AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega WHQL (14.501.1003.0 November 20)

Why did they stop releasing CAP's?

This is hilarious when there's a 3 month cap between driver releases and they didn't even have working CF profiles for the games that were released before Omega Drivers... I feel like someone is pissing me in the eye eeright::mad2:

 

lol, beautyful

 

I've had "rage" since switching to AMD because they seemingly neglect basic features Nvidia has had for ages. Why is that worth laughing at, and worth defending? People should get annoyed by these things. It's stupid. It shows AMD basically only cares to do the bare minimum until Nvidia turns it into a buzzword they can take their slow ass time to barely exploit. It's a legit concern. At least for me. HARDLY anything you should be poking an "lol" at.

 

The whole crossfire thing is just sad. I really feel sorry for those folks. Why AMD hasn't separated the profiles from Catalyst is beyond me. They really, really, really should of made their own equivalent to GeForce Experience. They should do a lot of things, lol. But it's really clear they never will. Can they even afford to?

 

Ubuntu 14.04.2 (3.16.0-32) 64-bit

I'm more than happy to hear that, but do you know whether this driver will be exclusive to Windows or not?

 

I knew all that (feature differences, software differences, etc) when i made my purchasing decision.

Did you not?

I would suggest poor research skills if so...

 

Nope. First AMD card in about a decade (give or take.)

Though, would I do it all again? Probably. $150 for a 280X when a GTX 760 was like... well over $200 and not as good. You just can't beat that. It's just a shame. A dang shame.

It's not even the kind of thing I'd research. It's so extremely basic of a feature.

But yeah, I probably should of had. Still, I don't see why such a thing needs to be defended.

 

Again, im not defending anything.

Im just confused by all the rage.

 

It's the rage before the new driver. All rage will be forgotten once the new driver arrives

I'm almost positive it was confirmed in the past they stopped CAPs since most/any game at that point that didn't "work" with Crossfire would require a new driver anyway (CAPs could only do so much).

 

Color me surprised that there actually IS a driver level way to do custom resolutions. How I didn't know this is beyond me, as I've been trying to find a way to do this since I switched to AMD, and have googled and googled (and used CRU, but stopped when I found it broke HDCP). For any who don't know, or care (I don't know how common knowledge this is or isn't. But maybe it'll help someone?), a dude over on hardforum told me:

Well, there is an option to create custom resolutions within the specifications of your monitor. IIRC I used it once to lop a pixel off my screen to correct a screen rendering anomaly in some game (Crysis 2?).

Open CCC - Click on My Digital Flat-Panels - Click on HDTV Support. On the right, where it lists resolutions and refresh rates, there is a button labeled "Add". It opens a screen where you can experiment.

No downsampling, of course, but having custom resolutions at all is a MEGA help to me.

 

Men's PMT.

 

Does it?

I've used CRU a good bit on a few different monitors without issue (but I don't know if I did anything HDCP-related to be fair).

If I recall right; I thought only the pixel clock patcher (which is only needed if the custom resolution makes the pixel clock go higher than the stock limit) broke HDCP, and not CRU itself?

 

QUOTE=The Mac;5025032]Again, im not defending anything.

Im just confused by all the rage.[/QUOTE]

To be honest, i understand what you mean, but it depends on the point of view.

To make you understand for example my point of view:

I bought 3 27" FHD TFTs mainly for Simracing (Assetto Corsa/PCARS).

I decided to go for 2 R9 290s because i thought Eyefinity to be superiour, i liked the price/perf. ratio, and overall never had bad experiences with AMD-GPUs.

Then the first benches of Assetto Corsa and PCARS came out, and the r9 290s showed quite ****ty performances compared to nvidia. Crossfire perf. also was a bad joke, also flickering like turkish disco.

So you have 3 27" (!!!) FHD Monitors, and can´t go for an acceptable amount of Antialiasing because the lack of performance. a friend of mine with 2 budget gtx 760s has by far better performance...

So i thought: "No problem, i´m not in a haste, CFX-Profiles will come."

I am waiting for a year now. There are 2 games that by now work properly with multimonitor and CFX: BF4 and Star Citizen.

I bought PCARS, FC4, Dying Light, Assetto Corsa, and some other games i bought just to wait for AMD not to f*** up any more.

And that baby also keeps dusting in the Corner: (while the friend of mine plays on a similar rig on the green side without big trouble.)



I am DAMN ANGRY, because, i gave that system a lot of thought, and everything works quite perfect, is it seat position/monitor setup/The system itself... but those absolutely worthless piece of GPU´s drive me crazy.

You understand, why I´m in a rage a bit? And I´m not talking about money now(Which was A LOT). I feel like an idiot, because i went for AMD.

Edit: And I DON´T WANNA HEAR about the evil developers any more. Give them the money nvidia gives them, and things will work out. It´s not my problem, WHY nvidia get´s all the developers attention.

Edit2: The funny thing is, that i still hope for AMD to get around the corner with Omega 1.5, or whatever...

 

Will AMD provide refunds to those that bought their cards in the hopes of getting a useable CrossFire setup and failed due to the driver team failing to deliver? Because products that don't work as advertised are as good as products that're sold with mislabelled specifications. All that retarded advertisement about AMD being the Fix3r is actually turning out to be a joke now.

 

I agree no crossfire profile > gtx 970 3.5GB issue. At least you get better sli support in games. Most of the time i feel i waster money on r9 280x crossfire. I still feel in games like bf4 it took them long enough to make crossfire great again but yeah a bit to late in my opinion. I just wish dx12 had build in crossfire support without devs or mad/Nvidia doing anything and that would make crossfire/sli much better in my opinion. I understand now why people always say single strong card is always much better. for example 2x r9280x is worse than r9 290x cause of crossfire profiles needed.

 

You (and anyone else who feels the same) are welcome to do a class action suit on the matter (would definitely be more useful than just putting up with this and complaining in the presence of people who can't do anything).

I bought 3 monitors for Eyefinity in the past, and it turns out it only works in maybe 3 games I play (2 of which need FWS). For a good while, I ended up just not using two monitors at all. Ended up just using them in standard multi-monitor though, so it's not a total waste (could have spent $160 elsewhere though; don't really need multiple monitors), but it was still somewhat disappointing.

I don't really blame AMD though; the implementation of Eyefinity works fine, and they even provide an API for developers to use.

Developers on the other hand don't want to put in the extra effort to add in a FOV slider, make wider camera views to avoid fish-eye effects, and to allow for centering or moving the HUD (AMD's API can control HUD placement as well). And then some developers (Blizzard and Valve) just out-right either don't support it, or "break" the game to not work with it (like Valve did with Dota 2; it worked fine in the past, then boom, now there's an over-scaled HUD with no announcement as to why).

So basically, my Eyefinity experience sucks because developers are lazy.

As for Crossfire; what exactly is needed to be done for a game to support it? I can't imagine there being too many different methods for handling resource load on multiple GPUs. I'm pretty convinced a new driver being needed for a new game is nothing short of PR-reasons, but I don't know enough about the process to really argue it. But if a new driver is really needed; I'd question what the developer did to require a driver-side game-specific "hack" for Crossfire support (and on a subsequential note; how much of AMD's driver is held together with duct-tape because of these game-specific hacks)?

The way I see it; the current rendering APIs have existed for a good while now. SLI and Crossfire have also existed for a good while. The methods for supporting SLI and Crossfire on a specific API have also existed for a good while, and there have been plenty of games that were made to work fine on SLI and Crossfire. So what could developers be doing different for new game releases to all of a sudden use some totally-unheard-of method that just happens to not be supported by SLI or Crossfire properly, and require game-specific-hack #53, why are they doing this totally-unheard-of-method, and why can't they just design their game to work with the setups?

Are there any games that "work" (not sure on what classifies as working; don't have such a setup) on Crossfire that hasn't had any AMD-intervention? And if so, why can't other games do that?

TLDR: I see no sane reason for Crossfire/SLI to not be working near-flawlessly with games at this point in time outside of PR-related reasons or the worst-of-the-worst shoddy/lazy coding.

I hear plenty of horror stories with SLI as well, so it's not like NVIDIA is going to be an instant-fix-all solution either, unless the games you play are Gameworks I guess.

Which on that note; are the games that perform better on SLI vs Crossfire mostly or all Gameworks?

 

A crossfire or SLI game profile is as far as I know mostly just a compatibility flag.
(For Nvidia the NVInspector program is really handy here for forcing games to use a specific profile and a few other advanced features such as say adding a HBAO compatibility flag or for their version of SSAA.)

Name of the exe for detection and then a series of number defining which compatibility mode to use and for games requiring new profiles a new driver release is required.
(Making month long "stalls" like this rather frustrating for SLI/Crossfire enthusiasts as several games can come out and have poor or non-existent multi-GPU compatibility.)

For single GPU's these can also be used to set AA compatibility flags or other fixes if required so profiles are not strictly for Crossfire/SLI but for those using such setups these game profiles / driver releases can be critical to get proper performance, but that's probably pretty obvious by now since SLI and Crossfire have been around for years though still heavily dependent on these profiles.
(And then there's the whole mess with game engine specific tweaks being required, some engines not scaling well whatsoever and some even having negative scaling with reduced performance on multi-GPU setups not to mention artifacts or outright crashes. Hopefully DX12 can improve this but it'll take a while for the API to become the standard just as it was with DX11 and we're still not seeing too many games utilizing 11.1 or 11.2 even though it's been a while since they were introduced.)

 

Update

Just an update on the weird desktop lag problem.

Its an Omega problem, as the past couple of days, everytime ive switched on, rebooted, gamed etc..., ive relocked the Monitor modes that unsupported checkbox, and had no lag.

Popped the 14.9 WHQLs back on to test today, and the unsupported modes, stays locked, no matter what i do, and had no lag.

Had the 14.9s on my old rig, and never had a lag problem on that (never tried the Omegas on it), the Omegas, are the only drivers ive had on this rig, as i popped them straight on, when i put it together.

 

I knew that. Totally should have been reading this topic past few days so I could have given the same advice ^^ Never used it but I knew it was there cause I always need to change my HDTV scaling.

 

CRU does not break HDCP support. The pixel clock patcher does.