I don't think the difference between Nvidia and AMD is really so much the driver team, I think its the testing team in Nvidia that stops drivers with obvious problems. That isn't to say they don't break things but they don't release drivers like this and I don't think any company should ever release products this low quality. The fact a lot of the problems aren't in the known issues tells us a lot about how AMD is currently testing its drivers. Change is needed in AMD, a perfectly good technology is somewhat soured by poor quality control and it didn't need to be. Give yourself realistic release schedules, delay if needed and go about getting it right and working well rather than throwing tonnes of beta drivers out that all have their own problems.
BF4 was a nice experience with Mantle so far. Generally very smooth, even with 79xx trifire.
No problems with other games I play.
Wait I thought driver support for 7970 for mantle was not out yet.
I installed 14.1 yesterday and played bf4 with no issues but did not check if mantle was available.
Currently have 7970 xfire and i5 2500k @ 4.4ghz
So 14.1 drivers support mantle on the other cards aside form 290?
Yes it does. I've been using it since the drivers came out.
Make sure to disable your IGP, and set bf4 launch options to 64bit only before you attempt to run mantle.
I still don't understand why AMD releases drivers in these sorts of states. Internally during testing they must have seen these problems. If they didn't then there is something seriously wrong with their quality control, they just aren't putting these drivers through enough testing to catch problems that the grand majority of users have.
I felt the same way about the frame pacing concerns. When FCAT first came out my initial thought was that the GPU companies must be doing at least that level of testing to check their SLI/xfire output. It turned out that wasn't the case for AMD, they were completely blindsided by the whole thing.
I don't think the difference between Nvidia and AMD is really so much the driver team, I think its the testing team in Nvidia that stops drivers with obvious problems. That isn't to say they don't break things but they don't release drivers like this and I don't think any company should ever release products this low quality. The fact a lot of the problems aren't in the known issues tells us a lot about how AMD is currently testing its drivers. Change is needed in AMD, a perfectly good technology is somewhat soured by poor quality control and it didn't need to be. Give yourself realistic release schedules, delay if needed and go about getting it right and working well rather than throwing tonnes of beta drivers out that all have their own problems.
Reading through the Mantle driver feedback and issue threads at HardOCP and OCN made me remember what I disliked so much about AMD's software when I was using AMD GPUs (7970s most recently). OCN in particular has nearly a 100 page thread of people experiencing crashes, some with Mantle working but breaking other games (Rome 2, minecraft, and others), CFX and surround not working at all (and not just in BF4), and stuttering. Oh. , this driver apparently halves hashrates per HardOCP users. Make one thing better, break 15 things in the process...
AMD really needs to treat their customers who were so hyped up about this better IMO. I remember stuff like this happening all too well. Mantle has so much potential, but it all hinges on AMD's software team stepping it up.
I don't think the difference between Nvidia and AMD is really so much the driver team, I think its the testing team in Nvidia that stops drivers with obvious problems. That isn't to say they don't break things but they don't release drivers like this and I don't think any company should ever release products this low quality. The fact a lot of the problems aren't in the known issues tells us a lot about how AMD is currently testing its drivers. Change is needed in AMD, a perfectly good technology is somewhat soured by poor quality control and it didn't need to be. Give yourself realistic release schedules, delay if needed and go about getting it right and working well rather than throwing tonnes of beta drivers out that all have their own problems.
The purpose of beta drivers is to catch problems on different systems configurations.
I'm sure there is some hardware+software configurations that have no problems at all, but it is simply impossible to test all the possible configurations.
When you download a beta expect it to have problems.
If it was all sorted it wouldn't be called a beta (and we all know how reliable release versions of software actually are...).
And one could always point to the infamous GPU killer drivers, which probably mostly consider worse than games crashing or whatnot.
Are the issues really that bad or is this another "omg BF4 is so broken I can't even launch it without my computer kicking me in the nads" stuff? I had very few problems with BF4 (with SLI 670s and on my single 290). I haven't gotten a ton of time with the new beta driver, but from people who have actually used it, is it that bad?
I ran into one issue with the Mantle drive with 7950+4670K; with the first driver install I was getting random hitches where the game would freeze momentarily then continue. These correlated with big spikes to 100% CPU usage monitoring the system with the built in graph overlays.
I did an uninstall and then a clean install and everything works fine now apart form one problem. If I change MSAA settings under the Mantle API I get frame spikes up and down and I have to leave and restart the game to get rid of it.
So generally it works fine for me and it's faster than DX11. Not substantially, but in the same static areas frame rates are about 10% higher.
Are the issues really that bad or is this another "omg BF4 is so broken I can't even launch it without my computer kicking me in the nads" stuff? I had very few problems with BF4 (with SLI 670s and on my single 290). I haven't gotten a ton of time with the new beta driver, but from people who have actually used it, is it that bad?
Are the issues really that bad or is this another "omg BF4 is so broken I can't even launch it without my computer kicking me in the nads" stuff? I had very few problems with BF4 (with SLI 670s and on my single 290). I haven't gotten a ton of time with the new beta driver, but from people who have actually used it, is it that bad?