AMD's Catalyst 15.10 Beta Optimizes 'Ashes Of The Singularity' DX12 Performance

16783289 said:

I remember crashed drivers from Radeon 9600 days, is that something one still have to live with with AMD cards?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: it may happen with either Nvidia or AMD drivers, but it's like a 1% chance for either. This talk of "AMD drivers are bad" or "Nvidia drivers are bad" is in the deep past. Both have the same average quality, and most of the times, errors happen due to individual hardware and/or software configurations.

It's like saying: in the 90's, Fiat brought to my country the Tipo. Some cases of Tipos catching fire expontaneously came out, so the car was badly seen, and sold very little. No other cases of the type happened in any other model or brand (including Fiat) since then, so we can't just say "Fiat cars catch fire".

Not sure I agree with this. AMD drivers are still bad. Crossfire is buggy compared to Nvidia SLI. If there is an issue, expect months before the next driver release.

And for DX12, one game doesn't cut it for me
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9659/fable-legends-directx-12-benchmark-analysis/2

It's like saying: in the 90's, Fiat brought to my country the Tipo. Some cases of Tipos catching fire expontaneously came out, and now they own Chrysler. So I'll never buy a Chrysler, or a Fiat, because they don't perform as well as the competition.

I remember crashed drivers from Radeon 9600 days, is that something one still have to live with with AMD cards?

In that sense, it's been 10 years and Windows is a lot more stable than it used to be. I wouldn't necessarily blame the drivers for everything that happened back then.

And for DX12, one game doesn't cut it for me
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9659/fable-legends-directx-12-benchmark-analysis/2

From the first page of that article you linked to:

The software provided to us is a prerelease version of Fable Legends, with early drivers, so ultimately the performance at this point is most likely not representative of the game at launch and should improve before release. What we will see here is more of a broad picture painting how different GPUs will scale when DX12 features are thrown into the mix. In fact, AMD sent us a note that there is a new driver available specifically for this benchmark which should improve the scores on the Fury X, although it arrived too late for this pre-release look at Fable Legends

Basically those numbers aren't very useful at this point except to compare Nvidia to Nvidia and AMD to AMD. After launch it will be interesting to take another look.

16783438 said:

Short answer: no.

Long answer: it may happen with either Nvidia or AMD drivers, but it's like a 1% chance for either. This talk of "AMD drivers are bad" or "Nvidia drivers are bad" is in the deep past. Both have the same average quality, and most of the times, errors happen due to individual hardware and/or software configurations.

It's like saying: in the 90's, Fiat brought to my country the Tipo. Some cases of Tipos catching fire expontaneously came out, so the car was badly seen, and sold very little. No other cases of the type happened in any other model or brand (including Fiat) since then, so we can't just say "Fiat cars catch fire".

No, the driver talk is NOT deep.

I've read some likely fairly popular description of AMD vs Nvidia drivers and tolerance and I've used Linux since 1996 or something and I know the Nvidia drivers has been way superior there and they also supported Solaris and FreeBSD.

Also I've got the impression Nvidia is quicker to modify their drivers for specific games.

And I for sure didn't had those crashing issues that my friend had on my Nvidia card. I've never had problems with them (I've had with Noveau drivers but that's not Nvidias drivers.)

Now with the asynchronous-computing issues for the Maxwell-cards I guess it's too easy and likely unfair to blame shitty drivers for the DX11-performance with AMD cards relative the performance using DX12, Mantle or Vulkan. I don't know how good AMD OpenGL-drivers has been on Windows.

It was an honest question from me though because I think the R9 380 especially hold a good spot against the GTX 960 currently and with the process shrink next year and twice the performance / watt for AMD cards as-well things should go better for AMD and in my case it still have the Linux drivers issue (well, unless Vulkan fixes that too and X/whatever starts to use that) but IF there was a lot of issues with crashing drivers or poor performance when it came to new titles that would be reconsider the cards anyway because I don't want poor drivers.

/shrug my current system amd cpu+gpu almost never crashes(every 3-4 years or so).

When it does crash, its not the drivers, or any other software. It means the heat sinks have wadded up with lint/dust and they need to be cleaned. As soon as take the system and blow out the dust, it wont crash again for another 3 or so years.

Assuming you didnt buy low level budget hardware, most systems are pretty darn stable these days. Crashes are very rare on any of the systems i own or use normally. If a system does crash its almost always from a power spike(lights flicker, on a system without a UPS), or its a thermal problem(fans stopped, heat sinks dusty)

If your gpu is crashing in games constantly, at least in mainstream games, its likely because of that overclock you think is stable really isnt stable. Its almost certainly a thermal problem not the drivers. Or in the case of a cheap power supply it could be unstable voltages at high load. One of those 2 things are almost always the case.

That said, i also have noscript on by default in my browser. And im blocking a few million ip address of ad sites, china sites, etc, etc. All those ones who like to push addware/spyware/virsues/etc on you. So i dont have a problem with that causing crashes.

16784321 said:

And for DX12, one game doesn't cut it for me
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9659/fable-legends-directx-12-benchmark-analysis/2

From the first page of that article you linked to:

The software provided to us is a prerelease version of Fable Legends, with early drivers, so ultimately the performance at this point is most likely not representative of the game at launch and should improve before release. What we will see here is more of a broad picture painting how different GPUs will scale when DX12 features are thrown into the mix. In fact, AMD sent us a note that there is a new driver available specifically for this benchmark which should improve the scores on the Fury X, although it arrived too late for this pre-release look at Fable Legends

Basically those numbers aren't very useful at this point except to compare Nvidia to Nvidia and AMD to AMD. After launch it will be interesting to take another look.

That's been AMD's excuse for the last decade, "AMD sent us a note that there is a new driver available specifically for this benchmark"

Just doesn't work in the real world. I'll never recommend AMD, unless at some point in the future, your games run on unfulfilled promises and false hopes. But you can probably just get an Nvidia card and see the performance now.