7970m Logging Thread, Games with Utilization Issues (Only post logs, NO questions please)

You sound really foolish. It being 20% slower at $300 less is a huge victory for AMD.

Mid-range vs High would be like comparing 6970M vs 680M, and we know how the 6900M cards are laid to waste by the 7970M.

In the desktop GPU market, a $300 difference nets you at least 2x the performance. The 680M's lead would be laughed at and mocked.

 

And it's still 20% faster in some game...

Don't expect better result in game like batman or borderland when they use PhysX. All other game have pretty much less than 10% difference.

 

Exactly. Jarred mistakenly used the overall laptop cost to calculate gain in performance vs addition of cost. The 7970m costs, $300 extra, while the 680m costs $495 extra. That is a 65% increase in cost for a 20% increase in performance. The 7970m is obviously the better value in terms of performance vs cost.

 

If you look at other graph with lower resolution. AnandTech - AVADirect Clevo P170EM Part 2: GTX 680M Grudge Match
You see difference are close to 10%.

Only at max setting with max resolution difference seem higher because of PhysX in some games and the wierd +100% from diablo 3.

 

My one concern is Borderlands 2. The 680m destroys that thing, while the 7970m is under 60FPS. Notebookcheck found the 7970m to get over 60FPS on Ultra in the game. So performance decreased with the hotfix? Also, it seems like Sleeping Dogs performance went down as well. Notebokcheck also recorded 80+FPS with Diabo 3 on Ultra. What the hell is going on?
AMD Radeon HD 7970M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

Notebookcheck's numbers for Max Payne 3 7970m are also higher. WHAT THE HELL. WHAT IS THIS.

 

680M will keep destroying AMD card in borderland 2 if you use PhysX max.

So many thing can happen, if you want solid result you need some game with benchmark like dirt or crysis. Without that you just don't know what part, map or scene of the games is tested.

The most important thing for us is the UTILIZATION GRAPH here AnandTech - AVADirect Clevo P170EM Part 2: GTX 680M Grudge Match

95% utilization with Battlefield 3 at medium, YES PLEASE.

Really, i can't be more happy.

 

But that is in single player. I thought BF3 was fine at all settings in single player with Enduro?

 

Just tired of Jarred, he doesn't fact check or verify the fud he spews.

 

I just wouldn't expect that when the first thing yous see when the game boots up is Meant To Be Played on Nvidia.

 

Of course developers aim to optimize for Nvidia, but you have to admit Nvidia is doing a fine job in optimizing their drivers for all games in general.

I wanted to point out that the 7970m has increased in price $50, and I wonder if that is because AMD is demanding more for it's chips due to low sales throughout the laptop/desktop sector. Now, the GTX 675MX is $250, $50 less than the 7970m. That is a really good deal for Nvidia quality and the performance you are getting, which should be 15% to 20% more than the 675m. In fact, if I were to buy right now, I would probably consider the 675MX even with the knowledge that the GCN drivers are being improved.

 

its weird that with new hotfix Batman AC utilization improved to normal levels, but fps has actually dropped bellow what we get now with poor utilization... Hopefully Jarred is doing something wrong there or his driver is not close to what we should be receiving.

 

are they though? I came from 6970m and I was getting higher fps with it than with my current 7970m on several games. Will have to see what happens with the new driver release, but 7970m certainly does not live up to 680m beater hype that was rampant around here when both cards came out.

 

Never happened. Was never a rampant 680M beater. Only it was a better performance/cost and therefore a win. Yup that still stands. 60% more costly and for the most part only 5-10% faster. That's a huge win.

If you're so upset about a $300 more card being faster, then buy it. Good grief.

 

Yeah, so it would seem the 680m has marginally more potential in gaming then our 7970m. For other tasks though, I am still very happy to own this card. Cad and caad work for example. Notebookcheck did a thorough comparison I believe, and allround it is just very good value for money. And we have more to come

 

yes, the sole reason i bought this over the gtx 680m was the CAD potential. in some regards it was a %300 percent performance gain in many areas. With that in mind, it's still quite a gaming power house at a very pleasing pricee!

 

not to mention the CAL++/OpenCL advantage of at least 200% over 680m ! ;o

 

Man I feel like I've been waiting a year for these drivers.

 

today is thursday. almost end of this week

 

I don't think its coming this week.

 

No one is a little surprised of the GPU utilization charts? in Anandtech's latest article? I am at least.
I was expecting 680M to be 100% used, if it aint maybe Nvidia owners should raise a campaign similar to wich 7970M owners did.
I also found interesting, being a neophite in the matter, Jarred's statement that GPU %s usually correlates with the cards capacity to provide FPS, and it it aint capable of more FPS the utilization is therefore low, or did i misread something?
Yes, we all have to agree that GPU underutilization is an issue, AMD aknowledge it, but it seems to me not as clear as it was.
I do infer from past and recent info that the issue of games not performing as expected is 100% driver/software related, not to say that hardware cant be improved, thats whjy every year we get new and better hardware, but the issues with 7970M are not hardware bottlenecks at all.

Back to my gaming experience 30+FPS is what i aim form more than that is just good news for future "mor demanding" releases, but the playability IMHO is just the same. I DO agree that average FPS is not so important as lowest FPS, if one has serious low fps points in a short period of time (say 15 or lower) it affects playability.

Also phisyx must be taken out of the comparisons, since its a known fact AMD cards dont manage phisyx directly. Nvidia placed it in the games just to kick AMDs behind and i couldnt care less about it. If you ask me it borders on monopoly practices and could even be legally pursued....

So taking phisyx out of the equation, and even considering enduro issues (wich i fully "suffer"), 7970M kicks 680M down the drain in a price/value comparison (wich is why we all purchsased it in the first place).

Its true Jarred is not comparing the cards prices difference vs performance %s, but overall computer price differences, wich is a serious mistake, if you do that is like saying a 500US LCD TV is same value as a 1000US LCD TV placed in a 1000000US home.... what is it 0,0005% price diff for probably 50% performance gain? I know it aint the same but still proves that he shouldnt use total values to compare card performance differences....its plainly wrong and misleading. I do think he didnt have any intentions to mislead its readers, just made an honest mistake.

As for the drivers, even if or when they come out it probably wont make any difference in my gaming experience, wich is NOT multiplayer. I understand multiplayers are much more affected, so i still support everyone's claims. But in the spirit of recs it must be said 7970M is a great card and definetely a good purchase, all things and problems included, and will only get better wich is amazing. IMHO.

cheers
Voz

 

Why would you expect 100% utilisation? Even with everything maxed there will be times when the gpu has less to do.
Surely the most relevant results would be the % utilisation at the lowest fps.

 

With vsync off, utilization should always be maxed.

 

at lower res it will hit other bottlenecks though - engine / cpu / bus bandwidth, so the rendering engine will not be able to feed GPU quick enough to fully utilize it. its not really a problem when you are getting 100+fps, but with enduro the problem lies with utilization and performance being low.

 

nope , still low utilization with vsync off...OMG Oct 19 and still no fix. 7970m is last AMD product for me.

 

At the risk of being boicotted by tech writers or amd affiliates —You just cannot release a commercial product without support. I guess most of us are following most of the same forum postings and twitter accounts, but going on and on about this "be patient" crap makes me sick.
Only good thing is that there are actually some benefits from this hotfix, at least according to anandtech, but for amd not to release at least a beta for us is just wrong. No one is expecting a miracle first time around. Just give us something !

 

Exactly. AMD has until the end of the month to release it before I jump ship. It's getting ridiculous.

 

I'm jumping ship either way - I just want a fix to be working so I can sell my laptop for a reasonable amount of money.

 

I don't think they would delay the fix if there wasn't a good reason to do so. I bet they are as anxious to release it as we are to get it.

 

Honestly, without sounding like a fanboy or like I am attacking you, If they wanted to release it it would have been out by now.

They did spend almost 3 months ignoring the issue altogether.

 

Yeah, cause that would make a ton of sense...

 

Well I mean, if they really cared about it, then they would have acknowledged the issue to begin with and the moment you are waiting on now would have happened two and a half months ago. Instead, they failed to even acknowledge the issue for almost three months and cause a lot of people to look a different way. Once their sales started slipping, then they decided to look like good guys and work on a fix for it.

So technically, they are not as anxious to get the fix out as you are to see it. If they were, they would have been working on this since day 1 instead of day 100.

No, I'm not being terribly unrealistic. They understand their hardware and software better than anyone, they should at least be able to figure out that is causing it an release a beta test for it in a month, much less five.

 

You are not making any sense. This IS affecting their sales, and more importantly their image. Of course they want the fix out as soon as possible. What kinda of a company would off its customers on purpose?

I guess you must a driver coder and therefore you know more than I do, but from what I have gathered the issue was never easy to fix. Heck, it wasn't fully fixed on the Anandtech's latest review.

And yes, you are being terribly unrealistic. There was something wrong with the drivers since they didn't release them. AMD wants this driver out ASAP, and there is absolutely no reason why they would delay it just to make us angry. Also, what they did in the past is totally unrelated to this matter, since their attention is on the drivers now.

 

First off, I said that they only reacted after it started effecting their sales.

Second off, it has been a known driver issue for 5 months. That is half the life of their flagship card, this is beyond the ASAP thing you are looking at.

I understand it was never easy to fix, but it is the flagship, it is their most important mobile product. I agree that fixing such a big issue is hard. It isn't easy, but this is your face here. They haven't even released an idea of what the problem was. Hell, they just in the last two weeks gave an idea of when it would be fixed.

I never said they were delaying them to make you angry, that is a byproduct. They just had no reason to release the drivers until they started seriously hurting their sales. Why else would they go so long before even admitting there was a problem. What they did in the past is unrelated, if it is unrelated. Their refusal to acknowledge an issue is related, however. They even went so far as to request threads about the issue be closed, which prolonged this issue while doing a good job of covering the it up. It wasn't until big bloggers caught on and started promoting the issue that they even answered the cries, nearly 3 months after the fact.

Yes they want to rush it NOW. It took them 3 months and slipping sales to do anything about it.

 

this is my first time buying amd and must be the last. no more, no matter how cheap they are.

 

I do disagree with that. It sucks that they have a horrible time this time, but Nvidia has had some issues as well in the past that made everyone say exactly what you are saying, however people always come back. The question is, does this happen again, or does AMD learn from it? That is what I would wait on.

If they learn from it, if they know better and are ready for this sort of thing next time, then there is no problem buying them. The 2001 Jag X-type was a pretty bad car, but that didn't mean that all Jags since there were terrible, or that all the ones before were.

 

the x-type is basically a ford. it is ford's fault.

 

Nvidia has had way worse issues than AMD has in the past and there are still people having issues with Optimus. Stop being immature and realize no company that makes computer hardware and software is perfect. Overall AMD has had a better record with drivers than Nvidia has. Nvidia has had multiple drivers that caused GPU to overheat, can youtube it, GPU's with smoke coming out, burning.

And at one point, Nvidia had shoddy manufacturing that caused mobile GPUs to melt. Nvidia didn't admit there was a problem until they lost a class action suit brought by Dell, HP, Toshiba, Apple, Acer etc. In that law suit, ANYONE who had a 8400M-8600M was entitled to a replacement or $$$.

So again, stop being immature because you have some issue with Enduro. I personally haven't enountered a game where the 7970M doesn't play a game above 30 FPS with the highest settings. I would like it to be better and I'm just curious to see what the full potential of the 7970M is, but that hasn't stopped me from play ANY game at the highest settings with smooth framerate. I am not a 60 FPS or nothing.

Also overall, AMD is the lesser of the two evils. You can youtube Linus Torvalds giving the finger and saying F-you to Nvidia in public during a talk. Nvidia angered Intel so much, Intel took them to court and now Nvidia can't make chipsets, and blocked Nvidia from making any x86 chips. Nvidia also promotes and pushes developers to use proprietary tech, which is bad for EVERYONE that doesn't have Nvidia. Actually you can go further, it's bad for Nvidia as well. PhysX has very bad coding, it's not multi-threading friendly even on Nvidia hardware and overall, IMO there are better physics engines. Just saying, I don't know why you are hating AMD so much when there is so much more to hate about Nvidia.

AMD Gaming Evolved program is just making sure games function properly with DirectX hardware, which is good for all gamers, both AMD and Nvidia. Most of it it's just to make sure the game uses CrossFire and EyeFinity properly, which has no negative performance impact on Nvidia.

Anyway, no company is perfect including AMD so I personally will just go with what gets me the most for my money. And so far past 5 years it's been AMD and I haven't had issues with their drivers other than some under-utilization, majority of games I have 60 FPS v-synced.

Oh and to make it even more awesome, Nvidia now has decided GeForce owners don't deserve to have full capability and slashed CUDA which they promote with EVERY Nvidia card... I think that's just BS, last time you could use a GeForce that didn't have terrible GPGPU, OpenCL capability was the GeForce 4xx series.

There is absolutely no debate in my mind, 7970M is again the performance/cost winner for 2012. Even with under-utilization, it's a better value than the 680M or the 675MX.

 

At least you got the point haha, That is what happens when you try to add European style to an American car.

 

You missed my point. I never said I'm ok with way AMD has dealt with this issue, far from it. I bought my laptop months ago and I've been involved in raising awareness of the issue, and sharing my bit of criticism towards AMD. I was talking about the current situation. AMD wants the patch out ASAP and won't delay it for small reasons (MY POINT), but that doesn't mean its their top priority. They also have to ready their drivers for Windows 8, and that is a lot bigger deal than the Enduro fix, since they affect all the cards, mobile and desktop.

And don't be fooled, AMD has been working on the fix long before they acknowledged it. Perhaps they even knew about it before the release. They kept their silence in order to avoid potential customers hearing from the issue, which is is of course very wrong. The driver team doesn't make the decisions, its propably the marketing managers.

 

This is my second ATI/AMD product, my first being a desktop 5770 that's ran perfectly since the time I bought it. This whole 7970M thing is just bad luck, IMO: brand new technology (i.e. Enduro) + bad marketing decisions = bad time.

Though I'm unhappy with AMD for their handling of the situation (and the performance of the 7970M a bit, though I can certainly max out almost every game I throw at it at ultra settings without issue), I'm not going to be foolish and say I'll never buy another AMD product. It's called research. This time I kind of sprung for the AMD card since its performance was supposed to give the 680M a run for its money for much less $$$. Next time I upgrade my GPU, I'm going to look at all of the choices more in-depth, then weigh my options.

 

b*llocks. optimus issues were mostly game detection faults where a wrong GPU was used. none of these issues took 7 months to patch and most could be worked around.

.
again, bs. Nvidia easilly churn out 10x more drivers per month than AMD does - go to laptopvideo2go.com and check out their Nvidia section, have a look at release dates and see how many different Nvidia drivers are released when compared to AMD's section.

once again fanboi lies. bad heatsink design causes overheating, drivers can tax a GPU a little more or not get into power saving states, but the main cause of any overheating will be the design of laptop's thermal system.

that was how long ago? and does a costly lawsuit make a company more or less likely to not repeat those mistakes?

so all the logs in this thread, some of which are yours must be an anomaly or fake or...? there are games where my 7970m will even struggle reaching 30fps and I can easily post screenshots or videos of it.

ah yes, another nice bit of fanboi gibberish... thanks guy, what does this have to do with 7970m's enduro issue?

 

i will consider to upgrade next year if the next gen cards still fit the board. if amd card still behave like this, this is definitely my last amdproduct, not only because of enduro, it is their technology being inferior to others, high energy consumption, hot, not environment friendly. i want an energy efficient and cool and good performance card. amd gpu is simply like their cpu.
i choose amd this time just because at that time i urgently need a notebook and that time 680m not out

 

I always choose my graphics card by that criteria

 

Then I do apologize, I did misunderstand the point. I thought you meant in general and not just right now, my fault .

Yeah, you could be right about them knowing about it before release, hell the "bad" second batch might have just had this problem and they thought it was just that batch of them. I also agree with the windows 8 thing, I know their driver team is putting a lot of time and effort into getting their drivers ready for 8, but they should have enough to allocate a small team just to work on fixing Enduro. I mean, Enduro is here to stay, and if they don't fix it now it is just going to push people away from buying next year as well and really put a dent in their sales.

But again, I do apologize for my over generalization of your first statement.

 

AMD was making a lot more drivers than Nvidia on the desktop side for a long time (don't know about the quality of those since I've been using 580gtx). I think that they have now adopted a similar release cycle to Nvidia. Nvidia has had a better support for its mobile cards than AMD, but I'm sure AMD will increase its attention towards the mobile drivers as well, since the mobile gaming business will only get bigger. And now that we have the unified driverset, perhaps we will begin to see new drivers pop out more regularly

There were one WHQL drivers from Nvidia that were indeed frying/breaking cards, but i think that was with the 8800 series or smth.

 

From Caveman :

"Keep your eyes open tonight."

 

O_O My eyes will be completely open!!! Thanks for the great news.... Let's hope it works out...

 

eyes closing. night

 

Catalyst 12.11 Official Beta is releasing today @3PM ET. Great improvements AND Enduro fixes. Check other threads.

 

What would be sick is if the hotfix Jarred tested was an isolated project separate from the desktop testing AMD was doing for 12.11, meaning that his results would not have included the +10% performance (from HD 7870) seen with 12.11. Imagine if we end up seeing little/no Enduro bottleneck+10% performance. But we can't over expect!