AMD Catalyst 12.11 (9.010.8 December 2) AMD Official BETA 11

i have a dozen mods loaded including the HD texture pack, still no issues...

dunno

 

It takes a lot of testing to certify a driver for Windows compatibility.

Is it possible for Microsoft to say to AMD during testing something like "Hey this needs to be fixed," and then AMD fixes it and testing goes on? Or is WHQL a yes or no process, as in once a driver goes in, it comes out the same as either approved or not approved? If it comes out the same, this driver probably will be similar to 12.11 with little changes.

And Skyrim did perform horribly at launch, but I do see frame spikes in some areas of the game even now. In the village near the entrance to the huge mountain staircase, I have smooth performance but every few seconds I get spikes close to 1 second in frame delay. Imagine a man falling in the sky, hitting brick walls every few seconds, and you will understand completely. It happens consistently and isn't related to specific effects in the game, just the general area causes the problem. Seems memory related, not sure though.

 

(From the last page in that article.

Yay. :banana: (Whatever that emote is supposed to be for, heh.)

EDIT:

Yay #2

 

I lol'd a good bit at the end

 

Dude look at those graphs 0_0. And AMD got these early fixes done in a few days! I am really excited to see where 13.2 beta will go. I have a feeling that the 13.2 beta series is going to kick even more ass than the 12.11 betas did!

 

I have a feeling the rewrite of the memory management software in the drivers will fix most frame latency issues now and in the future. It won't be finished with 13.2 betas though, the 13.2's contain specific latency fixes for skyrim and a handful of other games.

The thing to note here is that it's not about more FPS, it's about eliminating frame latencies that make a game feel stuttery even though it's running way above 60fps, ie. making the game smoother, rendering the frames more effective and smooth.

 

I just know it was when the 69xx-series were released. There weren't any drivers released in time except some "hacked-together-betas". Meanwhile nVidias new cards (can't remember which series) came with a driver where the powertemp software (that would clock down the card once it hit a certain temp) didn't work and many cards burned up. Hilarious times.

 

Not necessarily a milestone, but more a stable base. I'm not expecting much to be new with 13.1, except for stability (I say as another atiumd64.dll crash dances across my screen).


To all: Just to clarify, as a 5xxx I don't really have anything to look forward to with this driver, do I? From what I can gather, these latency issues are only issues that affected GCN (ie. 7xxx), yes?

 

Only GCN yes.
Though 5 and 6 series could get some minor fixes in there legacy drivers.

 

A WHQL certificate does not imply stability. Hell, nightlies are often more stable than release candidates and supposedly stable "final" builds across a plethora of software. Drivers are no exception.

 

It sure would be kindness if someone at AMD leaked a driver with the memory controller fix since I don't give a **** about Skyrim and Bethesda.

 

Just a stupid question : Supposed to use CAP even if I only have one gfx card (is there something that a single card would benefit from) ?

 

Yes - you can use CAP profiles even if you have one gfx card: http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33961798

 

profiles are used from CCC and/or RadeonPro and/or other utilities like ATT...

unless you are using a solo driver only...which means are not getting used...

conclusion: yes, CAP is from 0 to 999 ati cards everybody should install it

 

I had a question: If I customize a profile in CCC (e.g. adding AF to Sleeping Dogs), does this override the optimizations for that specific game in the CAPs?

 

Good question. I was wondering the same, since it's completely unclear what is going on, generally in whatever concerns the profiles etc.

 

Unknown, i know Radeon does does not.

There are MANY tweaks in the caps that you as the user never see. They are technical engineering tweaks.

RP will not interferre with those, i dont know about CCC however.

You get a funny message about overriding the internal CAP if you try but its pretty ambiguous.

 

The atrocious frame rate issues on release mentioned by The Mac, were not related to mods but Bethesda. They "forgot" (on purpose) to add critical CPU instructions optimizations to the PC code on release. After some time, a guy named Alexander Blade discovered this and released a program called Skyboost which gave a nice fps boost to the PC version. After that Beth decided to implement those optimizations on later patchs.

 

yup

i was running skyboost.

it was a bit of a cludge, as it intercepted the register calls and replaced them with better code.

Native fixes were much faster in the end.