Is anybody else a little disappointed with AMD's 7970 driver situation?

O

|oR|Spetsnaz

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Not trying to start a flame war or anything here but I must admit, I am pretty disappointed with AMD right now.

I've been running beta drivers on my 7970 since the 20th and I've been having some graphical glitches, such as flashing on overlays (steam overlay or a gradient overlay) when playing games such as MW3. I've been checking AMD's website every day for a new driver and every time I use their driver link at the top and choose my card, I get a 404 error page. The only way I found this beta driver was by going to hardocp.com and happening upon the link in the news.

I honestly have zero brand loyalty when it comes to AMD/Intel/Nvidia etc...I just buy whatever is the fastest or the best price/performance ratio. However, I have come to expect better from AMD. I've been very happy with my last few AMD/ATi cards. Now I'm starting to have some doubts.

I really hope AMD gets their act together with this card quickly.

/rant
 
I had a lot of little glitches with a few titles (nothing major, but things like flickering alpha textures or extra pop-in I hadn't experienced on 570 SLI), including SWTOR with an uneven speed (slow-mo/fast-motion effect) and antialiasing not working at all (setting worked and now works fine for me on my 570 SLI). AMD's driver updates seem to be at a glacial pace... supposedly no real official update until *MARCH* for the 7970. I expect better support for $550 single-card or $1.1k for a pair.

Devpost from SWTOR site said:
JovethGonzalez General Discussion -> HORRIBLE AA implamentation.

Hi folks,

Just in case you missed it, we added the following to the Known Issues thread earlier today:

Anti-aliasing is currently disabled for ATI 6900 series graphics cards.

Holograms will disappear during conversations if players modify their preferences to turn off bloom while anti-aliasing is on.

To give you all some more insight, the ATI issue is due to a severe graphical glitch and we are in discussions with ATI to resolve this. Thank you for your patience.
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Combined with the badness of the crossfire setups (which I was thinking of going for with 7970 CF soon) I just returned my 7970 outright around a week ago and went back to 570 SLI to wait for Kepler. While the 7970 is around 20% faster than a 580, it's 14 months later, the fan was noisy even on auto (which brought it to 42-46%, louder than my 2x 570 SLI to me even at 65% fan speed, all on reference coolers), and the price was pretty high for a "next-gen" part without much speed increase so much later. I'd like some extra performance and VRAM for BF3, but I can hold out until I see what nVidia brings to the table: if nothing else, it will definitely drop the high pricing on the 79xx series.
 
I feel the same way but it does what I wanted to do, which is to play BF3 in ultra across 3 screens. I'll wait patiently for the official release of the drivers. Never had these problems with my 570s in sli :/
 
I could do a google search and find just as many complaints about nvidia drivers.
 
I never had any problems with AMD drivers. But I also don't use more than one card. It's not needed and just costs more electricity and doubles the noise.
 
I've said it before and I'll say it again, AMD needs to fire its marketing and driver teams because they are really killing the good work their GPU engineers do. All my games are playable and I have no problems (mostly play SWTOR, BF3, Skyrim, and Dungeon Defenders atm), but why aren't the 79xx cards included in the 12.1 Cats? Was it a big surprise to the driver team that these cards were released?
 
Mr. K6 said:
I've said it before and I'll say it again, AMD needs to fire its marketing and driver teams because they are really killing the good work their GPU engineers do. All my games are playable and I have no problems (mostly play SWTOR, BF3, Skyrim, and Dungeon Defenders atm), but why aren't the 79xx cards included in the 12.1 Cats? Was it a big surprise to the driver team that these cards were released?
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I've got to agree. I'm not having any major issues right now but the only things I've played on my 7970 are SWTOR and BF3. Even then I still can't force AA on with SWTOR. I get all kinds of issues if I do.
 
The real question is is anybody surprised with AMD's 7970 driver situation? I love me some AMD, but this is just par for the course.
 
As long as the hardware is awesome, I can live with less than optimal drivers this close to launch.

They are working hard on the drivers and i personally haven't had any issues yet (knock on wood)
 
The situation looks normal to me, AMD rushed to release the card and thus had to make a "beta" driver version for the begining.

Nevertheless, my 7970 has been running great with all my titles exept in 2 special situations: World of Warcraft in DX11 mode only makes the PC totally freeze and I must push the reset button of the PC, in a game called Oil Rush, DX11 doesn't work (the game freezes as soon as it starts.

That's all and I must say its MUCH better than the drivers situation when the HD5000 launched. The only thing left to do with the HD7000 drivers now is to optimize them to squeeze more performance out of the cards and of course to fix the never-ending Xfire issues that will keep coming (I have single-GPU setup though so I'm not concerned about the later).
 
I just love the performance of these 7970s but I really really expected more out of ATi on working out all these weird bugs for their drivers. Its livable but if more problems arises with upcoming drivers, I might just have to switch back to nVidia cards once their flagship kepler comes out.
 
I almost bit on a 7970, but since I had so many random issues with my 5870 setup and my 6950 setup I decided to go with the GTX 580 Classified Ultra instead.... Every post I read about the driver issues keeps reinforcing the choice, but I really feel bad for everyone that has to deal with these issues since the cards were so damn expensive right off the bat. I don't know what the issue is but it seems like AMD just can't get the software side of things right on their cards. Good luck to all the 7970 owners, hopefully they surprise you all and get it together.
 
I play swtor lots too, and it is kind of dissappointing to see lack of proper driver support. I dont mind waiting but we shouldnt be waiting this long for there flagship card.
 
Just a question, but why do any of you consider buying a brand generation video card right around release date? I'd never expect to have solid drivers and crisp video right away. I think I'd always wait at least three months before looking into a new architecture, and that's if what I read about it up to that point says it's solid.
 
xTrident said:
Just a question, but why do any of you consider buying a brand generation video card right around release date? I'd never expect to have solid drivers and crisp video right away. I think I'd always wait at least three months before looking into a new architecture, and that's if what I read about it up to that point says it's solid.
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For me at least I got a new monitor and my old 6870 wasnt going to cut it. So I figured if im gonna upgrade now I might as well get something worth the cash that will last awhile.
 
I play starcraft 2 more than anything and xfire support is horrible! Weird blinking glitches, random performance drops. thought I had it figured out via settings in CCC, sadly i was wrong.

It's funny that their driver link for the 7900 series has been broken for a week, though. Pretty inexcusable.
 
you said you MOSTLY play SC2. Xfire seemed overkill.

But obvioulsy you are obviously using a 30" monitor , not a chance youll get decent AA at that reso without xfire, so i withdraw my comment of credualtion...

lol
 
I just looked at the new beta drivers from Nvidia saw some of the features:

New in 295.51

NVIDIA SLI

Adds SLI profiles for :
7554
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Oil Rush
Red Faction: Armageddon

Added SLI profile for a new game that I want to buy, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I started to wonder if my 7970 crossfire setup will have crossfire profile when the game comes out on the 7th??? Praying AMD at least gives us new beta drivers this coming week with crossfire profile for this game.
 
I'm not disappointed, mainly because the 7970 RC11 driver gives me great performance in the games that I play (BF3/Dirt3/JC2). I don't play MMO's, so I'm not mad due to SW:TOR issues. Bottom line is that the card bests 2 unlocked 6950's in crossfire and uses less power while doing it. One of the best $180s that I've ever spent.
 
The only issue in SWTOR that I know of with the 7970 comes from the use of forced AA. I don't think it works at all in the control panel. It doesn't for me. Any 7970 using SWTOR players able to enable AA in the game's control panel and actually have it work?
 
I'm more then disappointed,
2 7970 crossfire and most games are half assed supported.

Also, the cursor corruption still goes on today, this goes back to all the way back to the 4870 series!
 
Dan_D said:
The only issue in SWTOR that I know of with the 7970 comes from the use of forced AA. I don't think it works at all in the control panel. It doesn't for me. Any 7970 using SWTOR players able to enable AA in the game's control panel and actually have it work?
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From what iv tried, both changing in game settings for AA and manually in CCC, I see no difference in game graphics but my FPS take a big hit.
 
Igg said:
I'm more then disappointed,
2 7970 crossfire and most games are half assed supported.

Also, the cursor corruption still goes on today, this goes back to all the way back to the 4870 series!
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Gotta love that half dotted line. Thinking about making it my default. :(
 
Igg said:
Also, the cursor corruption still goes on today, this goes back to all the way back to the 4870 series!
Click to expand...

I haven't seen this yet with a single 7970, I did have it occasionally on Cayman crossfire.
 
Dan_D said:
The only issue in SWTOR that I know of with the 7970 comes from the use of forced AA. I don't think it works at all in the control panel. It doesn't for me. Any 7970 using SWTOR players able to enable AA in the game's control panel and actually have it work?
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(nothing major, but things like flickering alpha textures or extra pop-in I hadn't experienced on 570 SLI), including SWTOR with an uneven speed (slow-mo/fast-motion effect) and antialiasing not working at all
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GoldenTiger, I think you had a dud 7970.
 
dook43 said:
I haven't seen this yet with a single 7970, I did have it occasionally on Cayman crossfire.
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It did it to me the other day. However, it went away pretty quickly without me having to reboot. That's a step in the right direction. :p
 
Dan_D said:
It did it to me the other day. However, it went away pretty quickly without me having to reboot. That's a step in the right direction. :p
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Indeed ;)

I've gotten it to go away with 3-4 refreshes of the desktop in a row.

Sometimes i shake a fist at my screens and that seems to do the trick. Or I scare my cards into thinking they're going away. Start lookin in the "green" section on newegg now and then, seems to kick them into gear :p
 
I think some of you need to properly remove drivers and try again. No cursor corruption here, hasn't been for a long time.

Forced AA works fine in this game, if not, check your drivers. Also, if you have Adaptive or Super Sampling AA enabled, it's going to have a lower framerate than MSAA.
 
Dan_D said:
The only issue in SWTOR that I know of with the 7970 comes from the use of forced AA. I don't think it works at all in the control panel. It doesn't for me. Any 7970 using SWTOR players able to enable AA in the game's control panel and actually have it work?
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The control panel AA doesn't work, but forcing it does...and I don't have any graphical issues aside from character portraits sometimes corrupting.
 
Ghoststalker said:
The control panel AA doesn't work, but forcing it does...and I don't have any graphical issues aside from character portraits sometimes corrupting.
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I get all kinds of lighting problems which forces me to disable bloom. And then the game seriously looks like crap.
 
I came to the latest round of AMD offerings after having to RMA an NVIDIA card because their drivers wouldn't work with DisplayPort (as confirmed by EVGA, in a very specific configuration).

So I went from garbage drivers to garbage drivers. If I disable crossfire Skyrim runs pretty stable. If I want to actually use the $1100 worth of video cards I just bought, then it's a crap shoot of how long I can play anything before a hard lock.

It appears that "functioning drivers" is something that's hard to do, as apparently neither NVIDIA nor AMD can actually produce any.
 
svideo said:
I came to the latest round of AMD offerings after having to RMA an NVIDIA card because their drivers wouldn't work with DisplayPort (as confirmed by EVGA, in a very specific configuration).

So I went from garbage drivers to garbage drivers. If I disable crossfire Skyrim runs pretty stable. If I want to actually use the $1100 worth of video cards I just bought, then it's a crap shoot of how long I can play anything before a hard lock.

It appears that "functioning drivers" is something that's hard to do, as apparently neither NVIDIA nor AMD can actually produce any.
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This is why I always buy AMD cards separately. I wait until they resolve their Crossfire issues then I get the second one.
 
So I went from garbage drivers to garbage drivers. If I disable crossfire Skyrim runs pretty stable. If I want to actually use the $1100 worth of video cards I just bought, then it's a crap shoot of how long I can play anything before a hard lock.
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Skyrim. Why people expect TWIMTBP games (and Gamebryo engines) to run in crossfire on AMD hardware is beyond me. This has been an issue since 2008.
 
First off I am running 3 7970s in Tri-Fire and HAVE ZERO TEMP problems with these cards, all 3 run in the 70's overclocked at 1100/1500 Stock voltage with CCC controling the fans. Secondly yes the drivers have always been a sticking point with AMD, most games im not seeing any or very little different FPS coming from my 6970 Tri-Fire setup, Skyrim sucks it doesnt even use the 3rd card and the other 2 are at 50% usage.
 
What games are you people playing that you are having issues?!?

First of all, Skyrim is just terrible and it's garbage 2006 engine is garbage.

My 7970 Tri-fire works flawlessly in BF3, Metro, SWTOR, Crysis 2....

These are the best cards I've ever had, and I've been running SLI or Tri-fire/ Triple SLI in all my rigs for as long as it's been possible to do so.

They run cool, overclock like beasts, and are best cards out there.
 
Mine has been fine so far except for an occasional flash here and there.

In my experience with drivers, AMD/ATI has been almost flawless. Only exception is when it comes to multi-GPU setups. But both AMD and Nvidia have been a nightmare at that
 
|oR|Spetsnaz said:
Not trying to start a flame war or anything here but I must admit, I am pretty disappointed with AMD right now.

I've been running beta drivers on my 7970 since the 20th and I've been having some graphical glitches, such as flashing on overlays (steam overlay or a gradient overlay) when playing games such as MW3. I've been checking AMD's website every day for a new driver and every time I use their driver link at the top and choose my card, I get a 404 error page. The only way I found this beta driver was by going to hardocp.com and happening upon the link in the news.

I honestly have zero brand loyalty when it comes to AMD/Intel/Nvidia etc...I just buy whatever is the fastest or the best price/performance ratio. However, I have come to expect better from AMD. I've been very happy with my last few AMD/ATi cards. Now I'm starting to have some doubts.

I really hope AMD gets their act together with this card quickly.

/rant
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This has happened in every bleeding edge hardware since I remember. Improvements will come, just be happy that "it just works". I can pretty much play all my games fine for hours with no lockups or hard system reboot.
 
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