Download & Discuss AMD Catalyst 15.3 Beta Driver for Windows OS

I did....
http://forum.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=5033922&postcount=232

As otimus said. Wasn't actually a promise, I used the word deliberately.

 

ummmmm.....

you guys kinda made my point for me.

 

Sure, ok.


Just want to make one thing clear.

I am not mad at AMD or at anyone for that matter.
I'm just disappointed that after 4 months or so of waiting, the new drivers didn't deliver good stuff for most people.

I will just, keep waiting. Maybe Omega phase 2 will deliver the goods.

One thing for sure, is that so far, this new drivers are as stable if not more than the Omega one.

 

Bickering ends.

Driver discussion continues. Constructively.

 

They made W10 driver with WDDM2.0 and DX12 which(still) is unstable.
Of course after 15.3 with updated CCC and OpenGL component the disapoiment is understable.
Anyway i'm satisfied with actual driver quality state.
P.S. Do not try W10 with 15.200.

 

The game is crap, badly optimized.

 

So mAMDans here, lol.

Well, we're got what we've got.

 

So how is the perfomance with Elite Dangerous?
I wanted to buy the game, but now i have to first check if it run's well with AMD products.
I don't wanna screw myself again like i did with pre ordering FC4 and Dying Light.
Because al dev's are evil and hate AMD right?

 

Which is?

Can you even textualize that AMD has done stuff that's less than desirable?

 

Not dodged, just trying to keep up with a rapidly expanding thread. Also it's the weekend, technically i don't work weekends but still come here anyway to try and answer questions and help out.

I was referring to the fact that any improvements we make to Crossfire profiles will apply to all of our GCN graphics cards. The same goes for most other optimisations to any iteration of GCN.

It's impossible to list every single tweak, optimisation or performance improvement in a driver for every different 3d application. Instead we focus on the biggest improvements and highlight those to inform our customers of new profiles added for new games, or other key areas that we feel are best highlighted.

If you look back at performance over the course of a year, the gains increase slowly throughout the year for all applications for single gpu users. This driver will be no different in that regards and will improve gradually on performance seen in older drivers.

As an example of this please see the chart below, which represents single gpu performance improvements for our range of 13.xx drivers over the course of a year.



Are there any 50% performance increases for single gpu users in any games in this driver? No, because if that was the case then our previous driver would not have been well optimised.

 

Your acting like that's the only problem?
I've been with AMD for atleast 10 years, and always with CFX.
And it's a fact that it took to long for too little with this driver.
Your right about the hardware part and 4k scaling.
But we can complain that they won't give better VSR to gcn 1.1 cards and older.
Even if it's hardware dependent they could make a software solution for their customers.
They don't, you know why?
It's a way to force your customers to buy a new product.
NVIDIA does this different and better in my humble opinion.

 

Hi @ all, speacially @ AMDMatt.
I registered here because i want to give you some feedback to my gaming experience with AMD and because i appreciate that you - AMDMatt - are officially representing AMD in this forum which is great because users can give direct feedback - thats why i'm here

So first of all my rig uses 2xR9 290 in Crossfire and is powered by an Intel i7 3930k@OC - in my eyes a powerful rig designed for a great gaming experience.
But sadly i am very dissapointed with the overall performance an behaviour especially in modern or new released games.

Ok - you all know that Crossfire is a mess and that we had to wait much to long for the 15.3 driver an the additional CF-Profiles but the most annoying thing is that - for me - the new profiles don't provide a satisfying gaming experience.

Examples:
Ryse - son of Rome: With 14.12 i had negative performance scaling with provided Profile, better with bf4.exe but then flickering and other issues. Now with 15.3 the usage is much better but exactly in those moments i need the additional power of the second GPU there is intense micro stuttering or no scaling - CPU usage is at about 70% max per core so no bottleneck here. This means i am not able to play at a higher resolution with CF compared to single GPU, because of those problems - the gaming experience with one GPU is very smooth though (but performance of the card is way to low for 4k / supersampling - that's why i bought a second GPU....)

Watch Dogs:
New driver improves performance massively compared to 14.12 so CF is usable the first time but same issues as in Ryse - the additional power of the second GPU is worthless because of micro stuttering / bad frame pacing and massive frame drops (and afterburner shows 35-40% per GPU... great).
So same thing here - 1 GPU is smooth but performance is way to low for high resolutions.

I hope you understand why i am not satisfied - i spend a whole lot of money for 2 massive GPUs and overall just problems with CF... and then - after waiting 4!! Months things only improve but don't provide a good gaming experience.

The next thing is VSR - great stuff, thank you for providing this feature - but in my case with a native resolution of 1920x1200 it's pretty useless because i only can use 2560x1600 as maximum res... why is this depending on my native Screen resolution?? Why not provide the same resolutions as with a 1920x1080 monitor and let the customer decide if he wants black bars / letterbox...

I was very happy as AMD announced there will be an upgrade to this feature in january / february with more resolutions... ok, next dissapointment - its end of march and nothing of this is released yet...

I have a second rig with a GTX 760 and the experience overall is much more satisfying because the software provided by Nvidia is much better - even if i compare the experience with a single R9 290 - and this is so sad in my eyes because technically the R9 GPUs are pretty awesome and fast but all those problems...

So as one of your "enthusiast" customers i am very dissapointed by AMD, not because of the graphics cards but because of the software / support and the long ammount of time it takes to get a good gaming experience with AMD.

I really know that the current efforts regard Windows 10 and the launch of the new R9 300 GPUs... but please consider this: Who is buying your new stuff? Mostly the customers that bought the "old" stuff too... and now you are dissapointing those customers with a lacking support of the current / old solutions. So who do you think is buying the new cards? I can only share my thoughts but i am definitely considering changing back to the green side after my experience with the 290s...

Thank you for reading all this stuff @ AMDMatt and i hope you / AMD really take your customers seriously.

 

Hi BobBusfahrer,

Thanks for your feedback, I'll try to address the issues you've mentioned as best i can.

Unfortunately the two games you've mentioned are not overly favourable towards multi gpu setups. I think Watchdogs existing issues are well documented, despite that it's still a great game. I think with our profile for that game, we've done as much as we can. Our performance in it is good in terms of average fps and is ahead of our competitors, but i don't think we can do much more to improve the experience other than what we've already done.

At this stage i would recommend trying to tweak in game options to improve the experience.

Regarding Ryse, this is our first profile for it. I've had a quick go on it myself and agree that at 4K it's not playable, even at lower settings (fps does not really increase) but it seems ok at 1080P.

I'm not sure what the problem is here, it may be similar to Watchdogs in that there is only so much a Crossfire profile can do. I do find it odd that lowering the settings at 4K makes little difference to the fps, that's not normal behaviour and I'd be very surprised if our Crossfire profile was to blame for that.

As I'm sure you're now aware, multi gpu is a complex beast and it requires a lot of work and effort to get right, from all parties not just the drivers from a particular vendor.

I will look into Ryse and ask our guys to take another look at the profile and see if there is anything we can do on our end to improve it.

Regarding VSR we're still working on a phase two driver to improve and expand on our first implementation. I can't go into great detail about this yet, but we're still working on it.

 

+1

After cooling myself down a little bit and further testing my 15.3 roundup:

++ seems rockstable
+ CFX improvements

-- by far too less work done for 4 months time

--- CFX (though overall slightly improved) most of the time still completely useless compared to sgpu, because there are flaws in almost every game, that make you wanna turn of CFX again in the long term and use lower quality ingame settings. Is it framedrops, higher latency, more CPU-load, ingame cutscene-flaws, no smaa available, reflection flickering, frametime peaks. Often i was okay with minor disadvantages, until i deactivated CFX and suddenly experienced a much more direct gameplay feeling with 40% fps less.

All in all, i think this driver is a good one.

But considering the main target of the development in the last months beside freesync, it was failed completely.

And without CFX providing smooth experience, for me, there is no matter to even think about VSR.

 

@AMDMatt:
Thanks for your fast response and thanks for adressing those things to the driver development team! As much as i have tested so far the new driver is rockstable and solid, no problems with single GPU by now and improved experience in WatchDogs.

And as you said, mgpu is buggy as hell with DX11
Gaming experience is much better with single GPU although FPS are lower.
And of course AMD cannot be honest and say: Customers don't use CFX / don't buy 2 cards it's not worth it because Nvidia won't do the same lol.
And i also used SLI its definitly also a mess but support is better but better here only means faster concerning driver development.

My hope is DX12 will fix mgpu like Mantle did - CFX in Thief or Civ is absolute stunning, scaling not as good as it could but it behaves like single GPU which is great!
So thank's for Mantle and SFR Rendering Keep that up!

@klaupe:
+1 to your post!
I think we wouldn't be that angry / sad / dissapointed if our rigs were single GPU because that really works good / as it should.
In my case i disable CFX for most games if single GPU can give me enough FPS.
I only use a 60Hz monitor so i won't get any improvements by high framerates so my focus is on perfect image quality.

 

Totally agree with you regarding Mantle. Multi gpu on Mantle is unbelieveable, microstutter feels like a thing of the past on Mantle it's great.

We're very excited about DirectX12, i don't know if you saw the article on anandtech about DX12 but our cpu's, gpu's and apu's received the biggest performance increases from DX12 vs the competition. Good times ahead.

 

I noticed with Ryse, when I had my 295X2, I had to disable CF to get the game to stop stuttering - and to improve performance rather than reducing the resolution, I reduced the rendering scaling (Or whatever it's called) from 100% to 50%, which kept the same rez, but improved performance massively, but at the expense of clarity and sharpness

 

People worry to much about VSR. I think they should at least give us a better/smoother experience first for example far cry 4 and so on

Yeah it's ood but it's because Nvidia already have less cpu overhead than AMD. it's like comparing 2 cars with the same engine but the one is lighter than the other and then you install something to make it faster and say look the one received the biggest improvement but the one was already lighter making good use of all car components. So I won't take the dx12 improvements vs Nvidia as a good indication cause like i said Nvidia already have less cpu overhead than AMD.

 

So if we're right where we should be with our gpu's at the moment in performance terms, yet we get a much bigger performance increase from DX12, well that sounds good to me.

 

Are you still having this problem Illyrian? Look in the Catalyst Control Center, then look under My Digital Flat-Panels, and then click properties. There should be a "Preferred Scaling Mode" section, play with that.
However, this is with DVI. I dont know if it has been changed, or it is different between hdmi and DVI, but then there should be a "scaling options" section in the same menu as where you clicked Properties. In there, there is something called underscan/ overscan or something. Try that if the first method did not apply to your situation.