[eteknix] GoodBye Catalyst Control Center – Hello Radeon Software Crimson Edition!

[DrMrLordX]

It looks like the 11/30 beta driver (15.300.1025.1001) corrected some or all of the performance issues from the first Crimson driver.

Here is Ice Storm with the new driver, running 4.5 GHz with throttling (no amdmsrtweaker):

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9586689

Here is Ice Storm with the first Crimson driver, running 4.7 GHz with no throttling (amdmsrtweaker + disabled power-saving features):

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9449650

if I have the time, I'll return to 4.7 GHz minus throttling to test the new driver more thoroughly . . .

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Apparently cnext.exe keeps the system timer resolution at 1ms even when it's running in the background. According to the info here it seems like it could be an issue:
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/

 

[VashHT]

Well the beta fixed the weird downclocking issue I was having, but the backlight flickering/strobing is still happening when I have freesync on. If it happened in any game besides heroes of the storm I would have rolled back but it's tolerable enough since it only happens when I'm running a game and I alt tab out. The weird thing is a few games I play don't cause this, Witcher 3 doesn't and neither does Mass effect 3, but every other game I've tried does this. I've seen this on two different monitors (same model though) and I see the same behavior in Windows 8.1, so I'm pretty sure the problem is with the crimson drivers.

Does anyone else here with a freesync monitor see any problem like this?

 

[RussianSensation]

Yeah! So glad to be rid of that old CCC, it was so slow...

God damnit AMD

I don't like the new Crimson driver UI at all. It seems they dumbed it down for console users switching to PC gaming but failed to provide sufficient visual/explanations to explain all these settings to newcomers. From a usability point of view, I much prefer the old Catalyst panels we had where everything was extremely easy to find and was laid out logically in a vertical manner. This horizontal layout is just horrendous to me.

I also like the white background (or older school gray) of the old Catalyst way more than the new horrible dark transparency effects they have going on that makes it extremely difficult to use the Crimson driver when you have something else open in the background. The Crimson transparency is so annoying! I don't want any transparency effects for this UI - make it dark black.

In some areas the layout leaves much to be desired imo. Just take the Video section. It looks horrendous. You have all these settings at the top in a straight line and some of them couldn't fit so they dropped them down one more line, in turn leaving a huge empty transparent space in the panel. They don't even have a preview video with what these effects actually do forcing you to launch a 3rd party video player to check. The empty space could have been used to embed a video sample OR spread out all of the settings across the entire panel so that they look naturally spaced apart in a grid like pattern (for instance how we have Android or iOS icons on a smartphone).

The Gaming setting is so inconvenient. Again same issue as above. If you are knew to PC gaming, WTF do any of these settings do/mean? There is no explanation with descriptions, no preview video of how so many different AA modes or even AF impact visuals. For newcomers to PC gaming, this would be extremely helpful. There is no explanation what the trade-off is for turning ON - Surface Format Optimization. No explanation is given as to what the benefits/drawbacks are to Shader Cache: AMD Optimized. If it's always good to have these on, why are we given this option? If sometimes it's best to disable it, when are we supposed to disable it?

OpenGL Triple Buffering is turned OFF by default. No way to force Triple Buffering in non-Open GL games. Texture Filtering Quality is not set to High by default - FAIL. I want the highest texture filtering IQ in games - hence why it's PC gaming, not console gaming.

Anti-Aliasing options are very confusing scenarios for someone new to PC gaming. When you select Override Application Settings under Anti-aliasing mode, you get:

2x Standard
2xEQ Standard (what does that mean to someone who has no clue about AA vs. EQ?). Cannot use Edge-detect with this mode.
4x -> You can do Standard vs. Edge-Detect. Again, no explanation whatsoever about the differences in IQ or performance hit
4xEQ -> You can do Standard vs. Edge-Detect. that means with 4x AA we have at least 4 options but we don't know what the hell is the difference between them:

4x Standard
4X Edge-Detect
4xEQ Standard
4xEQ Edge-Detect

There are no visual preview cues or explanations.

It gets even more fun since with any of the above, you can select Multi-sampling, Adaptive Multi Sampling and Super Sampling. While at it, you can toggle Morphological AA to ON position.

The system allows you to select 4xEQ + Edge-Detect + Super-Sampling + Morphological AA all the same time, but Texture Quality is not set to High out of the box? LOL!

Frame Rate target control and per game overclocking is nice though.

It might take time for me to get used to it but thus far I am not impressed. I'd rather put up with slower start-up of the old CCC because all the menus made sense and everything was so easy to find for me. All they did is re-arrange the same crap in a new shiny UI that looks half-baked.

The new drivers also introduced some serious FPS drops/stutters on certain systems/GPUs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyKwEj-jLJ0

One solution that seems to work for this ^ is Downloading Intel Chipset Software Installation 10.1.2.10 WHQL Download

AMD should have done more testing than rushing this driver out the door.

 

[KaRLiToS]

I don't like the new Crimson driver UI at all. It seems they dumbed it down for console users switching to PC gaming. I much prefer the old Catalyst panels we had where everything was extremely easy to find and was laid out logically in a vertical manner. This horizontal layout is just horrendous to me.

I also like the white background (or older school gray) of the old Catalyst way more than the new horrible dark transparency effects they have going on that makes it extremely difficult to use the Crimson driver when you have something else open in the background. The Crimson transparency is so annoying! I don't want any transparency effects for this UI - make it dark black.

It might take time for me to get used to it but thus far I absolutely hate it. I'd rather put up with slower start-up of the old CCC because all the menus made sense and everything was so easy to find for me.

I don't like it either, setting up eyefinity was much better before.

There are too many additional clicks just to get where I need.

 

[Rvenger]

I get a black screen at restart and opening games on crossfire with anything GCN 1.2. Fiji and Tonga. 15.10 is perfectly fine.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

I don't like the new Crimson driver UI at all. ...

Agreed. I don't even have cnext.exe running in the background because of the timing issue I posted and never bother to bring it up with RadeonPro still handling everything I would need it to. As for texture filtering, the RadeonPro pop up says high quality completely disables any driver optimizations as well as crossfire. The setting and options are poorly named if that's the case but that's why the default would be what it is.

I get what they were going for here, it's not far off from what MS is trying to turn the control panel in Win10 into with "settings," but it (both actually) still needs a lot of work.

 

[tential]

Wow RS.....
You basically summed up why I HATE using AMD's drivers and Nvidia's as well.

I don't know what I'm doing in the settings. I don't know how they work. I don't know if they're even working.

If you mention Triple Buffering again, I'll probably have a nervous breakdown. I've attempted to do Triple Buffering so many times, and I can never get it to work. The one game I got it to work, Tomb Raider, it made it look amazing, FPS dips didn't matter, I LOVED playing it. It's why I beat Tomb Raider so quickly.

Now, I have NO OPTION for this setting in so many games, and I can't force it it's driving me insane.

Also, back onthe AA topic RS.
Do you have any idea how I can learn to his this? I didn't even know Texture Filtering wasn't set to High. I actually checked this, and saw it and was like "Oh, it's fine, it's clearly set at the highest mode.".

Like Dota 2, I just decided that I'd enable the SSAA.
http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=55512
I can't use SSAA? But how would I know this? I mean, especially with AMD's shrinking user base, there is less and less users that are going to dive into these settings and document them for AMD.

It's so frustrating. I don't know how to use it and I wish I did since I play old games and I have GPU horsepower going unused.

 

[psolord]

I found out something funny.

I had my 7950 installed on my tertiary system, with the crimson installed.

Then I replaced the card with my 5850 which usually resides on that system.

I booted up and the crimson could not find a graphics card. So I installed catalyst 15.11.1 just to see what will happen.

After the reboot both catalyst and crimson can work side by side, lol.



What is interesting however, is that now gpuz reports the driver correctly, while it was reporting catalyst 15.8 when I had the crimson installed with the 7950. Weird.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Crimson 15.11.1 are the last drivers to support 5xxx & 6xxx cards. They changed the driver version reporting in Crimson too, that's where the 15.8 was coming from.

Edit: Still sleepy, just realized you installed the older 15.11.1's.

 

[thilanliyan]

Is there a way to enable/disable XFire from within the new UI? I seem to have to go to Display Settings, then Additional Settings, which opens up a CCC-looking screen, then I go to gaming and then I can mess with XFire. It was a lot quicker before, unless I'm missing something.