AMD Catalyst 11.11 WHQL Driver Suite Released

I agree with you about ATi and OpenGL--that was my thought, as well. But the length of time here raises some interesting questions. First, I'd like to know where id came down on its in-house testing of Rage, because presumably id software has AMD cards it uses for development and testing along with nVidia cards it also uses for development and testing. Therefore, id software should have known on zero day that Rage was going to be a cluster-**** for current AMD card owners.

But I don't recall that id said much of anything on release day about having experienced problems with AMD products. That doesn't much compute for me. Of course, Carmack has always been partial to nVidia, but along the time he announced that id was moving to D3d as its target platform (several years ago), I had thought maybe that facet of his personality was in remission.

I suppose it is plausible to think that maybe id doesn't develop or test on anything except nVidia products as an explanation--but even nVidia products had problems with the game initially, and the FAQ that everyone referenced in the beginning to get the game to run semi-well with a minimum of texture pop-in prior to id's patch was a nVidia FAQ. So nVidia products, although seemingly optimized for, got the hose on release day, too: just not to the degree that the AMD products got it.

The sum total of this mess causes me to question whether Carmack sees any continuing value in "PC" support versus consoles and cell phones. Frankly, I'm really getting weary of hearing Carmack state how much more powerful "PCs" are than consoles, at the same time that he's apologizing for not taking advantage of that extra power by way of tailoring a PC release that could make use of any of it. I'd just rather id not bother with releasing a "PC" version of their games if they are going to do little more than port from a console version and call it a day.

Wanted to add that as of the last couple of Catalysts I've had this strange problem of the drivers stopping then restarting right after I'd make a change in the CCP. It could be as innocuous as simply opening the CCP under Win7 (x64)--driver would stop, go to a black screen, and in 1-2 seconds the desktop would come back with the systray balloon info telling me the display driver had stopped and then restarted. Anyone else have this problem? What seems to have fixed it for the time being is that I added and switched to an HDTV resolution (same res--just used the Cats HDTV driver format)--for some reason the driver isn't stopping and restarting because of changes to the CCP anymore. I'm glad, but puzzled, and hopeful it won't happen again.

Also, is the consensus that I should be running the 11.10's instead of the 11.11's?

 

Actually, Walt, my 560 Ti ran the game flawlessly on release day. I saw no bugs and it ran very smooth. There had been a driver pack available for the game (the BF3 beta also was the Rage beta) about a week prior to Rage's release. On the other hand with my 6950 on release day the game ran at 20 fps and textures were corrupted. The emergency pull-a-allnighter procrastination driver drop fixed some of this but even today after several driver updates the game is less functional on AMD cards than it was on NV cards on release day.

Considering there is a very in-depth presentation on NVIDIA's site regarding the rendering technology and the transcode CUDA function, I get the impression that NVIDIA was far more involved with the game in general. Maybe this is entirely proactive work by NV or it's id preferring NV, but we know that AMD devrel tends to drop the ball often. Whatever the case, AMD totally utterly failed completely in making sure their customers could play an anticipated game.

 

It uses OpenGL 3.x. I tried running Rage on my X1950XTX that I have around and it wouldn't load because it was missing OpenGL 3 functions. These coincide with DirectX 10 cards AFAIK. Rage runs great on a 8800GT after all.

 

...yeah...Wavey....listen up if you're there.

I was on the verge of buying two more 24" LCDs for eyefinity,
On second thought I will sell my 6970s and get a 3GB 580GTX.

 

Here's hoping that one holds up better than your previous two cards then... I may go for a Kepler next time, I dunno. It depends on how much power the thing draws and the level of waste heat the card generates (NV have been pretty bad in that regard lately, blowing power regulators and whatnot), and wether AMD can get their shit in order by that time, especially concerning tesselation.

69xx tesselation performance is unfortunately, maybe southern islands will fix. The driver nonsense has to stop though, that's for sure.

 

The biggest issue for me at the moment is whether to go back to a GTX 580 (I like the 3GB MSI card) or to instead dump money into two more LCDs for Eyefinity. Multimonitor on nV would require 2x 580 so the cost to go that route is about double...aka too much.

What's the time frame for Kepler? I know SI is supposed to be around year-end...

 

Hmm why would you sell your 6970s for a 580? Are you having problems with them?

 

In my experience the IQ of the 580 is superior to the 6970, particularly texture aliasing issues. I am not having problems with my 6970s, but I'm not gaming a whole lot lately...two games I'm interested in playing, Metro 2033 (already own it) and Dues Ex (the new one) have driver issues with AMD from what I've read. Obviously Rage has issues as well, but I'm less interested in it.

It's also doubtful I'd sell the 6970s. I tend to keep things I tweak for some silly sentimental reason.

 

No issues here with DeusEX on AMD. btw it's an AMD Gaming Evolved so the thing really shouldn't exhibit any issue on ATI cards. Rage is a whole other story though...

 

Hand them down to your kids... Or do they have laptops?

 

Laptops

 

Laptops...

Damn kids today! *waves fist in a curmudgeonly manner* They should be forced to spend ten years with an ugly beige full-size tower chassis that rattles when the optical drive spins up first, like we had to!

 

Yeah well, at least you can put a real graphics card in there. That said, to this day, I still don't understand why those things had to be beige.

 

Nothing changed as in the catalysts being flaky every month, this Rage incident will be quickly forgotten aswell.

Its been a long time since I experienced it, but that has to do with myself not using ATI graphics anymore. I dont think their OpenGL driver ever was worth a penny, and their monthly released are still handled like years ago - means laughable QA (heck I had Java programms crashing the desktop back then). Just because you are lucky you weren't effected till now is a poor excuse.

 

Yea this is definitely not the first time weve been awash in hotfixes and WHQL releases with jumpy "progress".

Another one I recall was with the Cat 10.6/7/8 and a D3D memory leak with Borderlands that would cause the game to consume all of its address space and just stop rendering. Then came 10.9 and they dropped about five hotfixes that month as well for a variety of different uses.

My favorite memory though is of my X800XL AGP having broken D3D for about 6 releases straight!! But that was years ago.

Has the giant mouse cursor been solved yet with the 5000 hardware?

 

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst1111aperformance.aspx

 

Yep, just been checking out this new 11.11a hotfix driver, and it 99.9 percent fixes flashing textures/polygons in Rage. It's finally playable and looks good. Now if only AMD could get things like this sorted with the devs so it's all ready for the release day of a game, that would be perfect.