AW ATI 8.761 BETA Driver - M17xR2/M17x/M15x (August 2010) - Discuss Here...

Out of the Box July 30th
1-installed all MS updates
2-installed all drivers from dell support
3-installed hardware monitoring tools - CPU-Z, HWInfo32
4-installed hard drive tools - atto, crytal disk
5-ran benchmarks 3DMark06, Furmark
6-Installed Crysis and Crysis Benchmark tool
7-ran benchmark for Crysis & played some
8-uninstalled stock dell driver for ATI, went into safemode used CCleaner to remove remnants, rebooted with auto driver install off and finished by installing Dell Beta 8.761
9- ran benchmarks again and played Crysis

Hwinfo did not report proper temps and some sensors were way off so I did not run monitoring tools while playing Crysis.
With the Stock Dell drivers the fps ranged from 40-60. However there were marching lines going up my screen especially noticable when in dark areas. Became very hard on the eyes so I gave up. 3DMark06 performed well with 19100 ish score however there was some flickering. No problems with it going on battery, sleep or shutting the screen off.

Game/Application Tested With Reported Problem:
1.Crysis: At this time I average 10-15fps.Crysis also has an issue that when scoping up the screen freezes with sound still running. Then remove scope and all is normal. This happens randomly and without explosions or large amounts of enemies on screen.
2. Crysis Benchmark tool: I have before and after Beta driver benchmarking results and though this is an old game; testing it against itself should provide some insight
3. 3DMark06: With stealth mode off and the crossfire icon showing in the corner 3dMark06 has dropped down by 200pts consistently after 4 runthroughs

System configuration and bios version:
1. M17x-R2 Crossfire 5870, 8GB Ram, Intel 920XM CPU, Intel Wifi 6300. Bios A06.
2. Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
3. Dell beta 8.761 video display driver

Prior driver installation if any:
1. Stock Dell Drivers

Any 3rd party tools (e.g. AMD GPU Tool, RivaTuner etc.) installed and/or used:1. HWinfo32 Beta - not used, CPU-Z not used.

Other reported problems:
Installed the Beta driver from Dell and there were no lines marching up the screen however there was a noticable drop in fps in game. Checked and rechecked Stealth mode and all three power mgmt programs are set to high performance. Tried to turn it on then reboot but as soon as I did the whole system locked up and had to hard reset.

I have sleep mode off completely but I had the screen set to turn off after 20minutes and the first time this happened with the Beta drivers, all the lights were on but the screen would not turn back on. The only way out was a hard reset.
I will install more games for testing, I have a few at my disposal and can report back. I am waiting for a true DX11 game at this point, waiting for FPS or RPG to be released. Am installing Bioshock 2 tonight.

 

I also had problems with this driver and I have never attempted to modify anything. My computer is stock.

 

please be specific about your problems when reporting them, it does brian and the engineering team absolutely no good in solving the problems if they don't know what they are.

 

brian,

are there plans to fix the battery/sleep problems not working? sorry if this is a n00b question

 

Glad to see everyone adding plenty of details - good job guys!

 

Yes, this is obviously unacceptable driver behavior.

 

This is EXACTLY what I'm looking for - sent to engineering.

Thanks!
+++

 

Awesome detail - sent to engineering. Thanks! +++

 

Joker, your such a over achiever

 

great! I look forward to the new release

 

Yep, thats exactly what I get. One thing I can commend the beta drivers is for reducing the amount of time the balck screen occurs for.. more like a flicker here and there and its gone.

10.7's I've had to quite the game entirely to get rid of it sometimes.

 

What I did:

1. I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
2. Installed all dell drivers from support.dell.com
3. Installed the 10.7 beta catalyst release.
4. Installed bad company 2
5. Launch bad company 2 and play it for at least an hour to see if it crashes.
6. The new Dell Beta driver was released so I then uninstalled the 10.7 and re-installed the new betas.
7. Played bad company 2 to see if there was any difference.

Bad company 2's performance is erratic and it will either lock up the system or crash to desktop at random. I also had black screens where you could still see the HUD and hear the action around you. This is my experience with both the 10.7 and the most recent Dell Beta driver.

Sleep is also a no go with this driver.

System configuration and bios version:
1. M17x-R2 Crossfire 5870, 8GB Ram, Intel 920XM CPU, 80GB Intel G2 SSD, Intel Wifi 6200, Bios A06.
2. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
3. Dell beta 8.761 video display driver

Prior driver installation if any:
1. 10.7
Any 3rd party tools (e.g. AMD GPU Tool, RivaTuner etc.) installed and/or used:
1. None

Other reported problems:
1. System locks up when sleep/hibernate are initiated. Booting from battery does not work nor does disengaging the A/C adapter.
2. Starcraft 2 there is a small issue where the cursor will actually look distorted after playing the game a while. It happens randomly. It will look as though they put the picture of the cursor through the blender. It still moves around the screen smoothly but just looks messed up. When I exit the game it also messed up the look of the cursor in Windows causing me to reboot to fix the problem.

 

Specs:

Alienware M17X R2, specs in my sig.

Setup:

Fresh install of win 7 x64, no previous drivers.
Installed dell 8761 driver
Installed catalyst profiles
Installed starcraft 2
Enabled extended desktop with my Dell U2711 monitor using displayport
Ran Starcraft 2
This happens <-- youtube link! (awesome music is due to cute girlfriend)

If I have extended desktop enabled via HDMI or Displayport, and I use ANY resolution and ANY orientation (primary, secondary, etc), ALL my games present this result.

The only drivers that do NOT do this are the dell 10.2's.

As you can see near the end of the clip, closing the lid (and turning off the notebook display in doing so) causes the game to run properly (though it didnt recover in this vid, have to run the game with the lid closed first).

This happens with all games.

I also have the no sleep/wake issue as reported in this thread.


Brian, I am sorry that they told you they fixed all of these issues and handed you something we could have gotten ourselves. Im guessing this is what happened:

1: AMD gives Dell engineers new drivers.
2: Dell engineers add dell hardware ID's to installer.
3: Dell engineers tell Brian "all issues fixed".

No Dell specific changes have been made to the drivers to make them different from the standard catalyst 10.8 beta save for adding dell graphics card hardware ID's.

Either there has been a mixup with the upload or they plain and simple did nothing.


Brian, I would check to make sure we actually got the right driver package, cos it hasnt got anything dell specific in it. Its stock AMD, which we all know wont work.

-Ash

 

I ran into a BSOD loop during POST this morning and couldn't get out of it. Interesting enough, I had some Windows Updates queued so I let them install on shutdown last night. And couldn't boot this morning. The only thing that worked was to uninstall the new beta driver and back out of the updates. After that, I just went back to the old Dell default driver. I'm not convinced that there isn't still a problem with my hardware. I have posted a dmp file of the BSOD in the M17X Problems Thread if anyone is interested: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-technical-question-thread-8.html#post6584643

 

My specs:
m17x R2
i7 720
4 gig memory
single ati 5870
1tb HDD (500gb x 2 in raid 0)

Here is what I did with the driver:
I removed the stock driver from device manager...

then used ati install manager in control panel to remove ALL ati software. Reboot into safe mode...

use driver sweeper to clean all ati display driver files. Reboot.

install Beta Driver. Reboot.

Now the Games: (All at max settings except Metro-high)

FPS w/ stock driver (FPS w/ Beta)
Mass Effect 2: 45-60 (45-60)

Batman Arkham: 50-60 (50-60)
Asylum

Two Worlds: 35-70 (35-70)

Transformers War: 30 (30)
for Cybertron

Call of Duty: 50-70 (60-70)
Modern Warfare 2

Ghostbusters: 45-60 (55-120)

Metro 2033: 25-30 (25-30)


The only preformance increase was in ghostbusters. All others were about the same. I felt like two worlds fps was much more up and down with the beta driver. Since I saw little to no increase in performance, I went back to the stock driver since when the power cord popped out, it locked up the system.

 

I spoke to engineering about these issues and they asked me to apologize for the issues that made it out - they only did very limited testing in an effort to appease my constant requests for a new driver. So, it was a bit my fault for pushing so hard for a new driver...

They have been able to reproduce the power management issues and they are working with ATI to resolve. I hope to have more detail soon.

They also asked me to ensure that those of you still using the beta drivers have the power play feature disabled.

Thx and keep sending detail - I'm sharing with engineering!!

 

Anyone else seeing boot problems after installing the most recent Windows updates? Tech support mentioned that this happend to an M15x owner yesterday. Hoping we don't have a new update that is causing issues out there...

 

Yeah... That was the intended driver. They are working on a "Dell" driver now. Hopefully this one will be much better....

 

Brian,

Thanks for your update.
It might have been sent out to a too big group as well. A group that consists of people not even knowing there are/were issues to begin with.
They see this thread, or the driver on the dell site and start downloading and installing, without bearing in mind it is a beta.

It might be an idea to give the new driver first to a select group here. Specifically the ones having issues and reporting it in a workable way.

Then if they can confirm the issues are resolved in realworld testing, send the beta out.
I'd happily be of assistance in testing the issue i reported to you in my pm (default clock leads to crashing vid, but can only confirm the issues explained in detail by the others. I am unable to flash, reinstall, debug etc)
And i assume guys like grim, joker, etc would love to help as well. No need for 15 pages consisting of only a few issues.

 

w7 up to date
no problems found


specs

Specs:

Alienware M17X R2
SSD + HDD 500
i7 720.
4g Ram
ATI 5870 CF

Setup:

Fresh install of win 7 x64
install all drivers from dell.
Installed dell beta 8761 driver
Installed catalyst profiles
Installed starcraft 2

to set up my SSD follow this tuto
First time setup - Alienware M17x Wiki

i'm really noob here and just to let ya know, maybe some one have the same isue probably all of u already know this and im the noob here XD..


i have some problems runing SC2 cuse i disable pagefile. FPS drop to like 20
crash the system, black screens. etc.. ( i play SC2 in ultra settings)

just enable the pagefile again and the game works perfect. just the problems already we know with sleep/battery..

no problems detectet untill now.



just a question here. i really need to disable pagefile to get best performance with SSD? can i stay with pagefile without any problems in SSD?

 

If I disable power play, it halves my fps in Bad Company 2. As a side note, I also experience the flickering black screen and random crashes to desktop in Bad Company 2.

 

Since I gave you the huge post with all the specs and issues, I won't be doing that again...
I have re-enabled Powerplay because as V3_Shae has noted the fps drops even further than before as in my paltry Crysis 10-15fps drops into single digits. Powerplay enabled or disabled; the system still will not recover from a shut down screen, sleep, or hibernate.
Installed BioShock 2 last night and only got to play a few minutes before 2am arrived. So far, without checking on fps, I am getting a bit of artifacting in game. What I see is a single line across the screen that flickers. It shows up in cutscenes and during gameplay. This is the same line I got in Crysis cutscenes with the stock Dell driver but it disappeared in Crysis with the Beta Dell driver 8.761.
The fps are definitely better in BioShock 2 than I'm getting in Crysis but I haven't run Fraps to check. Crysis has it's own benchmark program to report fps. And I was avoiding running any other programs while playing BioShock 2 for the short time I played.
Is the FFIV benchmark worth testing this system with? If so I will download and try that.
I have not installed the updates to MS Win 7 for fear I will get the same issues. If so I will most probably be in a position to wipe and reinstall, start from scratch. If that is the case then I will really wipe the SSD. I need more info on ata secure erase before I do. Once I have done all that research I will test the update to MS and report back.

 

Yes. Same here. BFBC2 doesn't play well at all for me either with Powerplay disabled in CCC.

 

Thanks Brian for keeping us all up to date with progress from AW side of things....you truly are doing a great job for us here, your attitude and drive towards getting these driver issues rectified is truly commendable. If more people were like you, well, all I can say is that that would be amazing.

Keep up the good work and thanks for all your continued efforts!

Gotta give the man some + rep!!!

 

at the same time this is NBR where there is many many users ready to help each other and they can see what hapens when normal people get thier hands on it revealing tons of issue they might never have found in thier ultra controled lab


also if this is the normal 10.8 beta you are telling me i can just add my unsuported alienware 4850's id to the thing and run them

 

Let me first start by saying I and most other people very very much appreciate releasing a Beta Driver at all, I don't think Any Other OEM can claim to respond so well to such enthusiast or community requests. Even though it doesn't work as well as many other users with higher expectations than normal were hoping, The people that count know what a Beta Driver is(and how hard it is to get released) and are happy to even get one. So Thanks.

I have all the most recent updates installed and have not had this issue, however I'm also down to a single 5870 for the moment. I do not use any utilities such as GPU tool or Riva tuner

Once again, thanks for the update!

 

My Windows 7 installation is up to date and have had no problems with it so far. Will update if I notice anything else.

 

Ok here is a question maybe someone will answer for me this time...

When I installed the beta drivers I forgot to check something and now that I have reverted back, I dont really feel like going through the whole clean install process again...

With the stock drivers, if I go into CCC and use the "advanced" screen to max out all the settings for the card (move the slider all the way to "quality" instead of "performance") what happens is when I start up many of my games (batman AA, COD MW2, Metro 2033, etc) the card wont power all the way up to 700mhz/1000mhz according to GPUZ. It stays at 100mhz/150mhz the whole time.

And the games run terrible!! Like less then 15 fps. Which makes sense if the core clock and memory are running at 100/150mhz respectively.
Disabling powerplay allows the core clock and memory to rise to 300/350 respectively, but does nothing for game performance. When I click "restore to factory settings" (which moves all the sliders back to the middle between performance and quality)everything is back to normal, games run fine.

Example: COD MW2
"3D" settings in advanced at "factory settings" I get 60-70 fps and game looks great.

"3D" settings in advanced maxed out I get 10-15fps game runs terrible.

Example: Batman AA
factory settings I get 50-60fps, game looks great.

maxed out I get 5-10fps game runs like crap.

Again, the terrible fps with settings maxed out is because the card is running at 100/150 or 300/350 not the intended 700/1000mhz.

Does anyone know if it still does this in the new beta drivers...or can you try it out? Makes no darn sense to me...

On every pc I every owned the first thing I did was go into nvidia/ati control panel thing and max out the settings...on this PC it puts gaming performance in the toilet; but not because the machine cant handle it, but because all of the sudden the video card wont run at its intended core clock/memory clock for gaming. If I had star craft 2 or Bad Company 2 I'd try them out...maybe I'll get BFBC2 on Friday and see how it runs on this machine.

Somebody please try this out this time and see if they are getting the same symptoms as me or if I am just nuts.

 

Another thing I noticed with the driver was it raised Windows aero and gaming graphics in WEI from 6.0 to 7.2 but dropped my primary hdd preformance from 6.8 to 5.9. I dont know if this is serious but i thought i would point it out. My score are normal now that I am using the older driver.

 

wei is so inconsistiant and funky I would doubt it was the drivers.

 

We ALL count Lozz, not just those who "know what this entails"....every one who has issues "counts" and not just those in the "know" or "more experienced", after all, we ALL have Alienware laptops dont we?.......

 

I lost points in graphics. It also appeared and maybe this happens normally, that Windows would go into basic Window theme right before I opened BFBC2. Is it supposed to do that? I guess i can see if the old drivers do that also as I have gone back to them.

 

I never said that, what I said was I appreciate the effort, instead of whining about a beta driver that didn't work for me after I complained about not getting driver updates.

 

Additionally, this wasnt a Dell beta driver, it was an AMD beta driver, which we are all used to using with the 10.7a.

It seems we all (including me) thought this was a dell produced/modified graphics driver, which we now know was not the case.

I think this is why we all had the "what the hell?" reaction, because we expected something different to what we are already using.

Now that Brian has said that we are indeed just using an AMD beta driver and dell is now going to put in the alienware specific modifications fixes, our expectations have been set straight.

Thus, I assume the next round of drivers will have less "whining" and more reporting.

To sum up what I know so far:

1: Sleep/Wake does not work
2: Gaming on an extended desktop configuration does not work (game shows garbled corruption as per this video)
3: Various instabilities in mainstream games
4: Reduced performance without crossfire profiles installed
5: Starcraft 2 artifacting of mouse pointer (could be included in the above, but may be important)

Any additions for a short, succinct list?

-Ash

 

Maybe i just read it wrong so apologies Lozz......and yeah, i think we are all grateful for any kind of progress. It would have been quite easy (like you say) for any other OEM to disregard our requests/opinions.

The mere fact that Brian is here to help us out really does bolster my faith in Alienware....once again, I feel that I have bought into a family of owners instead of just being a statistic.

 

Well I have decided to go back to the original Dell drivers for my 5870s. Started getting excessive flickering in WoW while in game and the loading screens were so bad the color was actually changing with the flickering. Nothing is running OC'd and I'm not using any special tools or anything. Just flat out stock machine (see specs below) running BIOS A07 and any other updates from the drivers site except for the two Intel things (the one that shouldn't be there and the Rapid Storage one since it won't work for me).

Guess I will live with my screen not fully turning off but I also won't have to deal with flickering and not being able to do anything once I wake my screen back up when I have it shut off.

I really miss my 280s... anyone want to trade some nvidia cards for my 5870s? lol

 

I had a really weird thing happen that I have never seen before installing the BETA driver. I was getting a decent framerate but the action seemed to be speeding up and slowing down. Very strange. I don't know how to describe it. When I was driving a car in Just Cause 2 it was like I was going from regular speed to slow motion and back every 100 feet or so. As soon as I installed the regular driver again it went back to normal. Weird.

 

Sounds like microstuttering.

 

Never heard of it! Googling now

Edit:
Hmmm. I wonder what causes it. Everything I have found shows that it mostly happens on multi-gpu systems, which mine isn't obviously. I wonder if a bad driver can cause it. Or maybe a program is interfering in some way causing it.

 

I completely fixed the BC2 problems on my end but the fix is pretty convoluted so I won't post it here. I remote connected to Jubbing and applied it to his system too. So right now he's able to put his on sleep/hibernate/unplug it just fine. He hasn't tested BC2 yet but I'm confident he wont be crashing again.

 

Something you maybe suggest to Brian??? - maybe something they can work into a fix?

 

Same here, straight driver no tools, and no tweaking. Still have the issues.

 

So you think this ISNT a Dell modified driver? Straight from ATI? Why would the standard ATI drivers not work but this Beta work without dell tweaking?

 

I've heard only very few people about this (calingasan) following issue i have already sent to Brian.

it seems like the card is clocked too low on default settings.
(engine 99 / memory 155) i just did a fresh install with alienware discs, since for some reason it wouldnt boot anymore. at the moment i am only on dell drivers (will post the details later).
When i try to play a youtube or MP4 file, my screen just locks up and freezes. i do hear sound. i see a popup that my graphics driver stopped responding and needs to restart.

i know exactly how to fix it with amd gpu clock tool:
if i install that and have it run at startup with a default clock setting a bit higher (200/400), it runs without any issues. for gaming use i run it at 699/1000.

This still happens on current beta.
calingasan has suggested it might be hardware related, but i dont have that confirmed yet

 

@bzzje:

The issue you are talking about is related to adobe flash players newest version. uninstall it and google an older version and the problem goes away. This is NOT related to the hardware or dell drivers in any way.

go to this link:
http://www.overclock.net/ati/788423-crash-while-watching-youtube-video.html
read savagebunny's responce on the first page...has link to older adobe version.

 

We've pulled the beta driver due to the severity of the power management issues. Engineering is working to get a newer driver up ASAP.

 

Thanks a bunch!

 

Had my graphics card and motherboard replaced by dell. I'm just monitoring it now to see if that error will comeback. so no, i dont think mine was a flash player issue as I still have the same OS now as I had before the replacement.

 

Please resize your picture, it's causing scrolling

 

omg, thumbnail sizes please!

in any case, that's the error I get when I overclock too much, I would try uninstalling driver sweeping and removing all ATI components via the program manager then trying to reinstall.