AMD Catalyst 14.3 Beta 1.0 (13.350.1005 March 12)

Mantle allows developers to have direct control over gpu memory management, so I highly doubt this is 'just how mantle works', its how they implemented their mantle renderers.

 

People tend to exaggerate sometimes...

I changed my videocard after installing BF4 and seeing it uses WAY more VRAM than my old 560Ti had... On that card, I had to keep everything @ medium/low, and even then, it sometimes spiked using more than 1gb of VRAM and it stuttered BADLY.

I got the 290 and... oh boy... what a difference...

It doesn't matter, Mantle or DX11.1, all maxed out (ultra settings), it uses about 3gb on DX and 3.5gb on Mantle... (Yes, Mantle uses more VRAM, but it's much smoother, perhaps because of that).

And then comes people with 3gb of VRAM or less,trying to run the game in Mantle with ULTRA settings, and complaining about stutter... C'mon guys, use some utility like openhardwaremonitor or afterburner and look at how much vid mem the game is using... if it's next to the maximum, you SURE to get stutter. Mantle is about optimizations, not miracle working... It uses more vid memory, because it's faster than RAM or worse, your HDD/SSD virtual memory.

 

The game with mantle , and the lowest settings possible and lowest resolution runs with 1.3gb vram used...Being an owner of a 1GB videocard makes mantle completely useless to me.And of course I wouldn't care about Mantle if I had a strong cpu. But it's purpose is to be used by people with old core 2 quads/new amd cpus which can't keep up with intel's i5/i7.

 

Hell Yeah ,,, Can't wait this WHQLs :vader:

 

I run the game with "Recommended" settings when i use DX (which is the same as the "high" settings for me), as i only have 2GB vram. Why should i need to run the game with "Low" settings to use Mantle? I have good (in my eyes) framerate when using DX, and no stutter or "hangs". With mantle using the SAME settings it turns quickly unusable to me.

Seriously, if the purpose of mantle is to lower my graphics settings so it looks worse.. why in the world would i do that? To have 100 fps at low settings vs 60 at high? Havent tested how the difference would be in low settings, but if the thing with using mantle is to lower the settings to use less vram to even be able to play, it is only usable for the top card, in this case 290x.

 

I've experienced several lockups and hard resets randomly (however seems to be linked to flash content in chrome) using these drivers. Moving back to 14.2 betas has cleared up the issues. Has anyone besides Espionage724 experienced any odd behaviour like this?

 

Almost everyone with the 14.2/14.3 drivers. However in my case at least it is not a reset or BSOD. My screen gets filled with colored, blinking lines when I try to watch a video and the system becomes unresponsive. But, if I click the power button once (to put the laptop to sleep) and then once again it recovers completely and continues to play the video with no other issues afterwards until the next reboot.

 

You guys realise that WHQL literally means nothing right? It's just a microsoft label. 13.12 drivers were never stable at all for 290s in crossfire with the vsync bug etc.

 

Yes this happens to me also.

 

Do u mean 13.2 or 14.2 ?

 

The only issue so far compare to 13.12WHQL driver for me, is that sometimes youtube player freeze or it won't load. Refresh page fix it.
Other then that this drivers are pretty good. (Gives 2-3fps more in battlefield 4, and played Thief on them without problems)

 

I've corrected my post. Moving back to 14.2 resolved the issue.

I have since moved back up to 14.3 B1 and removed all traces of Pepper Flash and instead installed normal Flash. So far no freezes or restarts. I'll update if there's any further issues.

 

I'm using Google Chrome instead of Firefox for two days now, and had NO lockups... I hope it stays this way.

 

AMD are going to need to perform a 'driver miracle' like Nvidia is suggesting they will with R340, otherwise Nvidia will have a very attractive performance gap. I already know of one person that is now very tempted to go Nvidia instead of AMD, especially considering the Nvidia enhancements affect all DirectX games.

A 10 percent boost at 70 fps means 77 frames a second, and to people looking at the figures 77 fps seems a whole lot better.

 

Yeah and the site results was flawed. The results from Thief alone was way off from AMD 290x

even I get more than there results from a single 290.

 

One funny thing about Thief is that it looks and feels smoother on my 7970GHz at 1125Mhz than on my 290X at 1100MHz, both from gigabyte and same driver's.

 

I really doubt nVidia will get that performance boost across all cards, and I'm SURE that if they do, image quality will suffer somehow.

There are no miracles people. nVidia had years to optimize their now old hardware (yes, 780ti is old tech, directx 11.0 stuff with just some DX 11.1 features implemented) and just now they'll unveil all of it's performance? C'mon...

I'm happy with my current system, and will only trade my VGA when the second generation Directx 12 cards arrive. This 290 will go to my next PC for sure.

 

I was having a strange bug when i left computer in idle. Its a black screen hardlock, also all the VGA fans gets at maximum.

The solution i found out was to set to never disable the screen.

 

That's happening with all 290-290x's

Disable ULPS (easy way: with latest Afterburner).

Mine does this, or locks with multicolor stripes on the screen.

 

well...looks like today is not a good day for AMD to release a new driver...I guess they feel like they are doing it great so...why in the ****ing hell are they going to do such an stupid thing??...