News - Battlefield 4 demo was running on an AMD Radeon HD 7990

[keithwalton]

ATI drivers may have sucked in the past but AMD drivers suck in the present.
I shall tell you a story of woe from just this weekend with AMD drivers.

I booted up a machine that I haven't used in sometime and it pops up on startup that i have 11.12 drivers would I like to update to 13.1
I agree and off it goes, does everything and says it's all gone swimmingly.
I try and opencl app (reason why i booted the machine) and the app just force closed on startup.

So I check CCC and it says I have 11.12 installed still thinking it was odd it didn't ask me to reboot during the install i reboot it, go back in and nope still 11.12,
So I download the 13.1 installer from the website, run it and it does exactly the same and remains on 11.12
So I uninstall it using the amd app, reboot and install 13.1, huzzah I say as CCC says I have 13.1 installed.

Run the opencl app, it crashes on startup again.
A quick google later I find that updating drivers can break the opencl database and that you need to wipe and reload. So I uninstall the drivers again, run a 3rd party wipe tool, reboot and reload. Still no opencl.

Another google search later I find that the 13.1 drivers are known to be a pain to remove and that amd have released a specific program just to clear them off.
So I run the special app it removes everything, windows reboots in 800x600 instead of 1920x1080 (all other reboots maintained resolution) installed 13.1 and huzzah opencl works at last and my application doesn't immediately crash.

However i'd taken a 20% performance hit compared to my old setup which i couldn't go back to as the cleaner had wiped it all away

[Jimbo75]

Nvidia drivers kill your graphics card.

Vista lawsuit paints picture of buggy nvidia drivers.

[ZaO]

Nvidia drivers kill your graphics card.

Vista lawsuit paints picture of buggy nvidia drivers.

Hilarious... My Nvidia driver crashed just after reading the links you provided lol!

[PowerPie5000]

ATI drivers may have sucked in the past but AMD drivers suck in the present.
I shall tell you a story of woe from just this weekend with AMD drivers.

I booted up a machine that I haven't used in sometime and it pops up on startup that i have 11.12 drivers would I like to update to 13.1
I agree and off it goes, does everything and says it's all gone swimmingly.
I try and opencl app (reason why i booted the machine) and the app just force closed on startup.

So I check CCC and it says I have 11.12 installed still thinking it was odd it didn't ask me to reboot during the install i reboot it, go back in and nope still 11.12,
So I download the 13.1 installer from the website, run it and it does exactly the same and remains on 11.12
So I uninstall it using the amd app, reboot and install 13.1, huzzah I say as CCC says I have 13.1 installed.

Run the opencl app, it crashes on startup again.
A quick google later I find that updating drivers can break the opencl database and that you need to wipe and reload. So I uninstall the drivers again, run a 3rd party wipe tool, reboot and reload. Still no opencl.

Another google search later I find that the 13.1 drivers are known to be a pain to remove and that amd have released a specific program just to clear them off.
So I run the special app it removes everything, windows reboots in 800x600 instead of 1920x1080 (all other reboots maintained resolution) installed 13.1 and huzzah opencl works at last and my application doesn't immediately crash.

However i'd taken a 20% performance hit compared to my old setup which i couldn't go back to as the cleaner had wiped it all away

20% performance hit from using the latest drivers that have been proven to increase performance (unless you're just talking about OpenCL performance?)? I've never heard of that happening before, and i can't even find any info on the 13.1 driver removal tool you're talking about either. The 13.1 drivers installed with no issues at all with my Radeon 7950 so maybe it's a Windows related problem you were experiencing?

[ZaO]

20% performance hit from using the latest drivers that have been proven to increase performance (unless you're just talking about OpenCL performance?)? I've never heard of that happening before, and i can't even find any info on the 13.1 driver removal tool you're talking about either. The 13.1 drivers installed with no issues at all with my Radeon 7950 so maybe it's a Windows related problem you were experiencing?

Yeh some issues are just specific to some peoples systems. It could be a hardware or software conflict. Or just maybe something that's messed up about the way something else in your system is setup. It's not always completely down to the drivers you're installing. It's easy to forget that sometimes when you're having the problem though. One thing I do remember from last time I had an AMD card is that I always had issues with new drivers installing correctly if I didn't uninstall the old drivers first. A lot of the time it would just update CCC and not the actual display drivers. You wont notice by looking at CCC. Only when you go to windows Device Manager will you see the display driver hasn't actually updated. Also, using these "Driver Cleaner" type programs has never done anything but caused me issues. So far with my GTX 670, I haven't had these issues. I just install new drivers without removing the old ones first and everything seems to go alright...

[PowerPie5000]

Yeh some issues are just specific to some peoples systems. It could be a hardware or software conflict. Or just maybe something that's messed up about the way something else in your system is setup. It's not always completely down to the drivers you're installing. It's easy to forget that sometimes when you're having the problem though. One thing I do remember from last time I had an AMD card is that I always had issues with new drivers installing correctly if I didn't uninstall the old drivers first. A lot of the time it would just update CCC and not the actual display drivers. You wont notice by looking at CCC. Only when you go to windows Device Manager will you see the display driver hasn't actually updated. Also, using these "Driver Cleaner" type programs has never done anything but caused me issues. So far with my GTX 670, I haven't had these issues. I just install new drivers without removing the old ones first and everything seems to go alright...

I've not had any major issues with either my GTX 660Ti or Radeon 7950 (both occasionally have minor hiccups)... All i do is install the latest CCC driver package over the top of the current drivers and it works fine. I remember i had an issue opening CCC a while back, but that was down to a corrupted .NET 4.0 installation and nothing to do with the actual AMD drivers. I'm pretty sure CCC can automatically update the drivers in tha background too (but i've always preferred downloading the new drivers and performing a manual install). I won't use driver cleaner software unless i really have to.

[kalniel]

Nvidia drivers kill your graphics card.

Vista lawsuit paints picture of buggy nvidia drivers.

Problem is that's not normalised data. So if more people have nVidia drivers installed, you'll probably see higher crash numbers.

Also it's from back in 2008

For what it's worth, I run computers with both nVidia and AMD cards. I personally rate the AMD drivers as better these days, especially sticking to WHQL releases. But nVidia drivers by no means suck.

[clovy]

When BF4 launch, i think GPU market will increased.

[ZaO]

Problem is that's not normalised data. So if more people have nVidia drivers installed, you'll probably see higher crash numbers.

Also it's from back in 2008

For what it's worth, I run computers with both nVidia and AMD cards. I personally rate the AMD drivers as better these days, especially sticking to WHQL releases. But nVidia drivers by no means suck.

That's a good point. I remember AMD graphics cards being the underdog ever since I started doing this. It only seems to me like they've started to balance out a bit in the last few years. If that's the case then that data is kinda useless.

[Jimbo75]

Problem is that's not normalised data. So if more people have nVidia drivers installed, you'll probably see higher crash numbers.

There aren't over 3x more Nvidia owners though. I had a look at the data back then and it was more like 60-40 market share for Nvidia. These crashes are very likely to be gpu/igp related, so also consider that Intel's market share is higher than both combined and they are below both in crashes. The logic points to Nvidia's drivers being totally disastrous at this time.

edit - I found this, seems intel didn't have quite more share than both combined but you can see that overall Nvidia's issues are well beyond what their share of the gpu market was back when this was an issue.

Also it's from back in 2008

Granted, but the top link "card killing driver 196.75" was 2010. They also had the fiasco with the 590 gtx burning up because of drivers in 2012.

For what it's worth, I run computers with both nVidia and AMD cards. I personally rate the AMD drivers as better these days, especially sticking to WHQL releases. But nVidia drivers by no means suck.

I think both sets of drivers suck - you just have to look at Nvidia forums to see the amount of whine about them these days. I played GW2 on release and the Nvidia drivers were a disaster in that game, now it's Tomb Raider and to be honest I don't see things improving what with AMD having most of the games these days.

[kalniel]

I think both sets of drivers suck - you just have to look at Nvidia forums to see the amount of whine about them these days. I played GW2 on release and the Nvidia drivers were a disaster in that game, now it's Tomb Raider and to be honest I don't see things improving what with AMD having most of the games these days.

Compared to the tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of computers in total with nVidia and AMD chips in, the complaints are small fry to be honest. Given the almost unlimited number of combinations of hardware and software possible and indeed are present in the real world I'm frankly surprised there aren't more problems.

That things are so stable for the vast vast majority and on the vast majority of titles indicates that they don't really suck, for either party.

With the slow down of new hardware releases this year, I'm even more hopeful that the drivers will have more chance to mature as well.

[fmq203]

Just another piece of information pointing towards amd being the gamers choice of graphics card. I only switched to Nvidia to get better performance on BF3. Now it looks like it might've been a bad choice in the long run...

how is amd gamers choice when nvidia have better drivers to start with?

The "Never Settle" drives has totaly changed that making Radeon cards lead the benchmark charts, and, taking to account that the GTX600 series of GPU were released after the Radeon7000 series one, it's clear that's all drivers optimization

[kernel_fender]

AJB
That would explain why the graphics looked crap the sun looked awful the tessellation was substandard particles were blocky overall feel was plastic tress fx what a laugh I bet that 7990 was puffing and blowing over heating as all amds do cheap nasty rubbish

[asdfsfe]

Thanks

[PowerPie5000]

AJB
That would explain why the graphics looked crap the sun looked awful the tessellation was substandard particles were blocky overall feel was plastic tress fx

It would be hard to tell the difference in graphics quality between a Radeon 7xxx and GTX6xx when the game is running with same detail settings and resolution on both cards (without messing around with the drivers), i should know as i own both.... One thing i do notice is glitchy long distance textures with BF3 running on my GTX 660 Ti (this doesn't happen with Radeon 7950, which is also faster).

I bet that 7990 was puffing and blowing over heating as all amds do cheap nasty rubbish

HAHAHAHA... FERMI.

Please stop spreading complete nonsense. There are plenty of happy AMD and Nvidia GPU owners out there (myself included) who are not blinded by brand loyalty or fanboyism. And by the way, my GTX 660Ti runs hotter than my Radeon 7950.

[ZaO]

It would be hard to tell the difference in graphics quality between a Radeon 7xxx and GTX6xx when the game is running with same detail settings and resolution on both cards (without messing around with the drivers), i should know as i own both.... One thing i do notice is glitchy long distance textures with BF3 running on my GTX 660 Ti (this doesn't happen with Radeon 7950, which is also faster).

So that is specifically an Nvidia issue, do you know?

I get the same thing...