AMD Catalyst 11.11 WHQL Driver Suite Released

I am really glad to hear that for the AMD crowd.

 

Latest readme specifically mentions problems with Metro.

 

SSAA doesn't work in Skyrim anymore. Reverting.

edit. Reverted to 11.11 WHQL and SSAA still doesn't work

 

Yep, I noticed that too. I mean, especially with Skyrim that is one of the most eagerly awaited titles this year next to BF3, MW3 and Rage and is not on the pay list of one vendor AFAIK, it seems strange that premium customers will have 50% of their AMD investment just turned off. Similar things happen on the other side as well, except that there's just no SLI scaling in some titles for extended periods of time and then suddenly, it's starting to work.

And that's just one of the reasons why I don't think that Multi-GPU setups in their current state deserve recommendation for people interested in higher performance.

 

Well, nVidia did put out a FAQ on its site on the day the game shipped--which purported to alleviate the texture pop-in problems for nV owners. Not having an nV product, of course, puts me at a disadvantage relative to your experience, but the Steam forums actually linked to the original FAQ on the nV site, and the fix seemed to work for both AMD and nV cards, according to much dialogue on the subject on the Steam forums. Subsequent patches from id removed the need for the original settings in the FAQ, IIRC.

I very much agree that nV seems far more aggressive these days when it comes to devrels, but in the cases that are the most blatant, and RAGE certainly qualifies there, I'd like to know how much of it is because of the IHV's activity, and how much of it is because of the game developer's predilections. I think something like this is worth knowing and fairly important an issue. I still cannot imagine that id shipped this game without the slightest inkling of how it would run on at least ~50% of the hardware that would be running it. I agree with your general assessment, but I have a difficult time understanding why a games developer/publisher would ship a game before reconciling the sort of problems as you describe for the game running on AMD hardware. That really doesn't make a lot of sense. Neither does the fact that both AMD and id software seem fairly mute on the subject.

I'd just like to know to what extent id software attempted to reconcile the problems on AMD hardware that, unless id has no AMD hardware in-house to use for developer testing and development, it surely knew about prior to shipping. If id was providing AMD with regular code updates--then, fine, AMD completely dropped the ball. But if id blindsided AMD, and id knew in advance how poorly the game would run on extant AMD hardware/drivers, then I'd like to know about that, too. Wouldn't you?

All in all, it seems a very odd choice for the developer/publisher to make--to ship a game that would be all but inoperable for ~50% of the "PC" people who would buy it. Either id software just didn't give a damn, or AMD just didn't give a damn, and I'd sort of like to know which.

 

Are you saying they disabled CF for Skyrim in the 11.11a version of the driver? That'd be a disappointment then, because even with it enabled it doesn't run super terribly fast at 1920 rez (at ultra settings, but what the hey. I have dual 6970s, they SHOULD manage, god dammit. )

 

Yeah the guide gave instructions for enlarging the game engine texture cache and tweaks to the CPU/GPU transcode function. The later game patch enabled menu options for most of this. The intent is to allow more VRAM to be used to cache the game textures so the engine less aggressively uses the extreme low resolution textures. Less pop in. Essentially it allowed people with >=768MB video cards a better experience.

Carmack mentioned during his Quakecon keynote that AMD was working on fixing Rage issues and this was months before release. Considering AMD dropped a hotfix on release day, it seems there probably was a mutual plan. Unfortunately the hotfix was the wrong driver! So another day went by and they dropped another barely working driver. And here we are today with a driver that apparently fixes all issues. Months later.

I think it's clear that id assumed AMD would have things under control but did not verify. They bet on the hotfix.

 

Yes, that's in the release notes above for 11.11a. No CF for Skyrim.

anyone know when Kepler comes? I'd hate to drop $500 on a 580 just before I could have had a 680...

 

Yes--sure looks like it was AMD who dropped the ball on that one. I find it remarkable that the AMD driver team is letting these things get by them. Even if they'd decided Rage wasn't going to do very well on the PC, that's no reason to ignore the game until after it ships.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh? Something's sure gone out of the AMD driver side of the house--monthly updates do very little good if things like this occur. I note that AMD still hasn't figured out how to do X fire in Skyrim--so...what was the driver team doing about that one? Sheesh.

 

Amg, why? I checked out the release notes, but must have mentally suppressed that bit, because I have no memory of reading it. There weren't any particular problems with skyrim in the driver either, from what I can tell, so why the hell they needed to disable CF is beyond me.

Oh well. Looks like I won't be playing any elder scrolls then for a fucking month, assuming they actually put CF support back in the december release, but with the twin parallel codebases and all I dunno what the hell to think. Do I have to wait until january then until both Rage and Skyrim will be playable? And I was starting to think good thoughts about AMD again, but they seem doggedly determined to alienate every single one of their customers, both on the CPU and the GPU side, with the god-awfully terrible performance of Bullcrap (sorry, bulldog), and now all these constant video driver fuckups.

Fuck yeah, I'm wondering the same thing at this stage.

 

Guys!?! This thread:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1600194&postcount=39

 

I don't know who you're talking about, but the Bob that posts on this site doesn't work for AMD unless something changed recently.

 

That's a different Bob.

 

Any chance to re-enable CF in Skyrim with a hacked CAP file maybe? I didn't suffer from negative scaling (quite the opposite) and if the corruption the release notes speak of is the outline around the player's weapon and/or shield, then I can live with it, because I didn't see any other form of graphics corruption.

 

Serious Sam 3:BFE even though fast on AMD has flickering and some graphical glitches.
Of course I'm on 11.10 so I'd better update to 11.11a.1.32.b.hotfix2

 

https://twitter.com/#!/CatalystCreator/status/140203846302576640

 

The drivers are live btw!