AMD suprassed NVIDIA in drivers last couple years?

If you aren't willing to accept a WHQL-signed driver with AMD's signature, I don't know what else to say. As for why it isn't on all their GPUs, I have no idea. But it works, so I don't really see any significant problem.

As for tri-fire, I don't know what to say there. What issues were you having with it, and does it occur in both previous and later drivers?

 

Its a WHQL driver for one card. it has been modified to work on others. Once it is modified it no longer is really a WHQL certified driver. Don't know what else to say. And yes other drivers don't have the same issues.

 

when i had a pc i never had trouble with amd drivers and i don't care if some one releases drivers every other day do they work is what needs to be looked at

 

I'm a former Nvidia user and I have not had a problem with either unless the word BETA was involved. As it stands I am currently using the 14.xx driver modded for all cards and my 290X has never felt more alive. Benchmarks got a boost, games feel better, and heat is fairly low compared to a previous driver.

AMD is surely making an effort but they cannot compare to nvidia when they have a driver team of around double the size.

 

It's not modified at all. It's on AMD's page listed as an APU driver, but out of the box, it works on all the normal desktop GPUs as well. This is the 14.8 driver, from the 14.200 branch.

You're probably thinking of the recent non-WHQL beta driver that was only for the R9 285 and modified for other drivers, and signed with I think Leshcat's signature. I think the version of it was like 14.300 or something.

Seems kind of weird that no other driver is affected by your issue though.

 

I have found AMD drivers over the last ,lets say 10 years for me to have less problems than Nvidia.

Today though I going from AMD Fan to Nvidia Fan cause just got me a couple 980 GTX cards.
Selling the last of my R9 290 cards and I am going to miss the last one left.Sapphire Tri-x.

 

When I had my 7970's in crossfire I had some pretty horrible experiences with various games, frame pacing was a real issue, even enabling vsync wasn't enough, used to have to cap my frame rate as well or the stutter was unbearable.

The 14.x drivers did improve things massively though, still use the 7970's in my other rig.

I think as others have said though neither side is perfect when it comes to drivers, but i would say that my 7970's had far more game breaking/distracting issues than I've ever had with nvidia cards/drivers.

 

_______________________________________________________

I have permanently left AMD, and for good reason. Their hardware products are garbage, and their drivers are slow to come out and they stink as well.
For anyone to state that AMD's driver releases are coming out much faster than Nvidia's is simply not paying attention, in all honesty.
I had a Sager Notebook with the 7970m in it, and it was pure junk.
AMD had to toss the first release of it in May 2012 because it was defective, and then when I got the newer batch put in, that lasted less than a year before my 7970m died and had to have it replaced with a 3rd card.
Dozens of other people reported the exact same problems as well.
Then we all had the same Enduro issues to deal with for almost 4 months before AMD started to realize that Enduro was greatly affecting Game Play and FPS rates. They continue to claim that the problem was "fixed", but that is simply not true. It hasn't been fixed, and the only people not having a problem with it are AW owners who can switch it off with a button.
I finally said goodbye to AMD forever, and put them and their slow-to-release and crappy drivers, and low-grade GPU's in the rear-view mirror.
It's Nvidia all the way from now on, and I haven't regretted a moment of it.

 

I believe my AMD GPU and CPU to be built of silicon and other things. Pretty sure the drivers don't have any scent to them either

Pretty sure AMD has nothing to do with OEMs botching up their implementations. But I'm betting this isn't entirely true to begin with...

Should I diss AMD for my Acer laptop overheating?

I still don't quite understand what Enduro is. Is it the muxless switchable graphics tech that uses Intel for the iGPU, and AMD for the dGPU? Or does it also include muxless AMD iGPU and AMD dGPU setups? What is AW?

 

yeah that was the one I was using. Didn't try that APU driver.

 

(Enduro is the Proprietary Switchable Graphics/Power-saving feature in Laptops that have AMD GPU's. Nvidia has their own design- Optimus, and AMD has their own. Both Switchable Graphics designs on non-AW laptops use a Muxless design (no internal Multiplexer), which routes the Display output through the DGPU to the IGPU. This is an inherently-flawed design that AMD owners were complaining about, because of a severe hit to gaming performance in greatly lowered FPS rates.
Alienware (AW) have internal Multiplexers, which eliminate this problem).

 

Enduro is marketing. Look at it like this:

There is fixed mode switching (muxed, muxless)

There is also dynamic mode switching (muxless)

getting into wiring is another topic all together : )

(for more info: http://leshcatlabs.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=62 )

These laptops have 2 cards. AMD GPU and the Intel GPU (PXAI)

To work together the drivers needed/need PX instructions that used to be implemented by the "OEM", in reality these drivers are signed by AMD.

Recently AMD has started implementing the PX instructions that "OEMs/AMD/Intel itself" used to add as the "middleman" into the AMD kernel with 13.11 beta X.

Quite late to remedy an already bad situation. However this fixes only half of the issue. Part of the trouble is that the Intel part has to be configured in a precise way to function properly with fixed switching. This customization used to be added by the OEM/AMD/Intel to the "Intel side".
Fixed switching switches from one card to another and used to be generally the preferred way for a number of technical and performance reasons.

Because fixed switching requires the customization of the Intel driver it is far easier to run laptops in dynamic mode instead. (Dynamic switching: Intel acts as a passthrough for certain applications that require the AMD GPU - this is determined by the AMD driver ). This allows Intel to be constantly on with never really "switching" to AMD as such. It has a number of benefits and disadvantages but is overall an easier situation for AMD since not many or few customizations are needed on the Intel side.

A problem arises because most OEMs have locked/removed the Dynamic switching function of their BIOS, keeping the users on fixed!!

So to our genuine surprise AMD has created a workaround to enable Dynamic switching (14.6/7/8) on devices that are locked to Fixed Switching (muxed fixed) in the BIOS by the OEM.

For the first time in years this allows users with "fixed switching/ muxed" 5xxx / 6xxx series cards that have had blackscreens upon wakeup and switching to utilize their devices without mods. (to a degree - as there are still some bugs)

 

Seems to me that the Nvidia drivers are still more efficient... you don't hear as much about stuttering problems with Nvidia either.. seems to be overall smoother experience. I still prefer AMD though, and this has a lot to do with many previous Nvidia cards having really annoying coil whining plus the o/c tool always gave a BSOD.

 

To OP: nVidia releases drivers more often.
To "The Garbage Guy", good luck in your life once some nV HW fails you.

 

As much as I have defended AMD in the past, and YES their driver support has VASTLY improved to what it was pre "Never Settle 12.11" drivers.

However, as of late they have been lagging behind.

Its now September, we should have AT LEAST an official beta for 14.9 drivers.

Yet you go to AMD website and all there is, is STILL is a WHQL for 14.4!! That was a driver from April!

Yea sure there is a 14.7 beta at the bottom but other than a few release candidates we have had nothing be "leaked" 14.x drivers that have pretty game breaking bugs in them and are somewhat unstable from system to system more so than previous drivers.

They either have something "big" in the works or they have failed to keep up.

I hope they do have something tasty in the works to be released within the next week or so to counteract Nvidia's GTX980 launch... then again the GTX980 is nothing special in terms of raw power so maybe AMD feels like they don't need to release anything yet.

*crosses fingers for Volcanic Islands!"

 

The driver debate is never ending. Back with ATI released the 9000 series (yes 10yrs ago) they had a bad rep for drivers and pledged to fix it. They started an 1 driver a month cycle and things got better (I had a 9600 pro at the time). I bought an Nvidia 6800 after that since they beat ATI to shader model 3.0 support and that line really whopped the HD 2000 series.

When I had that card I noticed Nvidias drivers were all over the place. Gains in some games losses in others. "What driver is best for this game?" threads were everywhere because people would pick the driver that suited the game they played the most.

It is a cycle. As drivers get better, focus shifts and they drop off. People complain and they shift focus again to make them better. I have never based a card purchase on a the drivers.

 

whaaaaat!!?? im f***ing suffering with the AMD drivers, when i had nvidia i never searched for drivers, no dx9 issues, and a lot of crashes overheating problems I AM SUFFERING!!!

 

Then go back to nvidia. I can't wait for the GTX 970 to arrive here.

 

My recent AMD driver experience is much better than the previous one (HD4850/70)
and things generally work as they should.

But the overall experience is not as smooth as NV, thanks mostly to Cata installation,
for which I never know how it's going to end up, or how many reboots it would end up needing.
With NV I've done Beta installs on fly, sometimes 3-4 times in 15 minutes - no reboots - nothing.

And the little things like Raptr vs ShadowPlay,
RadeonPro - compared to NV inspector this thing is as large as a 16-Wheel truck
and AMD component naming scheme (this thing is REALLY pissing me off $&*#)

All in all I may sound unhappy, but I am not.
I just learned not to tinker with Cata as much as I tinkered with NvCpl.
I know AMD does not have as much resources as NV, so my expectations are set accordingly.

 

Care to give some kind of actual details? Maybe the games you've played, what drivers you used, what kind of environment you're playing in (temperature-wise), OS, what you've tried doing to fix the problem, etc; preferably in it's own thread.