right, avoid crossfire.HisDivineOrder - Thursday, December 12, 2013 - link
This is what happens when you lay off most of your driver development team and leave a skeleton crew in charge of the leftovers.This is probably why Mantle is so important, too. It should help them reduce the load on their own driver teams (if Mantle were to take off) and put the emphasis squarely on the developers to make their games work.
Unfortunately, in the short term all we'll see is AMD having to support both Mantle's light driver, DirectX, now OpenGL with more gusto, AND help developers who DO dare try to use Mantle to keep the early games from representing the technology in some bad light.
So a strategy that should have made it easier on AMD's already strained resources is going to wind up putting extra load that isn't on nVidia or Intel's driver teams. They just have to support DirectX and OpenGL. AMD gave themselves a third API to support.
I'd expect updates specific to the 7xxx series to dry up just as soon as the Rx series are not mostly secret versions of the 7xxx series. I guess 7xxx owners are lucky that the Rx series is mostly a refresh of their old cards or else they'd never get any support.
Rather a lot like how AMD treats all their old lines that aren't the basis of current sales.
anubis44 - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
In fairness, AMD has seen some pretty dramatic improvements under Rory Read. He seems to have restored resources to the places where AMD needed them most (re-hiring Jim Keller and Raja Koduri--two of the best engineers in the world in CPUs and GPUs respectively), and the driver improvements in that last year and a half (essentially once Rory had taken the reins and figured out what was really going on) have been quite substantial. One important example of this new emphasis on getting the drivers right is this snippet from here (http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/11/22/jo..."Most notably, we've heard that one of AMD's best driver guys has moved back into helping to make drivers. That guy is none other than Terry Makedon, also known as Catalystmaker. He spent the last two years at AMD managing software marketing, while 10 years before that he spent as the manager of product management for Catalyst and all Radeon related software. Now he's back in a more familiar title as the manager of roadmap and strategy for AMD software. What this should mean is that Terry is back with helping with drivers and making sure that they live up to his expectations. Considering that AMD's drivers were at their best under his helm, I believe that we could see days where AMD's drivers are once again very good, if he gets the people he needs to make it happen."
I can only see things getting better and better for AMD, both in terms of hardware products and software support.
anubis44 - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
Sorry, link got messed up and you can't edit comments on here, but here is the correct link:http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/11/22/jo...
freedom4556 - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
I'm still pissed about no Crossfire support for <=4xxx series in Windows 8.1. I have a Core 2 Quad computer rocking 1 Gib 4870s that I can't take of 7 now. (And before the haters go 'woooo, 7 4 eva!' I like 8.1)freedom4556 - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
I've never had hardware become driver-obsolete on the same version of Windows it was launched on. It just REALLY rubs me the wrong way.Alexvrb - Saturday, December 14, 2013 - link
4xxx wasn't launched after Win8. If you're referring to the LESS FREQUENT driver updates for them, there isn't much they can do to optimize drivers for old cards that are already pretty much tapped out. They still do roughly quarterly releases. I've still got one machine with a 4850 and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. The drivers for that are already nailed down as good as they're gonna get. The thing is ancient in the PC world.Pastuch - Thursday, December 12, 2013 - link
I just switched from a GTX 670 to an R9 290 and I have to say it was a wonderful upgrade. All of the weird Nvidia driver issues I had with bitstreaming audio and crashing in BF4 vanished. I have had more problems with Nvidia drivers in the last year than ever before. They keep screwing with their monitor overclocking implementation too which drives me crazy.anubis44 - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
"They keep screwing with their monitor overclocking implementation too which drives me crazy."No kidding. I bought a GTX670 last year, and sold it again less than a month later. Every time I installed a new nVidia driver, it broke my 3 monitor setup, and I had to go through a 17 step procedure to get the clock timings back to the correct settings so all 3 displays would show up. Sold the card for close to the $400 I paid for it, and bought a Gigabyte Windforce 7950 for $319. Not only did the Radeon drivers set up eyefinity in under 5 minutes without issue, and the 7950 has 3GB of memory vs. only 2GB on the GTX670, but I was also able to safely flash the bios on the 7950 (dual-bios feature) using a Gigabyte 7970 bios, which boosted the default clock rate from 900MHz to 1000MHz, and the memory clock from 1250MHz to 14750MHz. The card is still running flawlessly in my FX-8350 rig (4.5GHz using a measly $55 Antec Kuhler 620 CLW cooler), and the fact that my favourite RTS Company of Heroes 2 runs on my 7950 faster than it does on a GTX770 is just icing on the cake. Everybody I know who's buying a new graphics card right now is going AMD in one version or another. I might upgrade to a Gigabyte Windforce R9 290 myself if I can even remotely justfiy the performance improvement over the 7950
At this point, nVidia looks to me like it's simply being beaten into submission by a surprisingly powerful AMD in the gaming graphics area. AMD finally seems deadly serious about dominating the gaming/graphics arena. The gaming console sweep, the R9 290(X) and now Mantle are proof of this.
The Von Matrices - Friday, December 13, 2013 - link
You're using one desktop GPU, which has never been a problem with AMD. Try using multiple AMD GPUs or AMD's mobile discrete graphics, and you will encounter a plethora of problems.Chrispy_ - Friday, December 27, 2013 - link
Personally I think AMD are right to focus their manpower on Mantle and 290 issues. If the Steam Hardware Survey is representative of the consumer market as a whole, Crossfire is such a tiny percentage of the market that it may as well not exist. Mantle, on the other hand, may well affect 25-35% of the entire gaming market - and more specifically it will benefit the low-end most where it's really needed.