So, it looks like they are trying to make a point about showing that they are taking the software side more seriously. It looks like this is just a GUI change mostly -- not necessarily a brand new driver itself. It looks like they are saying that they want to put more focus and effort into the drivers in the future though. We will have to see how it pans out. It's funny I remember the old pre-catalyst ATI drivers, and when catalyst control center came out and stuff, heh.
This is the problem. People assume things about AMD. Did you even read the article? It "Looks" like a GUI change? What special power allows you to see inside the code just by seeing the slides!!?
Well you tend to put the important features first in slides, so when they emphasize UI and ease of use, it's no great leap to assume that's where their focus is...
Yeah, seems like this is the 9000th time AMD/ATi has claimed they're going to be serious about drivers.
So far every single time has been a lie, but I still hold out a slim hope they'll actually get serious.
They NEED to actually make sure their drivers work great with all games, including very old games. They NEED to make sure they for the very first time in their history actually start supporting their mobile GPUs...
Pretty sure they don't "need" to optimise for very old games. In fact that's probably the opposite of what a cash-starved organisation struggling for market share needs to do!
So is this just a cosmetic change for the interface or will there be tangible performance improvements for games? As it stands, the CCC doesn't bug me. It's clunky, but works fine for me.
They are talking about the core driver not the flashy setting panels. AMD and put all the lipstick they want on the front end. Their problem is matching Nvidia in quality drivers which they have been behind on for years now.
AMD has been ahead of Nvidia, actually, for several years now. Nvidia's been throwing in more and more proprietary tech into their drivers, driving them down even further.
@Bateluer - I don't know what AMD drivers you've been using - but I've got a 295x2, and the number of times its crashed because of terrible drivers, or things have become unplayable is ridiculous. When Dragon Age 3 came out - I swapped out to a GTX 770 and actually got better FPS. Its been nothing but strife - I'm going back to SLI Nvidia with the next generation - Hell, if the 980ti comes down a little more in price I might jump ship early. It's ridiculous that a company would even consider writing driver control panels in .NET; Performance is key - and they used one of the slowest programming languages!?
Well played AMD for pulling the wool over my eyes this time - but never again.
It's not the product, it's you. I have a 5970 still in production, which had very few issues despite being a dual-GPU-on-a-card product. You either had a broken registry, a bad CPU, or something else wrong. AMD is ahead of NVIDIA driver-wise /ignoring/ the frontend. You can see they're still working hard behind the scenes when they released the first production-worthy DX12 driver which Ars documented back in August. You can also see their contribution to Open Source with their OSS kernel module, and their commitment to opening the drivers, contributing to 'Radeon' and deprecating FGLRX. NVidia, meanwhile, deserves the Linus Torvalds Finger.
I just want to throw my 2 cents in and say that AMD drivers have been extremely stable for me. I game with friends every friday (all with nvidia hardware) and they often crash at least once during our session. Typically while alt tabbing or streaming. I don't have these issues with AMD. I alt tab AND stream.
I have administered fleets of machine, AMD drivers caused less problems when running and require less reconfiguration than nVidia to get things as they should be. nVidia had more cases of crashes and the, rare, system instability issue. Neither company's driver was fully better than the other, but nVidia did present more problems in use.
However, driver support for new games was delivered more quickly and, yes, WHQL certification was more frequent. This really is a non-issue, though, unless you are forced to use WHQL drivers or are frequently adopting bleeding edge games that don't yet have driver support (this is actually rare, most new games work just fine with existing drivers, but better drivers leads to better performance and, sometimes, resolves issues game developers were too lazy to fix).
@Morawka: "..., all their game ready releases are beta drivers, meanwhile nvidia's are all whql certified."
That is just a difference in philosophy. AMD doesn't think that the common user should be bothered to upgrade their driver all the time when it only affects the newest games that the common user probably isn't playing. They view the beta driver as the gamers driver. Feel free to disagree with their naming scheme or definition of beta, but I wouldn't worry too much about the whql certification in this instance.
Having spend more than a little time on both sides of the fence (concurrently I might add), I think many issues people blame on drivers are more related to actual hardware issue (not necessarily GPU) and all the crap they get on their computers from their browsing habits. I've seen a lot of stable systems with both manufacturers. I feel like ATi has the edge in the HTPC realm. Multicard setups still go to nVidia, though that gap has gotten much smaller since the release of the Radeon 2xx series. nVidia does tend to get driver optimizations for new games out sooner than ATi. Though, this was much worse before ATi started to push developer relations.
@Morawka: "It is well known nvidia's directx 11 driver optimizations are second to none, it's even admitted here on anandtech."
They are definitely faster at getting the optimizations in there. However, as I look more at the architectures, I get the feeling that their optimizations aren't so much superior, but rather their hardware architecture is well optimized for DX11. Initially I simply credited this as ATi putting too much focus on compute. However, ATi and AMD have a long had a history of pushing forward looking architectures before their time. Given some of the features that are now being used by developers, it would appear that ATi's time with mantle had them focused on low level APIs and consequently, they spend resources into areas that aren't necessarily useful to DX11 games.
@Morawka: "All of this year's AAA releases are using DX 11" Really? All of them? Not a single DX12 game among them? With all the hype, I would have thought it would have been a bigger deal for the AAA houses if for no other reason than to check the DX12 check box. It's a good thing people swap out video cards on a yearly basis or they might get stuck with a terrible video card when DX12 hits.
Sarcasm aside you bring up a good point, the vast majority of games in the near term are still DX11 games. DX11 will be a valid code path for the foreseeable future. DX12 is not a magic bullet, though like some previous versions of DX it has some advantages that will eventually allow for substantially different gameplay than you can get with DX11 (or DX12 at the moment). While I think ATi's architecture is better suited for DX12 at the moment, the superior DX12 architectures won't come until we see how game developers figure out how they are going to use the features available.
looncraz and burntmybacon are the most sane commenters in this thread so far.
I have experienced all sorts of crashes and weirdness from both companies, but only with nVidia have I experienced random intermittent crashing after a driver update that GeForce Experience recommended to me. Similarly I have access to an (admittedly awful) HDTV that works fine connected to AMD cards but has never (as in, not ever) been able to run properly at native resolution without overscan on nVidia drivers.
Those edge cases aside, both companies produce decent drivers and have good products. I am currently with nVidia for SLI / GSync but am contemplating a switch to an R9 Nano at some point in the near future.
First clear headed post I've found here. It's also important to realize that having too many WHQL drivers is seen as a bad thing. Normal users don't like having to update things. There is also another thing to point out. NVIDIA cards rely on individual optimizations more than AMD. To put it simply this has to do with the fact that NVIDIA uses tricks like queue and compression to squeeze more performance out of less "muscle" and power. NVIDIA cards often perform abysmally when using old drivers with new games. AMD is less impacted by this
They are labelled beta because they are not WHQL dude. @fireduckzilla I have a 295x2 with 98 games in my steam library and then some in Origins and I haven't had any issues. How did you isolate your problem to the drivers?
This is just nonsense, and presumably you know it. AMD's drivers are comparatively a disaster. In fact at this point I almost trust Intel's drivers over AMD's.
AMD's problem has never been hardware, which has always been amazing. They need to actually get serious about drivers, and not just CLAIM they're going to finally be serious. They're literally nearly 20 years late at this point.
The question is.. why is there long term problems with ATI/AMD drivers? My father once noted that having problems with drivers for so long can't be just issue of bad coding. And I think there might be a point in that. It's possible that hardware architecture of ATI/AMD cards is very unfriendly towards driver development making the task of creating reliable driver much harder than it is for competition.
295x2 user here and no issues what so ever. (Actually single issue Dirt Rally - early access I might add - used to crash on CF, this was adressed by Codemasters with a patch released today) I'd have to agree with twnznz; it has been mentioned quite few times on Anandtech comments section how FPS rate seem to steadily climb even on GCN 1.0 cards up to this day. Personally I haven't had any issues with CCC so I'll be intruiged to what's on offer.
1. what you write control panel in couldn't matter less. It's not a driver, just a thing that edits "config file" 2. claiming .NET being slowest programming language is false at best.
Haha you just don't know how to use a computer properly, If you are having so many issues. Honestly the drivers AMD have been putting out lately have been very good. In fact better then nVidia.
Yep, absolutely. I HOPE this means they're going to actually pay attention to the drivers themselves, but they've claimed they are 9000 times at this point, and then never do.
AMD doesn't have a problem with their actual drivers. I have more problems with my Geforce 650M in my laptop than my Radeon 280x in my desktop. Even Crossfire, the perennial whipping boy is now scaling better than SLI (290x and newer only) because they added a hardware unit to handle syncing up the cards. It's just perception at this point.
@Flunk: "If you read the article, it says they're rewritten the whole thing and added some new features. So, no it's not just a visual change."
It says they've rewritten the whole CONTROL PANEL. "..., with the company ditching the entire Catalyst .NET codebase." You don't really think that any of the driver base was written in .NET do you? Err, ... , well, ... , anyways, I'd hope they wouldn't do something that stupid.
"Settings will be a ground-up redesign for AMD, with the company ditching the entire Catalyst .NET codebase. In its place AMD has built a new control panel from scratch based on the QT framework (ed: this will only be for Windows, at least for now), with the goal of giving their control panel a rather significant visual overhaul while also addressing load time complaints that go back to the earliest days of the .NET control panel."
Just an FYI, the switch from .NET to QT is GUI only. I'm also assuming, "Setttings," is specific to the GUI as well - probably how the GUI talks to the back-end to make the application feel quicker (asynchronous calls probably).
The main question is, are they re-writing what's under the hood. Putting a 1970 v4 engine in a lambo does not make an awesome car.
It allows individual gaming profiles to all games. So it is GUI, but there are also new features that were not in old GUI. The drivers are completely separate thing.
Terrible analogy! It would be more accurate to say that they're using the same engine. Just giving it some handling and appearance upgrades.
Anyway they're constantly improving the drivers as well, they finally got around to revamping the control center. This was a much needed improvement, and the upgraded per-game settings that come with the new control center are great - especially being able to use FRTC on a per-game basis. So they are adding relevant features. Plus this shows they're making their software side of the equation more of a priority than they did in the past.
I hope the unification of the Radeon guys under the RTG banner continues to yield positive changes on both the hardware and software sides.
What's being announced today is just the control panel. AMD has not announced any new core driver features besides the simple adjustments to support the new profile features.
OK, that's how I read it, but I just wanted to be sure. Hopefully the next step will be more performance oriented (in regard to actual GPU performance).
@nathananddrews It looks like they are exposing features that weren't exposed in the UI before. Didn't really need to change the UI altogether to do it, but as long as the new UI isn't worse I'll take that as a positive. This seems to be more about a changing of perception than practical improvements. Practical improvements generally take longer to implement so it could just be that this is the first change with more still in the pipe.
The CCC is the #1 complaint people have about AMD graphics on the software side... so, yes, that's where you would begin to improve things.
That said, the article listed a couple of things that were different (per-game FPS limiting. The screenshot showed a 255fps limit, which is FAR better than the current max of 95FPS.
I don't like the flat aesthetic, but at least it isn't overdone.
What's more, it looks like you can set OverDrive profiles per game, which will be a VERY welcome addition! I current link my profiles to macro keys on my keyboard. I'd much prefer to have a super-low clocked default except when I'm actually gaming - and only one game I play can actually push my card enough to need full clocks (BF4).
So, there are obviously some nice upgrades to be seen here.
AMD actually started last year on the whole major update/minor update cadence. Throughout most of 2015, they were updating the older driver code base as necessary for new hardware and games while working on this.
The downside to a yearly new feature cadence is that it'll be 2016 for the next wave of major features get integrated. On the plus side, it looks likes AMD has returned once again to monthly updates for bug fixes and new game profiles. Hopefully this will be used get profiles to end users before a game ships instead of afterward.
AMD didn't stopped the monthly updates. They minimized the number of WHQL drivers, but Beta drivers where frequent and very stable. Nvidia on the other hand was coming with hotfixes after hotfixes for it's frequent WHQL drivers, with that Chrome bug, being just one example where the WHQL stamp isn't more than just an extra stamp.
Chrome crashes on almost every beta release of AMD/ATi drivers. The only reason you don't hear about it much anymore is because Chrome hard-disabled hardware acceleration when it detects AMD/ATi drivers and has for a while now.
The only way I am able to force Chrome hardware acceleration without crashing is to rigidly stick with Catalyst 15.7.1 and even there there is frequent massive render bugs like black squares everywhere (No crashes though).
I'm using the 15.10 beta drivers on an HD7870 and Chrome lists all but the rasterization as being on for hardware acceleration there are 4 workarounds though but it is on so not sure what the issue is for you.
Hardware Accelerated Rasterization is incredibly important, as that is basically the most GPU-centric of the tasks for a browser to hardware accelerate. If you browse websites with lots of pictures strewn everywhere without Hardware Accelerated Rasterization you are going to meet choppiness and quickly.
Hardware accelerated rasterization is the reason why PoS phone SoCs can run 4k screens with worse than atom processors on websites massive amounts of images on them at silky smooth 60 fps.
Try to do the same thing on PC with software rasterization and have fun with your slideshow.
AMD should have focused on performance, power savings, BOM reduction, more frequent and reliable driver updates... Better control panel is good but not a game changer, and frankly don't think it matters at all.
I personally dislike custom GUI styling and commend nvidia for sticking with stock windows look in the windows control panel. It makes the app consistent with the rest of the OS and that is good for my book. Amazing graphics and features is where I like diversification, not in GUI design.
The actual driver would be done by a different team compared to the control panel (Radeon Settings/ CCC). So its not likely for AMD to have diverted resources (human wise) from making the changes you want. These teams would have a different set of programming skills and in this case this teams job is to allow you the user to access certain features of the driver/gpu.
I wish they got rid of the rapter plugin as optimized game settings is nice and all for people who don't like to tweak them to personal taste but raptr should not be part of the deal.
When installing AMD drivers instead of selecting express install select custom install, that will give you the option to not install Raptr. You can also pretty simply uninstall Raptr through the control panel.
So they copied the Geforce Experience, does that mean that they will also start doing driver releases in tandem with major game launches to optimize as well?
This is not akin to Geforce Experience, that would be Raptr. CCC/Radeon Software is analogous to Nvidia Control Panel, not what I would call bloatware...
No, it's really not. Geforce Experience and Raptr focus on full game setting optimization plus whatever junk they throw in like screen capturing. The stuff you see in the Game Manager screenshot is no different settings then you'll find in the Nvidia Control Panel 3D settings, its just that now AMD is adding per game profiles which is very handy for some things like frame rate control.
"At this point AMD tells us that the first release of the Radeon Software drivers and Radeon Settings control panel will be in Q4. However I expect that we may see it a bit sooner than that, and that AMD is shooting for November while offering a conservative ETA."
Aren't we already in Q4 (doesn't Q4 start in October?)?
AMD's last quarter once again showed how difficult its CPU and Graphics division is doing. With the big release of the Fury and 390 brands, revenue was up for the division but so were the losses ( $45 million revenue increase, $35 million loss increase from the previously bad quarter). It would be interesting to see if the dividing the graphics into its own division will be treated as such in AMD's financial filings. we could finally see how AMD is tackling the Intel/NVidia giants.
AMD the CPU company has been dead for many years at this point.
The cutting up of the company along the lines talked about is to salvage the part of the company that is still living from the part of the company that is necrotic and has been rotting the living part for at least 3 years now.
So basically a shiny new wrapper, that may not win new customers, but may just give the dozen or so diehard fans the illusion of getting their money's worth... oh well, same ol' AMD.
It's more than skin-deep. The screen-shots alone show features that require driver updates to work such as > 95FPS FrameLimiting and per-app OverDrive profiles. You can't do that with a new skin.
The ability to auto-setup Eyefinity is also more than skin-deep, much more.
Nov 2015, and still no adaptive Vsync? RadeonPro stops working in Win 10, so it cant help anymore. Always have some micro stutter here and there. I've got the 4670 and 7750, and pretty sure I'm done with AMD.
Dx12, Mantle, and any other low level API are there only to show one thing: the hardware is good, but the driver is crappy as f*ck.
What are you talking about? AMD has has adaptive VSync out for quite a long time. You have to buy a monitor that supports it.
RadeonPro is 3rd party software, talk to the authors about Windows 10 support. Not sure what RadeonPro could do for micro stutters, though, AMD's drivers have excellent frame pacing abilities, so micro stutter should be almost non-existent.
Oh, wait, you have bottom of the line cards, generations old, aren't up to date with what is happening, and you're blaming AMD... got it.
Freesync/G-Sync are typically described as variable refresh. Adaptive v-sync would be the ability to dynamically turn v-sync on and off depending on the framerate, typically locking v-sync on at 60fps and turning it off if the framerate drops below that.
That's Free Sync, not adaptive Vsync. Pls read Ryan's comment for more info on them. The developer of RadeonPro left for Raptr, so it is no more. So you dont even know what you're talking about right?
You don't see my point of having old cards? Ok, firstly I've been using them for about 6 six yrs now, been thru a lot (of frustration) with them. Secondly, when it's about time to upgrade, I'm not going with AMD again, not with those crappy drivers.
Oh yeah, needless to say even their own Frame Rate Control doesnt work in Win 10, hahaha. They're neither talented nor listening, that's why they're going down, hard.
They can add all the window dressing and flashy GUI stuff they want, what I want to know is, have they fixed DX9 CF and CF stability in general? Because atm it's terrible, so damn glitchy when I tried it with two 7970s.
Personally I think going from .Net to Qt is going to benefit Linux platform. Also it would help with start up time (Qt is much faster in this regard, as it does not have to load bunch of .Net runtime to the memory). For code maintenance-vice I believe that Qt would be a nightmare, unless the people use Managed C++ code in the old CCC codebase (which is equally bad IMHO).
They can of cause just update its UI code to be native ones so it does not look distinctively ugly on Windows, which would be their focus. I don't really know why they make a switch though.
If it were me to choose, I would go with other toolkit that more friendly than Qt (it require a lot of custom tool likq QMake, and use pretty ugly code under the hood). Probably ... CopperSpice ? I don't know (have heard this name in CPPCON2015, it's basically a Qt fork that focus on modernize its code. No major user currenly AFAIK).
The last AMD video card I used was a Radeon HD 6570 and that was a while ago so my personal experiences are a tad dated. Under Windows Vista and 7, I had no problems with the GPU and drivers. Things pretty much worked without me being worried about getting the latest Catalyst driver to fix some outstanding problem. When I moved that computer to Ubuntu I didn't really do much to push the card. It spent most of its time displaying web pages. There were no problems there either. I've since moved on to use NV graphics in my current big laptop (Linux Mint) and my desktop (Win7 Pro). Both are equally well-behaved so as far as driver quality is concerned, my experiences limited personal experiences make them a non-issue in my mind. I understand that not everyone will have the same results and some people are going to have pretty strong brand loyalty emotions tied to a particular product too. In the end, I really would just like to see AMD remain competitive because I certainly don't like the idea of an Intel or Nvidia that doesn't have to worry at least a little bit about what that other company is doing. :)
I dont want to see AMD gone either. But their driver team sucks, really really sucks. They only care about average fps in benchmark, and not smoothness in gameplay.
100fps sounds super cool? No, think again. How about for the first half second, the card stutters and puts out 0 Frames, and then for the second half it pushes out 100 Frames? Still 100 frames in total for that single second, right? But if your char dies during the stutter, you might want to throw the mouse across the room rather than continue playing.
Now that you mention it, I do remember having some inconsistent performance problems in Fallout 3 on the HD 6750 which really ought to have been quick enough to handle a game like that at 1280x1024 pretty easily. A much older GeForce 8800 GTS had no similar problems and neither does a GeForce GT 730 which are respectively a bit slower and a bit faster than the Radeon card. I didn't notice that problem in any other game, even later Bethesda stuff like Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim on the Radeon card and I wrote it off to FO3 being kinda quirky due to its age. Maybe it was an AMD-induced problem. If it was though, it was a pretty mild problem and I still played quite a bit without it being too frustrating. Then again, it's not a reflex intensive FPS with other human players where hesitation would make a big difference in the gaming experience.
Major UI Redesigns are always a source of bugs. Drivers are inherently supposed to be stable. They should have just worked on features, stability, and performance. Oh well. I was already leaning to getting my son a GTX 970 any how. I currently have an R9 290 that I have mixed feelings about. The BIOS and as a second resort drivers should be able to keep a GPU from overheating when I don't even overclock. The nvidia GPUS use about 100 watts less power, but have a coil squeal. I guess you can't win. I do like that the R9 390 has 8GB RAM though.
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Chaser - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Good for AMD!extide - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
So, it looks like they are trying to make a point about showing that they are taking the software side more seriously. It looks like this is just a GUI change mostly -- not necessarily a brand new driver itself. It looks like they are saying that they want to put more focus and effort into the drivers in the future though. We will have to see how it pans out. It's funny I remember the old pre-catalyst ATI drivers, and when catalyst control center came out and stuff, heh.karthik.hegde - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
This is the problem. People assume things about AMD. Did you even read the article? It "Looks" like a GUI change? What special power allows you to see inside the code just by seeing the slides!!?Hold your judgement at least till it is released!
Jamor - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Well you tend to put the important features first in slides, so when they emphasize UI and ease of use, it's no great leap to assume that's where their focus is...Wolfpup - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Yeah, seems like this is the 9000th time AMD/ATi has claimed they're going to be serious about drivers.So far every single time has been a lie, but I still hold out a slim hope they'll actually get serious.
They NEED to actually make sure their drivers work great with all games, including very old games. They NEED to make sure they for the very first time in their history actually start supporting their mobile GPUs...
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Pretty sure they don't "need" to optimise for very old games. In fact that's probably the opposite of what a cash-starved organisation struggling for market share needs to do!nathanddrews - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
So is this just a cosmetic change for the interface or will there be tangible performance improvements for games? As it stands, the CCC doesn't bug me. It's clunky, but works fine for me.tipoo - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
That's what I'm wondering. Any special sauce, or just a visual and brand refresh?Flunk - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
If you read the article, it says they're rewritten the whole thing and added some new features. So, no it's not just a visual change.Jumangi - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
They are talking about the core driver not the flashy setting panels. AMD and put all the lipstick they want on the front end. Their problem is matching Nvidia in quality drivers which they have been behind on for years now.Bateluer - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
AMD has been ahead of Nvidia, actually, for several years now. Nvidia's been throwing in more and more proprietary tech into their drivers, driving them down even further.fireduckzilla - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
@Bateluer - I don't know what AMD drivers you've been using - but I've got a 295x2, and the number of times its crashed because of terrible drivers, or things have become unplayable is ridiculous. When Dragon Age 3 came out - I swapped out to a GTX 770 and actually got better FPS. Its been nothing but strife - I'm going back to SLI Nvidia with the next generation - Hell, if the 980ti comes down a little more in price I might jump ship early. It's ridiculous that a company would even consider writing driver control panels in .NET; Performance is key - and they used one of the slowest programming languages!?Well played AMD for pulling the wool over my eyes this time - but never again.
twnznz - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
It's not the product, it's you. I have a 5970 still in production, which had very few issues despite being a dual-GPU-on-a-card product. You either had a broken registry, a bad CPU, or something else wrong.AMD is ahead of NVIDIA driver-wise /ignoring/ the frontend. You can see they're still working hard behind the scenes when they released the first production-worthy DX12 driver which Ars documented back in August. You can also see their contribution to Open Source with their OSS kernel module, and their commitment to opening the drivers, contributing to 'Radeon' and deprecating FGLRX.
NVidia, meanwhile, deserves the Linus Torvalds Finger.
Michael Bay - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
And still AMD drivers on loonix are abysmal, especially compared to nV. Not that anyone sane even cares about them being open or closed-source.eek2121 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
I just want to throw my 2 cents in and say that AMD drivers have been extremely stable for me. I game with friends every friday (all with nvidia hardware) and they often crash at least once during our session. Typically while alt tabbing or streaming. I don't have these issues with AMD. I alt tab AND stream.Morawka - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
amd drivers are not even close to nvidia,, all their game ready releases are beta drivers, meanwhile nvidia's are all whql certified.It is well known nvidia's directx 11 driver optimizations are second to none, it's even admitted here on anandtech.
All of this year's AAA releases are using DX 11
looncraz - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I have administered fleets of machine, AMD drivers caused less problems when running and require less reconfiguration than nVidia to get things as they should be. nVidia had more cases of crashes and the, rare, system instability issue. Neither company's driver was fully better than the other, but nVidia did present more problems in use.However, driver support for new games was delivered more quickly and, yes, WHQL certification was more frequent. This really is a non-issue, though, unless you are forced to use WHQL drivers or are frequently adopting bleeding edge games that don't yet have driver support (this is actually rare, most new games work just fine with existing drivers, but better drivers leads to better performance and, sometimes, resolves issues game developers were too lazy to fix).
BurntMyBacon - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
@Morawka: "..., all their game ready releases are beta drivers, meanwhile nvidia's are all whql certified."That is just a difference in philosophy. AMD doesn't think that the common user should be bothered to upgrade their driver all the time when it only affects the newest games that the common user probably isn't playing. They view the beta driver as the gamers driver. Feel free to disagree with their naming scheme or definition of beta, but I wouldn't worry too much about the whql certification in this instance.
Having spend more than a little time on both sides of the fence (concurrently I might add), I think many issues people blame on drivers are more related to actual hardware issue (not necessarily GPU) and all the crap they get on their computers from their browsing habits. I've seen a lot of stable systems with both manufacturers. I feel like ATi has the edge in the HTPC realm. Multicard setups still go to nVidia, though that gap has gotten much smaller since the release of the Radeon 2xx series. nVidia does tend to get driver optimizations for new games out sooner than ATi. Though, this was much worse before ATi started to push developer relations.
@Morawka: "It is well known nvidia's directx 11 driver optimizations are second to none, it's even admitted here on anandtech."
They are definitely faster at getting the optimizations in there. However, as I look more at the architectures, I get the feeling that their optimizations aren't so much superior, but rather their hardware architecture is well optimized for DX11. Initially I simply credited this as ATi putting too much focus on compute. However, ATi and AMD have a long had a history of pushing forward looking architectures before their time. Given some of the features that are now being used by developers, it would appear that ATi's time with mantle had them focused on low level APIs and consequently, they spend resources into areas that aren't necessarily useful to DX11 games.
@Morawka: "All of this year's AAA releases are using DX 11"
Really? All of them? Not a single DX12 game among them? With all the hype, I would have thought it would have been a bigger deal for the AAA houses if for no other reason than to check the DX12 check box. It's a good thing people swap out video cards on a yearly basis or they might get stuck with a terrible video card when DX12 hits.
Sarcasm aside you bring up a good point, the vast majority of games in the near term are still DX11 games. DX11 will be a valid code path for the foreseeable future. DX12 is not a magic bullet, though like some previous versions of DX it has some advantages that will eventually allow for substantially different gameplay than you can get with DX11 (or DX12 at the moment). While I think ATi's architecture is better suited for DX12 at the moment, the superior DX12 architectures won't come until we see how game developers figure out how they are going to use the features available.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
looncraz and burntmybacon are the most sane commenters in this thread so far.I have experienced all sorts of crashes and weirdness from both companies, but only with nVidia have I experienced random intermittent crashing after a driver update that GeForce Experience recommended to me. Similarly I have access to an (admittedly awful) HDTV that works fine connected to AMD cards but has never (as in, not ever) been able to run properly at native resolution without overscan on nVidia drivers.
Those edge cases aside, both companies produce decent drivers and have good products. I am currently with nVidia for SLI / GSync but am contemplating a switch to an R9 Nano at some point in the near future.
variform - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
First clear headed post I've found here. It's also important to realize that having too many WHQL drivers is seen as a bad thing. Normal users don't like having to update things.There is also another thing to point out. NVIDIA cards rely on individual optimizations more than AMD. To put it simply this has to do with the fact that NVIDIA uses tricks like queue and compression to squeeze more performance out of less "muscle" and power. NVIDIA cards often perform abysmally when using old drivers with new games. AMD is less impacted by this
K_Space - Saturday, November 21, 2015 - link
They are labelled beta because they are not WHQL dude.@fireduckzilla I have a 295x2 with 98 games in my steam library and then some in Origins and I haven't had any issues. How did you isolate your problem to the drivers?
Wolfpup - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
This is just nonsense, and presumably you know it. AMD's drivers are comparatively a disaster. In fact at this point I almost trust Intel's drivers over AMD's.AMD's problem has never been hardware, which has always been amazing. They need to actually get serious about drivers, and not just CLAIM they're going to finally be serious. They're literally nearly 20 years late at this point.
HollyDOL - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
The question is.. why is there long term problems with ATI/AMD drivers? My father once noted that having problems with drivers for so long can't be just issue of bad coding. And I think there might be a point in that. It's possible that hardware architecture of ATI/AMD cards is very unfriendly towards driver development making the task of creating reliable driver much harder than it is for competition.K_Space - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
295x2 user here and no issues what so ever. (Actually single issue Dirt Rally - early access I might add - used to crash on CF, this was adressed by Codemasters with a patch released today)I'd have to agree with twnznz; it has been mentioned quite few times on Anandtech comments section how FPS rate seem to steadily climb even on GCN 1.0 cards up to this day. Personally I haven't had any issues with CCC so I'll be intruiged to what's on offer.
garbagedisposal - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Yes, AMD is trash because *your* experiences are universal. Mkay.HollyDOL - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
1. what you write control panel in couldn't matter less. It's not a driver, just a thing that edits "config file"2. claiming .NET being slowest programming language is false at best.
GarzMan - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Haha you just don't know how to use a computer properly, If you are having so many issues. Honestly the drivers AMD have been putting out lately have been very good. In fact better then nVidia.Wolfpup - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Yep, absolutely. I HOPE this means they're going to actually pay attention to the drivers themselves, but they've claimed they are 9000 times at this point, and then never do.Flunk - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
AMD doesn't have a problem with their actual drivers. I have more problems with my Geforce 650M in my laptop than my Radeon 280x in my desktop. Even Crossfire, the perennial whipping boy is now scaling better than SLI (290x and newer only) because they added a hardware unit to handle syncing up the cards. It's just perception at this point.BurntMyBacon - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
@Flunk: "If you read the article, it says they're rewritten the whole thing and added some new features. So, no it's not just a visual change."It says they've rewritten the whole CONTROL PANEL. "..., with the company ditching the entire Catalyst .NET codebase." You don't really think that any of the driver base was written in .NET do you? Err, ... , well, ... , anyways, I'd hope they wouldn't do something that stupid.
Tewt - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
It's in the article:"Settings will be a ground-up redesign for AMD, with the company ditching the entire Catalyst .NET codebase. In its place AMD has built a new control panel from scratch based on the QT framework (ed: this will only be for Windows, at least for now), with the goal of giving their control panel a rather significant visual overhaul while also addressing load time complaints that go back to the earliest days of the .NET control panel."
toffty - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Just an FYI, the switch from .NET to QT is GUI only. I'm also assuming, "Setttings," is specific to the GUI as well - probably how the GUI talks to the back-end to make the application feel quicker (asynchronous calls probably).The main question is, are they re-writing what's under the hood. Putting a 1970 v4 engine in a lambo does not make an awesome car.
haukionkannel - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
It allows individual gaming profiles to all games. So it is GUI, but there are also new features that were not in old GUI. The drivers are completely separate thing.Alexvrb - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Terrible analogy! It would be more accurate to say that they're using the same engine. Just giving it some handling and appearance upgrades.Anyway they're constantly improving the drivers as well, they finally got around to revamping the control center. This was a much needed improvement, and the upgraded per-game settings that come with the new control center are great - especially being able to use FRTC on a per-game basis. So they are adding relevant features. Plus this shows they're making their software side of the equation more of a priority than they did in the past.
I hope the unification of the Radeon guys under the RTG banner continues to yield positive changes on both the hardware and software sides.
HollyDOL - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
If it is the QT I have been working with few years back I feel sorry for the devs...xdrol - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Depends what "years back" actually is. QT 5.5 is quite nice.Ryan Smith - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
What's being announced today is just the control panel. AMD has not announced any new core driver features besides the simple adjustments to support the new profile features.nathanddrews - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
OK, that's how I read it, but I just wanted to be sure. Hopefully the next step will be more performance oriented (in regard to actual GPU performance).BurntMyBacon - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
@nathananddrewsIt looks like they are exposing features that weren't exposed in the UI before. Didn't really need to change the UI altogether to do it, but as long as the new UI isn't worse I'll take that as a positive. This seems to be more about a changing of perception than practical improvements. Practical improvements generally take longer to implement so it could just be that this is the first change with more still in the pipe.
Mushkins - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
That's step one in his grand strategy to bail out this sinking ship? Rebrand the driver interface?So it's the same set of awkwardly named options that only work half the time, but now they're even harder to find. Sounds like a winning plan to me.
looncraz - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
The CCC is the #1 complaint people have about AMD graphics on the software side... so, yes, that's where you would begin to improve things.That said, the article listed a couple of things that were different (per-game FPS limiting. The screenshot showed a 255fps limit, which is FAR better than the current max of 95FPS.
I don't like the flat aesthetic, but at least it isn't overdone.
What's more, it looks like you can set OverDrive profiles per game, which will be a VERY welcome addition! I current link my profiles to macro keys on my keyboard. I'd much prefer to have a super-low clocked default except when I'm actually gaming - and only one game I play can actually push my card enough to need full clocks (BF4).
So, there are obviously some nice upgrades to be seen here.
tipoo - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
It did need an overhaul. This is hardly their one hail mary.Tewt - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Read the article. Not just a rebrand but rebuilding the underlying software.Gigaplex - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
No, it's rebuilding the front facing software. The underlying driver isn't getting rewritten.BobSwi - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
But that social integration, just what I want for my video drivers. /sKevin G - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
AMD actually started last year on the whole major update/minor update cadence. Throughout most of 2015, they were updating the older driver code base as necessary for new hardware and games while working on this.The downside to a yearly new feature cadence is that it'll be 2016 for the next wave of major features get integrated. On the plus side, it looks likes AMD has returned once again to monthly updates for bug fixes and new game profiles. Hopefully this will be used get profiles to end users before a game ships instead of afterward.
yannigr2 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
AMD didn't stopped the monthly updates. They minimized the number of WHQL drivers, but Beta drivers where frequent and very stable. Nvidia on the other hand was coming with hotfixes after hotfixes for it's frequent WHQL drivers, with that Chrome bug, being just one example where the WHQL stamp isn't more than just an extra stamp.Communism - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Chrome crashes on almost every beta release of AMD/ATi drivers. The only reason you don't hear about it much anymore is because Chrome hard-disabled hardware acceleration when it detects AMD/ATi drivers and has for a while now.Communism - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
The only way I am able to force Chrome hardware acceleration without crashing is to rigidly stick with Catalyst 15.7.1 and even there there is frequent massive render bugs like black squares everywhere (No crashes though).caqde - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I'm using the 15.10 beta drivers on an HD7870 and Chrome lists all but the rasterization as being on for hardware acceleration there are 4 workarounds though but it is on so not sure what the issue is for you.Communism - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Hardware Accelerated Rasterization is incredibly important, as that is basically the most GPU-centric of the tasks for a browser to hardware accelerate. If you browse websites with lots of pictures strewn everywhere without Hardware Accelerated Rasterization you are going to meet choppiness and quickly.Cryio - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Is Hardware Accelerated Rasterization that important?I am using Opera on Windows 10 with a 280X, drivers 15.10 and Hardware Accelerated Rasterization was disabled.
Communism - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Hardware accelerated rasterization is the reason why PoS phone SoCs can run 4k screens with worse than atom processors on websites massive amounts of images on them at silky smooth 60 fps.Try to do the same thing on PC with software rasterization and have fun with your slideshow.
roc1 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
AMD should have focused on performance, power savings, BOM reduction, more frequent and reliable driver updates... Better control panel is good but not a game changer, and frankly don't think it matters at all.I personally dislike custom GUI styling and commend nvidia for sticking with stock windows look in the windows control panel. It makes the app consistent with the rest of the OS and that is good for my book. Amazing graphics and features is where I like diversification, not in GUI design.
squngy - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Sometimes it is good to take the low hanging fruit first.Murloc - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
this is also the easiest and probably least costly stuff though. It also impacts all users.You have to start from somewhere...
caqde - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The actual driver would be done by a different team compared to the control panel (Radeon Settings/ CCC). So its not likely for AMD to have diverted resources (human wise) from making the changes you want. These teams would have a different set of programming skills and in this case this teams job is to allow you the user to access certain features of the driver/gpu.qlum - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
I wish they got rid of the rapter plugin as optimized game settings is nice and all for people who don't like to tweak them to personal taste but raptr should not be part of the deal.Communism - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Yes, I hope this isn't a raptr reskin.Ryan Smith - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
It's not. Raptr/Gaming Evolved is a separate application and will continue to be bundled with the drivers.Communism - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Thanks for the response :D.It's good to know that this seems to be a good step.
One just learns over the years that anything that sounds good coming out of AMD/ATi's mouth regarding software never really turns out to be true.
I just hope that this time it's different :D.
freeskier93 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
When installing AMD drivers instead of selecting express install select custom install, that will give you the option to not install Raptr. You can also pretty simply uninstall Raptr through the control panel.Sttm - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
So they copied the Geforce Experience, does that mean that they will also start doing driver releases in tandem with major game launches to optimize as well?garbagedisposal - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
They already do driver releases with game launches, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.mobutu - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
more bloatware, along with the geforce experience crapfreeskier93 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
This is not akin to Geforce Experience, that would be Raptr. CCC/Radeon Software is analogous to Nvidia Control Panel, not what I would call bloatware...Sttm - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Go look at the Game Manager screenshot, that is Geforce Experience.freeskier93 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
No, it's really not. Geforce Experience and Raptr focus on full game setting optimization plus whatever junk they throw in like screen capturing. The stuff you see in the Game Manager screenshot is no different settings then you'll find in the Nvidia Control Panel 3D settings, its just that now AMD is adding per game profiles which is very handy for some things like frame rate control.johnpombrio - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Agreed. This is AMD's clone of NVidia's GeForce Experience.Shadow7037932 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Radeon Software Apple edition anyone? :PGigaplex - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Apple does their own driver software. They wouldn't let AMD or NVIDIA write it.prime2515103 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
"At this point AMD tells us that the first release of the Radeon Software drivers and Radeon Settings control panel will be in Q4. However I expect that we may see it a bit sooner than that, and that AMD is shooting for November while offering a conservative ETA."Aren't we already in Q4 (doesn't Q4 start in October?)?
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Yes we are. But "Q4" is their official statement on the matter.prime2515103 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
You said "However I expect that we may see it a bit sooner than that..."My point was, how can we see it sooner than Q4 if it's already Q4? Just nitpicking...
johnpombrio - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
AMD's last quarter once again showed how difficult its CPU and Graphics division is doing. With the big release of the Fury and 390 brands, revenue was up for the division but so were the losses ( $45 million revenue increase, $35 million loss increase from the previously bad quarter). It would be interesting to see if the dividing the graphics into its own division will be treated as such in AMD's financial filings. we could finally see how AMD is tackling the Intel/NVidia giants.Communism - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
AMD the CPU company has been dead for many years at this point.The cutting up of the company along the lines talked about is to salvage the part of the company that is still living from the part of the company that is necrotic and has been rotting the living part for at least 3 years now.
D. Lister - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
So basically a shiny new wrapper, that may not win new customers, but may just give the dozen or so diehard fans the illusion of getting their money's worth... oh well, same ol' AMD.looncraz - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Didn't read the article, eh?It's more than skin-deep. The screen-shots alone show features that require driver updates to work such as > 95FPS FrameLimiting and per-app OverDrive profiles. You can't do that with a new skin.
The ability to auto-setup Eyefinity is also more than skin-deep, much more.
Zeus Hai - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Nov 2015, and still no adaptive Vsync? RadeonPro stops working in Win 10, so it cant help anymore. Always have some micro stutter here and there. I've got the 4670 and 7750, and pretty sure I'm done with AMD.Dx12, Mantle, and any other low level API are there only to show one thing: the hardware is good, but the driver is crappy as f*ck.
looncraz - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
What are you talking about? AMD has has adaptive VSync out for quite a long time. You have to buy a monitor that supports it.RadeonPro is 3rd party software, talk to the authors about Windows 10 support. Not sure what RadeonPro could do for micro stutters, though, AMD's drivers have excellent frame pacing abilities, so micro stutter should be almost non-existent.
Oh, wait, you have bottom of the line cards, generations old, aren't up to date with what is happening, and you're blaming AMD... got it.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Freesync/G-Sync are typically described as variable refresh. Adaptive v-sync would be the ability to dynamically turn v-sync on and off depending on the framerate, typically locking v-sync on at 60fps and turning it off if the framerate drops below that.Zeus Hai - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
That's Free Sync, not adaptive Vsync. Pls read Ryan's comment for more info on them. The developer of RadeonPro left for Raptr, so it is no more. So you dont even know what you're talking about right?You don't see my point of having old cards? Ok, firstly I've been using them for about 6 six yrs now, been thru a lot (of frustration) with them. Secondly, when it's about time to upgrade, I'm not going with AMD again, not with those crappy drivers.
Oh yeah, needless to say even their own Frame Rate Control doesnt work in Win 10, hahaha. They're neither talented nor listening, that's why they're going down, hard.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
They can add all the window dressing and flashy GUI stuff they want, what I want to know is, have they fixed DX9 CF and CF stability in general? Because atm it's terrible, so damn glitchy when I tried it with two 7970s.mr_tawan - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Personally I think going from .Net to Qt is going to benefit Linux platform. Also it would help with start up time (Qt is much faster in this regard, as it does not have to load bunch of .Net runtime to the memory). For code maintenance-vice I believe that Qt would be a nightmare, unless the people use Managed C++ code in the old CCC codebase (which is equally bad IMHO).They can of cause just update its UI code to be native ones so it does not look distinctively ugly on Windows, which would be their focus. I don't really know why they make a switch though.
If it were me to choose, I would go with other toolkit that more friendly than Qt (it require a lot of custom tool likq QMake, and use pretty ugly code under the hood). Probably ... CopperSpice ? I don't know (have heard this name in CPPCON2015, it's basically a Qt fork that focus on modernize its code. No major user currenly AFAIK).
BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The last AMD video card I used was a Radeon HD 6570 and that was a while ago so my personal experiences are a tad dated. Under Windows Vista and 7, I had no problems with the GPU and drivers. Things pretty much worked without me being worried about getting the latest Catalyst driver to fix some outstanding problem. When I moved that computer to Ubuntu I didn't really do much to push the card. It spent most of its time displaying web pages. There were no problems there either. I've since moved on to use NV graphics in my current big laptop (Linux Mint) and my desktop (Win7 Pro). Both are equally well-behaved so as far as driver quality is concerned, my experiences limited personal experiences make them a non-issue in my mind. I understand that not everyone will have the same results and some people are going to have pretty strong brand loyalty emotions tied to a particular product too. In the end, I really would just like to see AMD remain competitive because I certainly don't like the idea of an Intel or Nvidia that doesn't have to worry at least a little bit about what that other company is doing. :)Zeus Hai - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I dont want to see AMD gone either. But their driver team sucks, really really sucks. They only care about average fps in benchmark, and not smoothness in gameplay.100fps sounds super cool? No, think again. How about for the first half second, the card stutters and puts out 0 Frames, and then for the second half it pushes out 100 Frames? Still 100 frames in total for that single second, right? But if your char dies during the stutter, you might want to throw the mouse across the room rather than continue playing.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Now that you mention it, I do remember having some inconsistent performance problems in Fallout 3 on the HD 6750 which really ought to have been quick enough to handle a game like that at 1280x1024 pretty easily. A much older GeForce 8800 GTS had no similar problems and neither does a GeForce GT 730 which are respectively a bit slower and a bit faster than the Radeon card. I didn't notice that problem in any other game, even later Bethesda stuff like Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim on the Radeon card and I wrote it off to FO3 being kinda quirky due to its age. Maybe it was an AMD-induced problem. If it was though, it was a pretty mild problem and I still played quite a bit without it being too frustrating. Then again, it's not a reflex intensive FPS with other human players where hesitation would make a big difference in the gaming experience.seier - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Major UI Redesigns are always a source of bugs. Drivers are inherently supposed to be stable. They should have just worked on features, stability, and performance. Oh well. I was already leaning to getting my son a GTX 970 any how. I currently have an R9 290 that I have mixed feelings about. The BIOS and as a second resort drivers should be able to keep a GPU from overheating when I don't even overclock. The nvidia GPUS use about 100 watts less power, but have a coil squeal. I guess you can't win. I do like that the R9 390 has 8GB RAM though.