Will the 7970m work well out of the box?

I've been hearing lots of things about people having to install alternate drivers to make the 7970m work well. Is this true? Should I stick with the 670m instead? I don't like messing with drivers/BIOS, so I want something that will work well out of the box. Is 7970m a bad choice for me?

 

Drivers will mature over time no matter what GPU you use. Installing a new driver is not like modifying your BIOS. They are two completely different things! It will work fine out of the box. It will work even better with this driver. You needn't worry as much.

 

The reason I ask is because of threads like this http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...ards/674714-7970m-civilization-5-problem.html where it seems people have trouble playing games with the standard drivers. Is this common? Would the 670m/680m not have the same problems?

 

I think you're just being overly phobic/paranoid of the drivers. You should relax more. I can assure you I'm have zero issues on over 30 modern games I've tried with the 7970M and the driver I mentioned. Better drivers are just around the corner as well! It's not going to be very different whether you opt for an AMD or a nVidia card. In the end, tech just works and sometimes it just doesn't. Life's a luck of the draw that way, and different people have varying experiences.

 

i play civ 5 and have 0 issues (even with direct x11). dont be scared about what ppl post around here, 99% of the problems are because they screw something up when installing the card. im using it for about 1 month and i dont have any problems what so ever.
install the stock drivers and go play.

 

There is no major issue with with amd 7970 . i am playing all my games maxed out . however, in clevo system , clevo engineers have implemented a design that you can not turn off power saving feature (enduro ) in amd 7970 which result in performance downgrade while running at performance mode . in alineware, this issue dooesnt exist because they have option to disable enduro so they can have maximum performance. I own clevo and I am not experiencing any fps drop in bf3 multiplayer as well as other people so not even all clevo owners have this issue

 

Also keep in mind that the handful of members posting problems here are in the minority. The vast majority of users that are content with the product are happily gaming at this moment!

 

Amen to that! I haven't had time to go to the forums much...I'm too busy chewing up games at max settings on my new laptop with 7970m. LOL

 

Even though AMD/ATI Drivers are known to be a bit wonky when compared to nVidia's, as long as you are using the latest ones offered by ATI, you should be good. All of the big issues from ATI Drivers are usually addressed in a fairly adequate manner and going with the latest ones should rectify prior issues. In conclusion: you are good with your 7970M out of the box.

 

my m14x r4 with the 7970m has been flawless so far with the 12.7 beta drivers. I put significant time into swtor, wow, bf3, crysis 2 and I can max them all with my temps around 60-67 degrees.

 

I'm using a 7970m with my P170EM and I have yet to see a problem with the stock drivers from March. The card runs just fine as far as I can see (I have 'only' used it with actual games and not any benchmarking tools). The Enduro switching is a little annoying, but not anything close to a showstopper for me since it only takes a restart of the game and a few clicks of the mouse to set up.

 

Yes, the 7970M should work just fine out of the box. I was using the 12.7 beta drivers (just install them them over the stock ones), and the vast majority of games ran without a single problem.

In some games, using DX9/DX10 helps alleviate a lot of the GPU underutilization problems. For example in Crysis 2, I was only getting ~40-45 FPS with DX11 (extreme settings) but got a fairly constant 60FPS with DX10 (also at extreme settings). In Max Payne 3, the FPS stayed the same (~45 FPS) regardless of whether or not it was running in DX9/DX10/DX11 (mind you, this was ~45FPS with all settings completely maxed out - which is pretty good). In some of the older games (Crysis/Crysis Warhead), I could only get ~30FPS at high settings, and I know this card should be doing much better than that. It's probably due to drivers, which will hopefully get better. I guess the take home message is that if you're willing to tweak each game just a little, you can easily get 45-60FPS. I know everyone wants to get absolutely maximum performance out of their GPU (... and the 7970M is somewhat limited by Enduro), but if you're getting good framerates at max or near-max settings on every game, then by that definition I think that the 7970M does fine out-of-the-box.