AMD Catalyst 14.8 WHQL (14.201.1008 August 12)

Is it really that hard AMD... notice core clock and actual clock:



Yep, I want to underclock to 920. It's not happening. Since 14.1 . 8 months. Oh, and it bluescreens every time I uninstall after 14.4 or whatever it was, I've forgotten already.

 

Been on 14.4 since I got my card (fresh install of Win 8.1). Never had an issue other than the occasional game crash. I am hesitant to update. I will wait for these to officially post to AMD's site.

 

Major lockups and Black screen of death!

I installed these 14.8s and upon reboot everything was unstable and booted into a black screen. Sometimes it would lockup upon loading anything that accessed the video cards like afterburner. This is with an Asus 290X oc2 video card. Think same thing happens with 14.6 and above. Personally feel the asus overclock is not stable and the 14.6 pushes the card over the edge. Back to 14.4!

This sucks.

 

No driver since 13.12 has worked on Vista, despite download links here for at least some 14.x (if not all) claiming to support Vista.

I recently decided to buy Windows 8.1, not specifically because I wanted 14.x drivers to work, but because I will finally be getting my first pc upgrade since March 2008(?) and these days the Windows OEM license has changed...

You can now comply with Microsoft rules for the Windows license by having the key installed on any one pc at a time.

With earlier Windows, like Vista, an OEM key was tied to a pc for life.

 

As long as I have ever owned AMD cards since the old 6970 days I have had horrible time with the drivers either affecting eyefinity or crossfire or just plain not working. If they don't get their act together I say there should be a class action lawsuit. My first impression on this Asus 290X OCii directcu on any other driver besides 14.4 has been dismal. I swear I want my money back. I've got this thing installed on a dual boot win7 64 and win 8.1 64 and it acted up on both OS versions. I want an nVidia card. I swear.

Anyhow if anyone has an Asus 290X DirectCu OCii can you please post your gpu-z shot to display bios info?

Thank you.

 

Sell the card and go NVIDIA then?

I can say personally I've had very little issue with AMD's drivers, but I don't quite understand why people keep using the hardware and complaining about it instead of just jumping ships like they say they will. I have to be personally ok with the hardware in my computer to use it comfortably; sold off the 4670K and Fatal1ty H97 Killer I had because I can't stand Intel nor ASRock that much (only had the combo to review).

Throw the GPU(s) on eBay, sell it, buy competitor's GPU(s), profit*

*assuming the competitor's drivers are as flawless as claimed; YMMV of course

 

That's normal, it's due to the WHQL process. WHQL is both a good and bad idea. The good being that it requires some level of driver quality (this is more of an issue with the small tech companies for specific things), the bad being that each WHQL costs money and takes a month or so to go through. This can effectively slow driver releases if they strictly stuck to a WHQL schedule, and of course, AMD, like Nvidia, don't want to be constantly forking over money to get drivers through.

AMD and Nvidia have therefore released almost-WHQL ready drivers under the status of 'beta' or 'RC' etc, which can get a special signing which doesn't cost them each time. These aren't quite the same as WHQL drivers since they may include more changes in them and the testing structure etc, but that's not a bad thing.

To put it into perspective, time wise, if a WHQL driver became available on 29 August, it would have to be from say, 20 July. It's not bad to try out, it's probably almost recommended.

The issue with drivers not working with some cards etc isn't specifically AMD's fault, it's the fault of the card's manufacturer. Some of them do have a heftyish overclock on them, and they possibly aren't applying quite enough voltage to keep the temperatures down. They may also be using several different kinds of memory in use on the cards, some better than others.

In any case though, give them a try. They do support the desktop GPU's, even without modding.

 

with this driver (and 14.7rc3) i have about 50 fps (conquest large 64 players) with drops to 30 in heavy situations (playing with Vsync - on). That is enough for me. everything is maxed out (only msaa is off).

cpu runs at 3500, gpu runs at 1175/5500 (power limit +20%)

im testing performance increasing on the test range - spawning to viper and sitting still, turning vsync off and watching fps (perfoverlay.drawfps 1). with this driver fps (DX11) is about 87 while sitting still and down to 79 while firing zuni rockets =)

 

Red screen = unstable cpu, memory or possibly vccio. Increase voltages a notch or two all round. Not gpu related.

 

I have two Sapphire Radeon 7970's, Intel 4770k @ 4.5GHz, MSI Z87 Mpower mobo , Samsung 27" 120Hz monitor, Windows 8.1 x64, and I use SweetFX injector basically every game and almost never had any issues. Usually issues have been game developers end(bad and lazy work, Rush the game out only to get your money and please Stock holders)

Bethesda gameworks have best business strategy ever. They releases always half finished product and "let" the user community make the rest, example high resolution textures etc.

 

>All the DX9 issues the 14.4+ beta's have had actually make it into the WHQL driver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eal4fep7pK4

Well, the upside is they can no longer ignore the 4+ months of bug submissions I submitted, the second this hits mainstream users and is pushed on the general public and all the DX9 problems become super well apparent, they'll HAVE to fix it

 

i've got this damn red screen a couple of times playing bf4 and my cf run hotter +8-10c on both cards i'll try this one and tell u if the probleme is fixed

 

I kinda knew that but still i was playing Planetside 2 CPU most intensive game i know never had red screens. I guess i'll up the voltages a litte bit then try again.

 

If it's only started red screening with this driver, I wouldn't start messing about with memory or cpu

 

That's what i was thinking about my issue with tv connected to pc with hdmi cable.
"Why would i need to change hdmi cable if with 14.3 and previous drivers it was working?!".... changed cable and now no problem, i can throw at it any version of driver and tv works fine.


In this case, red screening, i would try swapping psu or investigate if motherboard or cpu is not failing.

 

When my gpu doesn't have enough voltage it always end up with a red screen.
As for this driver is solid for me (till now) and it boost the fps in Watchdogs and Metro 2033 redux.

 

The driver runs fine and I was finally able to launch NFS: Shift 2! Thank you!

 

ntoskrnl.exe was coused red screen. So it's not a driver after all.

 

I think these are just the 14.7 RCs getting their WHQL cert, as they aren't much different by the looks of it, they are even dated the same as the RC3s, the 12th August.

They may get released officially next week, along with another Beta, that will probably just be the 285 support.

 

Red screen only happen to me when I overclock my cpu too hard.