7970M Driver Issues?

Hello Everyone,

There have been a number of posts here on the boards where folks are saying that the drivers for the Radeon 7970M are 'bad' and the drives for the various nViida cards (660M, 675M, and now the 680M) are 'good.' What does this really mean? What makes a driver 'bad' or 'good'? In my mind a 'bad' driver is one that is unstable, causes the comptuer to crash, or performs so terrible that my computing expereince is impacted. A 'good' driver would be one that works, and does not do any of the above. Is this simply a performance idea, that the nVidia drivers are better optimized for games compared to AMD's efforts? Several folks have asked questions about which card to get and many times the 'bad' drivers are mentioned in effort to steer the poster towards the nVidia side of the house.

nVidia has had there share of 'bad' drivers, but check this link:
NVIDIA Responsible for Nearly 30% of Vista Crashes in 2007

The driver model used for drivers is the same between Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is not a a completely transparent statistic, as they do not break down the number of computers that had the various flavors hardware. If more of the tested computers had nVidia cards, of course the stats are going to show more crashes.

If you have some personal expereince with what you define as a 'bad' driver, would you kindly reply to this post and elaborate? I am just trying to get my head around the driver issue.... Thanks

Rich S.

 

Well, my 7970m have stability issues since i have installed it in my R2, not exactly stability issue, but it seems that or drivers or the card dont like the facebook web page ( or any flash-intense web page i think) wich is constatntly green SOD'ing or GSODing, or chessboard screen of death is the best way to describe it. It is not crasng in games at all, wich is wierd, just when i browse web pages, a driver issue ? Voltage ? Or what ?

 

I think there is a perception that ATI have buggy drivers mainly because there was recently a phase where release after release seemed to cause issues. However, as you pointed out, Nvidia also has released poor drivers so it is not as if they are completely innocent.

In my experience, most of the issues I have had related to the mobile line of GPU's. I have owned many Nvidia and ATI desktop GPU's and I can safely say that I have not had as many issues with drivers as I have in recent times with the 5870m and 6990m. Of course, crossfire added a whole element of complexity and I am sure that without it, there would have been a reduction in these issues.

I should point out that I have never owned a SLI configuration, so in terms of a dual GPU configuration, I cannot be objective.

Another thing which is a little annoying with an ATI crossfire setup, is having to wait for X amount of time for ATI to release a CAP after a game is released!! I think in this respect Nvidia are better, but like I said, I am only speculating.

In terms of what I have experienced as a bad driver:

--BSOD when installing a new version of a driver
--Inability to roll back to a stable driver and being forced to format my machine
--Driver crashing during games, or when alt tabbing during games
--Additional video (such as skype) freezing when launching a 3D application
--Crossfire flickering (especially with 5870's)

 

For the most part, when most people talk about driver support, they are talking about gaming performance. Historically, Nvidia has always been better than ATI/AMD in this regard. Nvidia releases frequent updates with various performance improvements and fixes - more frequent than AMD. That's not to say the AMD drivers are bad, just not as good as Nvidia's. AMD does release updates, too, though, and I wouldn't worry about it too much.

 

Hi flingin,

Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it Green Screen of Death? I am not familar with that. When you have issues, does your browser crash, or just not render the elements correctly? Are you using a modified or "official" driver? Did you use this tool AMD Catalyst to download a compatiable generic driver? Thanks!

Rich S.

Hi Antipathy,

I did not collect any specifics, but up until June of this year, AMD relased a new driver every month (so at least 12 updates a year), and nVidia only released them when necessary. I was under the impression that AMD were releasing drivers more often than nVidia? The notebook world is different too, as you can't always use the generic drivers from AMD or nVidia, as the OEMs don't allow it. If you relied on drivers from Dell, you are often several of versions behind. In fact, I think that Alienware hasn't released an updated driver for my original M15x in over a year I am wondering if the 'bad' drivers is more of a percpetion thing than a reality (as Douse said)?

Thanks for taking the time to respond!

Rich S.

 

Don't get me wrong, in the last year ATI drivers have been painful...

 

Well, I'll admit that I am an Nvidia fanboy, and this being the first purchase of an ATI/AMD GPU I have ever made, I have little real world experience with them. I guess I may be wrong about the frequency, and you could be right about the perception. You know what they say though, perception is reality. Also, keep in mind the current generation of AMD GPUs launched 2 months earlier than the Nvidia GPUs. In the 4 months since the GTX 680 launched, for instance, Nvidia has released 5 driver updates (2 WHQL, 3 beta).

 

Hi Rich,
What i am getting it something like BSOD, laptop crashes and i cant to anything about it
I have to force to shut down by holding the pwr button
I am using official 12.6 driver downloaded via the tool

 

Hi everyone. I just got off the phone with the tech support at AVA direct. I asked him about the driver controversy. He says the clevo drivers shipped with the IVY bridge mother board for the p150em are fully functional with the Radeon 7970m. He says the driver offered on AMD's web site is the problem. DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE DRIVERS! USE THE STOCK CONFIGURATION FOUND IN THE CLEVO BUILD! Here's why the card(and situation in general) is so uniquly different from all others:

1. The AMD graphics card must opperate at times in tangent with a secondary intergrated graphics processor. The IVY Bridge board is the first to present this preticular senerio. The complexity of the functionality must be navigated by the clevo drivers exclusivly- at least for now.

2. The 7970m card is the first to "self-overclock." Many otherwise well experienced computer geeks out there are compounding their problems by trying to overclock this kind of electronic configuration. Most know what they are doing, but many don't, and how could they... this card is the first of it's kind, right?

There have been a number of posts here on the boards where folks are saying that the drivers for the Radeon 7970M are 'bad' and the drives for the various nViida cards (660M, 675M, and now the 680M) are 'good.' What does this really mean? What makes a driver 'bad' or 'good'? In my mind a 'bad' driver is one that is unstable, causes the comptuer to crash, or performs so terrible that my computing expereince is impacted. A 'good' driver would be one that works, and does not do any of the above. Is this simply a performance idea, that the nVidia drivers are better optimized for games compared to AMD's efforts? Several folks have asked questions about which card to get and many times the 'bad' drivers are mentioned in effort to steer the poster towards the nVidia side of the house.

nVidia has had there share of 'bad' drivers, but check this link:
NVIDIA Responsible for Nearly 30% of Vista Crashes in 2007

The driver model used for drivers is the same between Windows Vista and Windows 7. This is not a a completely transparent statistic, as they do not break down the number of computers that had the various flavors hardware. If more of the tested computers had nVidia cards, of course the stats are going to show more crashes.

If you have some personal expereince with what you define as a 'bad' driver, would you kindly reply to this post and elaborate? I am just trying to get my head around the driver issue.... Thanks

Rich S. [/QUOTE]

 

I'm just trying to put some input in as an owner, I have had a number of issues with the drivers. I have tried the 12.6 driver and the 12.7 beta driver and the beta driver caused a lot of issues whereas the 12.6 driver seemed to be noticeably slower but supported more games.

Issues:
-Complete inability to overclock (Even a change of 1 MHz causes extreme instability on any driver and "tearing")
-Tearing during regular use on the beta driver on Amnesia: The Dark Descent
-Lower than expected frame rate
-Maximum of 80% usage in most cases

My temps have been really low though, I have yet to see it get higher than 70 Celcius. All in all, I am very satisfied with the performance but I do hope the AMD releases a good driver which does not inhibit the performance of the card and is also stable.

 

Hi Eddie12390,

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my inquiry. Please don't read anything into my questions, as I am just informatio gathering... Is the 7970M advertised as an Overclockable card? Is OCing supposed to be a "feature"? I have thought when an end-user OC's a component, they get no support from the manufacturer, and thus a part that is unable to OC is not 'bad.' When I took delivery of my M17xR4, it did not have ANY 7970M drivers installed, and I went and got the ones from Dell's website, and installed them. I have no idea which Catalyst version they correlate too, but have you tried the official Dell drivers, do they cause the same symptoms as you listed? Thanks!

Rich S.

 

Although the 7970m was not advertised as being an overclockable card, it is disappointing that my card was not able to be overclocked. I am not trying to pin that on anyone as being their fault and I realize that it is just the luck of the draw.

Admittedly, I have not tried the official Dell drivers as I had completely forgot that they existed.

 

Folks around here seem to unilaterally recommend installing the official drivers off of Dell's website, and then installing the 12.7 beta drivers on top of them. Give that a try and see how it goes.

Also, what are you using to OC with? Afterburner? Seems like almost all 7970m's are great overclockers.

 

I will try that after I get home from work.

I was under the impression that the only working over clocking software was Afterburner with the config modification.

 

Have you tried to overvolt your card? Most have said that 1.075v is the sweet spot for this card.

 

I was so close to buying a 680m because of the driver hate but ended up sticking with the 7970m. I am sooo glad I did because I havnet had a SINGLE issue as of yet with the drivers. As soon as I got my R4 I switched to dedicated graphics, uninstalled everything that said AMD/ATI on it including the registry and then installed the beta 12.7's. So far my gaming has included StarWars:TOR (maxed out), BF3 (maxed out), Crysis 2 (maxed out, high res textures), Deus Ex:HR (maxed out), EVE Online (maxed out easily), Metro 2033 (mix of high/ultra since this game is coded pretty badly), SC2 (maxed easily), and WoW (maxed easily). If anyone is on the fence because of the driver issues I say dont be worried at all. The only thing I can say is Enduro has no business being on these machines in the first place. This isnt your standard energy saving laptop, its a gaming machine and is not meant to run off the battery at all since you will have decreased performance anyway. So save yourself a headache and disable enduro as soon as you get your machine.

 

I believe that is correct.

 

Problem right now is that with the way the motherboard is designed on Clevo systems, it's not possible to disable Enduro.

Anyway, I do agree with your statement here. Why the heck do they have to incorporate a stupid design into a performance card to save power? It's like buying a car with a 6 liter V12 engine, producing over 600 horsepower, and then worried about fuel consumption.