Delusions of ATI CCC

ATI Catalyst? Software: A Proven Track Record in Performance, Stability and Innovation | AMD at Play

Good read, but IMO the author is delusional or living in his own fantasy land.
- AMD finally provides DXVA L5.1 and some GPU accelerated encoding support 2 years after Nvidia has and while doing so, bricked DXVA support on 480p/SD, yeah take step forward, then take a step back.
- Cross-Fire and Tri-Fire problems are innumerable to count...
- The CCC is still one pain the butt to navigate and get anything to work.
- Still failing to fix GSOD, many users after 10.2 and 10.3 still suffer GSOD

Example:
Man of delusions expounds on how 10.3 increased eyefinity support. There are still innumerable threads demonstrating that eyefinity is broke on X-Fire and Tri-Fire... Again it's the excellent trend of take a step forward, then take a step backwards, in the end not moving forward. If you do something, do it right, don't do it halfway. Halfway seems to be par for the course for AMD.

Example 2:
Terry Delusional goes on to state some performance increases in 10.3-10.4 when it has been made very obvious that Nvidia is able to maintain good performance while having noticeably better IQ than AMD.

Example 3:
Goes on to talk about Mobility support. I guess the lack of 10.4a that desktop users enjoy is part of the commitment. I suppose forcing Mobile users to download the desktop drivers for Avivo, Hydravision, HDMI and other goodies is an example of the commitment. Halfway is par for the course and acceptable for Terry Delusional.

Thought some of you might want a good chuckle.

Some horrible mistakes:
Terry Delusional thinks Crysis is a DX11 game. He keeps referring to Intel i7 as 7i... there are many more, enjoy finding them. Proof reading seems to be not required for Terry Delusional. Again, half way is par for the course.

 

Umm... The GSOD is more of an Asus problem than an ATI problem, it's only the Asus notebooks with ATI cards that experience GSOD, and the ATI cards on Asus notebooks are made by Asus.

The Xfire may not be perfect, but it's actually better than nvidia's SLI recently. And Eyefinity is still an experimental thing, so it's understandable to have some issues.

 

I was not talking about GSOD on Asus, but for desktop users. Can find posts on Overclockers.net, HardOC Forums, Guru3D even on Rage3D.

 

Ok.. though it seems that mxm ati chips don't have GSOD problem at all, ATI must kind of hate Asus or something. For the desktop cards, almost all desktop cards are produced by various card manufacturers, using ATI chip, we don't really know if it's really caused by the chip, or the bad cards, and since the manufactured card is the last line before releasing to consumers, it's a large responsibility of the card makers to do their own QA as well.

As for the other stuff, well the article is obviously going to be biased, what do you expect from an article on AMD's site really.

 

Dell has the "GSOD" problem as well, I have it all the time with my Mobility 4670..

 

I'm not quite sure what your point is here. That corporate shills tend to be biased? I think we all knew that already. I certainly hope you're not suggesting that nVidia is any better, or perhaps you already forgot that nVidia pushed out defective drivers that caused major overheating issues just a couple months ago?

I've been an nVidia man for years; I used an 8800GTS in my original desktop build a few years ago, I have nVidia cards in both my U30Jc and my T61*, and several of the computers I've built for others were nVidia-based. But right now, AMD is absolutely burying nVidia, and it's pretty hard to argue against that point. The GTX 480, provided you can find one in stock, is still $100 more than the 5870 despite being sold almost at a loss, uses twice as much power, and runs upwards of 90C under load, all for 6% better performance. Not exactly a good deal for anyone.

*Speaking of nVidia and sucking...I'm on my fifth NVS 140M thanks to nVidia's inability to properly test G84/86 before pushing them out.

 

An experimental thing? right, a 1300$ graphics+monitor experiment...didnt say on the box that it was an experiment when i got it. It has been having issues for well over 6 month now...you know. NO thats not ok, i aint a beta tester.

 

It's eyefinity, not nvidia 3dvision. I don't thinkt here's a graphics + monitor with a box for eyefinity. What I meant by experimental means it's a new technology, so not working on certain games or conditions is understandable.

 

Yup, Eyefinity (and 3DVision for that matter) has to be properly supported by the game's developers. If it's not, there's not really anything AMD can do about that. It's just like old games that don't work right in widescreen; that's the original developer's fault, not AMD/nVidia/Intel/whoever's fault.

 

Correction, most if not ALL games* as a matter of fact most deactivate xfire for eyefinity (the reason I bought e second card in the first place)

And do you have an eyefinity setup?...

There are a few heavy bugs that are eyefinity/crossfire/ATI realated and that have nothing to do with the games.

Anyway, second thread I hijack about this lol, I should stop.

/moves on

Sure id pick ATI over nvidia anydays, but the drivers are just...horrific.

 

Well, like pointed above the article is from AMD itself, and people don't go shooting their feet on a regular basis.

Also, I don't see anything wrong with his writing: he is just pointing (obviously) the bright spots of their achievements.

 

I've seen tons of articles from various tech sites comparing the IQ of Nvidia and ATI based systems. In each and every one of them, the difference was a complete wash. Some of the tests were incredibly elaborate, utilizing a double-blind testing strategy and otherwise identical hardware. You can find these from MaximumPC, ExtremeTech, and TomsHardware.

In most cases, there was absolutely no discernable difference in a side-by-side comparison. I have mostly Nvidia based GPUs, but have at least 1 ATI GPU that I used daily, and I haven't seen a noticeable difference. So if you have proof, PLEASE post it. It's possible you may be confusing monitor IQ with GPU IQ.

I can semi-agree with your other points. I really wouldn't mind if AMD stopped trying to add new features in every patch and sent 1 or 2 releases on bug-fixes only.

 

I don't get your anti-ATI rage, I really don't. Is it maybe because you yourself have been experiencing a problem with ATI hardware or software while the rest of us have had little to no such problems?

In which case it's not a good idea to generalize about ATI hardware and software. I have no problems with the ATI CCC and I am running version 10.4. Ever since they lightened the CCC sometime during the 9.xx series it's been a dream to use. No problems whatsoever.

Also, I think ATI's drivers are on par with Nvidias. There's just a lot of blind, unfounded hate directed at ATI drivers when they really are just as good as Nvidias.

 

I have not found this to be the case. In recent times, ATI makes good hardware and lousy drivers while Nvidia makes good drivers and lousy hardware. I am not talking about performance in specific games -- there's a lot of them and it's hard to optimize all at once -- but when any 2D video (even Windows Media Player!) causes a crash within a minute, it's clear that not a lot of effort went into testing the drivers. This happened with a desktop I built last December and while looking for solutions online, I discovered that I was far from the only person with such issues. ATI eventually fixed this with a driver update, but it took them several months and even now some people still have the problem.

 

I've had no problems with ATI drivers crashing anything other than a 3D game on the five Radeon cards I have owned over the years (9200, 9600, X1600, 4850 & 5870). Clearly it's some kind of problem with your configuration and not with ATI's drivers.

Maybe you installed a third-party codec pack or installed your drivers incorrectly (sound, video, network, w/e). Which would be much more likely candidates for causing your crashes.

 

"Clearly"? :laugh: Just because you didn't have any problems doesn't mean that everyone else's problems are not caused by ATI. I had a 9600 and that worked well (drivers and all). The 4550 in my new desktop was a different story.

Guess again. This was a clean install of Windows 7 and I am quite confident that I did not screw up any driver installations. I was quite thorough with this (which is why I remember it) -- I updated everything I could and nothing helped until they released their new drivers. The probability that something else was broken and yet their drivers somehow fixed it is vanishingly remote.

 

Could have been a driver conflict with some of your hardware or software. PC's vary vastly in terms of hardware and software, it would be impossible to make a specific program or driver work 100% correctly in every single hardware and software configuration out there.

Sure there are problems with ATI's driver just like there are problems with every other bit of software out there. However, there are more people without problems than people with problems. It's just that those that complain make it seem like there are more with problems than without.

 

Some of the problems you might be having with Eyefinity/multimonitor/multicard setups could be related to limitations in the driver model Windows uses. Take a look here, Vista didn't support multiple monitors on multiple adapters, and drivers that haven't been updated to WDDM 1.1 in Windows 7 don't either. There might be software that was designed for WDDM 1.0 that still might not work.

Windows Display Driver Model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

ATI Catalyst is THE WORST driver series I have ever had the intense displeasure of installing. My fondness for drivers started back in the day when Nvidia's Detonator series proved that with each new release my little TNT2 packed more and more punch. This was completely inverted when I migrated to my next ATI card with Catalyst proving each new release in most instances introduced more bugs, dropped performance, and rendered previously playable games unplayable.

What a joke, no matter how you sell it, ATI's CCC is the most garbage piece of shameware out there.

 

This based on your experience with Catalyst drivers from...the R100 era?

 

Wow, CCC is one of the best driver packages out there, infact one of the main reasons i was happy to move from nvidia to ATI is purely the fact that i find the ccc center so much easier to work with,

And the drivers are awesome too, performance gains creap up quite nicely these days,

Sorry your experience is not so good.

 

I have never had any driver side-issues over the past year and a bit. Well BC2 would crash sometimes, but everyone was having that problem.

ATI CCC is easy to install and use, I guess it will differ from person to person but I have not had any issues.

 

I wouldnt say I've never had any issues with ATI drivers, but I've had just as many with Nvidia drivers, and the ones I had with Nvidia were more serious.
Neither company is perfect, I don't hold either as better with drivers than the other, certainly not based on recent experiences where Nvidia turned out to be the cause of some major issues with a wider variety of laptops.

 

Lol, ATI is also owned by a CPU company....... Of course they're going to produce more refined products.