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cynan
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AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ short

Thu Aug 01, 2013 6:14 pm

Looks like AMD has released their beta Catalyst 13.8 driver that includes frame pacing for better fluidity with Crossfire configs.

From the release notes:

Support for AMD CrossFire™ Frame Pacing

Frame Pacing ensures that frames rendered across multiple GPUs in a CrossFire configuration will be displayed at an even and regular pace.

Enabled through the AMD Catalyst Control Center; Globally or on a per application basis.

Frame Pacing is enabled by default.


Anyone with an HD 7XXX crossfire setup want to give this a spin and let us know how they work?
 
wingless
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Thu Aug 01, 2013 6:40 pm

I'm sending this GTX 760 I bought last week back for an HD 7950 Boost for future Crossfire lovin'!
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michael_d
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Thu Aug 01, 2013 8:17 pm

My Sapphire HD7970 is sitting in drawer. I gave up on AMD at least for now. No physics and worst of all no support for Metro games. Ever since I started using Titan I noticed the following:
* Metro and Gears Of War dynamic light effects are not even rendered in some areas on Radeon.
* Particle effects in Rage look much better on Titan.
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I am looking forward to Maxwell
 
just brew it!
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 12:51 am

Looks like they released a 13.8 beta for Linux as well. Guess I will give it a try...
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Prestige Worldwide
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 6:22 am

A feature gimped experimental driver to sort out frame pacing roughly 20 months after the 7970 is released..... ouch.
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wingless
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 6:38 am

michael_d wrote:
My Sapphire HD7970 is sitting in drawer. I gave up on AMD at least for now. No physics and worst of all no support for Metro games. Ever since I started using Titan I noticed the following:
* Metro and Gears Of War dynamic light effects are not even rendered in some areas on Radeon.
* Particle effects in Rage look much better on Titan.
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I am looking forward to Maxwell


My Experience with the my new GTX 760 in Metro: Last Light is this: After 5 minutes or less of game play, my GPU utilization would drop from 98% to 10-20% and frames would go to 10FPS! I tried all the GTX 760 compatible Nvidia drivers to no avail. This was in Windows 8.0 Ultimate SP1 64bit. I'm hoping it's just a Windows 8 issue. I'll test in Win 7 Ult. 64bit when I get home today.

So far with the GTX 760, the game is unplayable for this reason!
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michael_d
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 7:06 am

wingless wrote:
michael_d wrote:
My Sapphire HD7970 is sitting in drawer. I gave up on AMD at least for now. No physics and worst of all no support for Metro games. Ever since I started using Titan I noticed the following:
* Metro and Gears Of War dynamic light effects are not even rendered in some areas on Radeon.
* Particle effects in Rage look much better on Titan.
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I am looking forward to Maxwell


My Experience with the my new GTX 760 in Metro: Last Light is this: After 5 minutes or less of game play, my GPU utilization would drop from 98% to 10-20% and frames would go to 10FPS! I tried all the GTX 760 compatible Nvidia drivers to no avail. This was in Windows 8.0 Ultimate SP1 64bit. I'm hoping it's just a Windows 8 issue. I'll test in Win 7 Ult. 64bit when I get home today.

So far with the GTX 760, the game is unplayable for this reason!


I am using 320.14. Your issue could be related to Physics driver. Uninstall it and install physics driver that came with the game. The game is much more fun with physics.

Also it looks much better with SSAA x4 and resolution set to 1920x1200 instead of 2560x1600. At 2560x1600 it becomes a bit choppy even on Titan and there are some graphical corruptions on water.
 
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 7:19 am

I had no problems with Metro: LL on my first playthrough with 670 SLI. Not sure which driver was out at the time but it must have been a week or 2 after MLL launched and I generally update to the most recent drivers for new games.

However, when the Factions Pack DLC launched last month, the Reich mission was completely unplayable. I was getting 10 fps at best, it was a total slideshow. Not sure if drivers or just a horribly unoptimized level is to blame but it was really bad.

I didn't even use SSAA, as I find that the built-in edge AA in MLL is fantastic. This is coming from someone who thinks 4xMSAA is necessary in BF3 @ 1080 and that the FXAA used in BF3 makes everything look all crappy, blurred, and reduces the visual depth perception between geometry in a multiplayer map.


Edit: Back on topic: despite not buying anything from AMD since the 4870 launched, I'm always rooting for them and hope they sort this pacing issue out. I really wouldn't buy an AMD card these days but I would certainly like to have them deliver a product that I would be compelled to buy.
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cynan
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 9:32 am

All the reviews of the beta driver so far seem to have been with the 7990. I was just wondering if anyone had tried it with a pair of HD 7XXX cards as I'm thinking about whether it's worth it to pick up another 7970 for 2560x1600.

michael_d wrote:
My Sapphire HD7970 is sitting in drawer. I gave up on AMD at least for now. No physics and worst of all no support for Metro games. Ever since I started using Titan I noticed the following:
* Metro and Gears Of War dynamic light effects are not even rendered in some areas on Radeon.
* Particle effects in Rage look much better on Titan.
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I am looking forward to Maxwell


And yes yes, of course Nvidia is obviously the superior choice. This thread is geared toward those poor schmucks amongst us who've already oh so foolishly invested in AMD graphcis.
 
Waco
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:17 am

michael_d wrote:
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I've seen no mention of this anywhere else but here...it sounds like you just have your gamma/brightness/contrast settings all jacked up in one set of drivers and not the other.

That said, this "beta" driver (can we really call it that when EVERY driver they release is a beta?) is disappointing. The people who need Crossfire fixed the most aren't helped at all by this...
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 10:46 am

Waco wrote:
michael_d wrote:
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I've seen no mention of this anywhere else but here...it sounds like you just have your gamma/brightness/contrast settings all jacked up in one set of drivers and not the other.

That said, this "beta" driver (can we really call it that when EVERY driver they release is a beta?) is disappointing. The people who need Crossfire fixed the most aren't helped at all by this...


I used to have weird render bugs in some games back when I was running e8400 / 4870. Quake wars had some really weird artifacting on a couple of Catalyst releases and I had something similar happening in BF:BC2 right before I switched to a GTX 295.

Not to say that the GeForces I've used since then have been without issues.

One driver release completely crippled my COD4 frame rate this year. This driver was the one I needed to play Metro 2033 without a wierd graphical corruption issue on most lighting sources and I found myself changing drivers whenever I wanted to go from playing one of those games to another. BF3's performance has had its ups and downs with different nVidia drivers as well.

Looks like certain game-specific tweaks come at the cost of potentially breaking / degrading older games at times.

Anyway, none of those issues really have anything to do with frame pacing so I guess I'm way off topic here.
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Waco
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 11:22 am

Oh I've had corruption from both parties' drivers in the past...but blanket statements like "company X's lighting is better" or "company Y has better contrast" are, from my experience, totally unrelated to either company. :P

Back in the day with separate render pipelines, maybe, but not today.
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Airmantharp
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 11:53 am

cynan wrote:
All the reviews of the beta driver so far seem to have been with the 7990. I was just wondering if anyone had tried it with a pair of HD 7XXX cards as I'm thinking about whether it's worth it to pick up another 7970 for 2560x1600.


I'd say yes; Anandtech appears to have run that configuration, and it showed significant promise. Just wait until the next-gen stuff comes out if you don't need the performance now, but it's not like the prices are bad at all.

I switched to Nvidia after trying HD6950 2GB CFX; it was fine for many games, but as I found after I switched, BF3 was just wretched on those cards, and that's what I'd bought them for, to run at 2560x1600.

But now, I'm looking forward to 4k in the next year or so, and AMD seems to have their act together; and getting ~6GB on a graphics card is far cheaper on AMD. Don't need it for the framebuffer, but with the new console games coming out that can make use of the 8GB of memory on the consoles, it looks like AMD is going to be the budget 4k option going forward!
 
mortifiedPenguin
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 12:48 pm

Installed this last night on my dual 7970's but I haven't had a chance to run any benchmarks. I usually run in Eyefinity (6048x1200) so this drive is of relatively limited use to me, but the fact that this is out there is a good sign.

Not sure if its particular to my config or not, but I did have freeze when trying to install the driver. On reboot, CCC only showed Hydravision was still installed but no graphics driver. Running the installer again had no issues so I guess it was just unable to install the new driver over the old one.
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DPete27
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 3:44 pm

1) We've known since March 26th that AMD would release this driver fix in the July driver.... Ok so it was August 2nd instead, but close enough.
2) From the TR review of the beta, I'm hoping the release driver at least includes SOME of the remaining missing support. If not, it will be a dollar short as well as a day late.
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keltor
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 4:16 pm

michael_d wrote:
My Sapphire HD7970 is sitting in drawer. I gave up on AMD at least for now. No physics and worst of all no support for Metro games. Ever since I started using Titan I noticed the following:
* Metro and Gears Of War dynamic light effects are not even rendered in some areas on Radeon.
* Particle effects in Rage look much better on Titan.
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I am looking forward to Maxwell


I have recently upgraded from dual 7970s to dual GTX780s and honestly I cannot find or see any of the issues you are talking about. As far as I know both Metro games and Rage use unified rendering paths, so there really shouldn't even BE any of these types of issues ...
 
michael_d
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Fri Aug 02, 2013 11:45 pm

When I had a pair of 5870s, I never experienced any stuttering, performance/scaling in general was pretty good at that time. The only problem I had was with STALKER CoP complete mod, the game would crash up on launch if Texture Quality set to maximum and CrossFire enabled. Is it supposed to improve performance with dual cards or a single card with dual GPUs or both?

Prestige Worldwide wrote:
I had no problems with Metro: LL on my first playthrough with 670 SLI. Not sure which driver was out at the time but it must have been a week or 2 after MLL launched and I generally update to the most recent drivers for new games.

However, when the Factions Pack DLC launched last month, the Reich mission was completely unplayable. I was getting 10 fps at best, it was a total slideshow. Not sure if drivers or just a horribly unoptimized level is to blame but it was really bad.

I didn't even use SSAA, as I find that the built-in edge AA in MLL is fantastic. This is coming from someone who thinks 4xMSAA is necessary in BF3 @ 1080 and that the FXAA used in BF3 makes everything look all crappy, blurred, and reduces the visual depth perception between geometry in a multiplayer map.


Edit: Back on topic: despite not buying anything from AMD since the 4870 launched, I'm always rooting for them and hope they sort this pacing issue out. I really wouldn't buy an AMD card these days but I would certainly like to have them deliver a product that I would be compelled to buy.


SSAA removes blurring caused by AAA. Textures look clearer especially at SSAA x3 and 4. Drawback, I had to set resolution from 2560x1600 to 1920x1200 but it looks better.
 
Waco
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Sat Aug 03, 2013 10:52 pm

keltor wrote:
I have recently upgraded from dual 7970s to dual GTX780s and honestly I cannot find or see any of the issues you are talking about. As far as I know both Metro games and Rage use unified rendering paths, so there really shouldn't even BE any of these types of issues ...

Similarly, I recently swapped from a 7970 to a 770 and minus the difference in noise and the presence of PhysX...everything is essentially the same.
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Fighterpilot
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Sat Aug 03, 2013 11:13 pm

michael_d wrote:
My Sapphire HD7970 is sitting in drawer. I gave up on AMD at least for now. No physics and worst of all no support for Metro games. Ever since I started using Titan I noticed the following:
* Metro and Gears Of War dynamic light effects are not even rendered in some areas on Radeon.
* Particle effects in Rage look much better on Titan.
* Texture filtering in general looks better and more detailed on Titan.
* Light effects in general look more authentic on Titan because light source illuminates a larger area and and interacts with object surfaces more fluidly and naturally.
* Light source is more intense on Radeon.

I am looking forward to Maxwell


What?....your $1000 dollar Titan has better image quality than a $400 dollar HD7970?
Damn....,didn't see that coming... :roll:
 
Waco
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Re: AMD's beta CX driver: A day late but hopefully not a $ s

Sun Aug 04, 2013 12:54 am

Fighterpilot wrote:
What?....your $1000 dollar Titan has better image quality than a $400 dollar HD7970?
Damn....,didn't see that coming... :roll:

Except that they both have exactly the same image quality...
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