AMD 12.11 "Never Settle" Driver Performance Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by draemn

Interesting... I was looking at some results for the 7870 and 7770 and the performance gains with the new drivers seem pretty tame compared to the impact on the 7970. Got an explanation why the 7970 will benefit so much more than these lower siblings? Also, I'm curious what % of 7970/680 owners play above 1900x1200 performance as Nvidia still holds on to the performance title at this resolution.

That's an excellent question. I don't know the exact technical reasoning behind it but I can make an educated guess.

Basically, these driver benefits seem to be focused upon memory controller optimizations. If the rest of the core processing stages become the bottleneck, the additional bandwidth efficiencies won't be nearly as effective.

We can actually see some of that happening in our tests where certain games at higher resolutions just don't boast the higher level performance increases as they do at lower resolutions.

Originally Posted by sswilson

So if my quick check online is any indication the 7970 seems to be $50+ less expensive than a 680? That's a massive gap, and if the results work their way down the line should put some pressure on Nvidia to draw back from their (too expensive IMO) current pricing scheme.

Also take into account the three games (and those are pretty much A-list titles) plus the 20% off MOH code.

Originally Posted by chrisk

Anyone else think its ironic that these drivers are called "Never settle", while we are then told that their CPUs are "good enough"? ;p

Good to see some extra across the board performance on these. I was following Sky's f@h thread there and was thinking something was up if he was working hard to get some new PPD numbers. The news of the extra games to be bundled was not really news, but the driver optimizations were a great surprise.

You will see the PPD numbers later tonight...in another review...CPU related.

Unfortunately, I messed up on tonight's review since I thought it was supposed to go live tomorrow night. Guess not.

[Mena]

How did you mess up? Looks fine to me....

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by Mena

How did you mess up? Looks fine to me....

Read between the lines....... ;)

[great_big_abyss]

Originally Posted by sswilson

Read between the lines....... ;)

Can't wait. I'm looking for a replacement for my 1055T.

[Eluder]

Too bad they took this long to fix their drivers, I wouldn't have switched from a CFx 7970 setup to a GTX 680 Lightning.
Hopefully this means nVidia fights back with some massive improvements of their own, though I doubt they have the same headroom as AMD did with their driver and hardware combo.

[Dave Baumann]

Logically Tahiti should always show the most different performance changes (for the more or less positive) realtive to Verde and Pitcairn. Look at the engine and memory configurations of Verde and Pitcairn and you'll see the ratios of Vertex engines, CU's, ROPS, and memory are very close with Pitcairn being 2x across the board (except with a little more than 2x the bandwidth). Compare Tahiti and Pitcairn however and you have the same number of Vertex Engines, 60% more CU's, the same number of ROPs and 1.8x the bandwidth. Dependant on where the bottlenecks of an application are Tahiti is always likely to show something more different than the other two ASIC's.

[great_big_abyss]

I'm more interested in seeing the improvements across the board for the 7950. I hope you find time to test some more AMD cards, Sky.

[trayton]

I would also if you get a chance like to see the 7950 included :) Got me 2 of those lol :)

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by trayton

I would also if you get a chance like to see the 7950 included :) Got me 2 of those lol :)

Well... if you've got two of them you can do the community a service by testing the old(er) drivers against the new ones in whatever benchmark you might have on hand. :)

[Arinoth]

Well it's nice to see AMD FINALLY got their heads out of their asses with respect to writing a GOOD driver for once. Hopefully they can continue this and can build on it.