AMD Tweaking Radeon Drivers To Reduce Frame Latency Spikes 105
crookedvulture writes "Slashdot has previously covered The Tech Report's exposure of frame latency issues with recent AMD graphics processors. Both desktop and notebook Radeons exhibit frame latency spikes that interrupt the smoothness of in-game animation but don't show up in the FPS averages typically used to benchmark performance. AMD has been looking into the problem and may have discovered the culprit. The Graphics Core Next architecture underpinning recent Radeons is quite different from previous designs, and AMD has been rewriting the memory management portion of its driver to properly take advantage. This new code improves frame latencies, according to AMD's David Baumann, and the firm has accelerated the process of rolling it into the official Catalyst drivers available to end users. Radeon owners can take some comfort in the fact that a driver update may soon alleviate the frame latency problems associated with AMD's latest GPUs. However, they might also be disappointed that it's taken AMD this long to optimize its drivers for the now year-old GCN architecture."
Re:Technology sites give brainddead measurements (Score:5, Informative)
You should be reading the Tech Report GPU reviews then, they have all that stuff included.
Re:Give them credit (Score:5, Informative)
More than that, this frame latency issue is new to the recent drivers - possibly even restricted to the 12.11 beta drivers, which one might expect to have the occasional issue. Further, other review sites that investigate the smoothness of gameplay, even if not by quite the same method (ex: Hard|OCP [hardocp.com]), have not found the issues that Tech Report has, which leads me to suspect that it might not be a universal issue.
I think that Tech Report has been very irresponsible in their handling of this issue. They've been quick to condemn, ignoring that the driver is _not_ a final version, and apparently unwilling to investigate the disparity between their older results with the same cards/older drivers (which had no such frame latency issues) and their new results. Frankly, I'm not willing to give them any regard as a review site any longer - their frame latency methodology certainly has merit, but they seem to be utterly incompetent in actually analyzing or investigating the results.
Ordered Nvidia (Score:2, Informative)
I had a newish card, AMD 4xxx HD, but they force me to use the fgrlx-legacy driver. The fgrlx-legacy drivers don't work with the newest xorg, and the ones that work with the older xorg are missing features essential for steam. AMD scaled down the Linux team recently. I just bought an Nvidia.
Re:Technology sites give brainddead measurements (Score:5, Informative)
This only went on so long because tech sites use such poor, useless benchmarking methods. Minimum/Average/Maximum FPS, or often just Average/Maximum FPS, are worthless!
Umm... Tech Report has been doing frame latency benchmarking for over a year now.
And I'm not sure if they were the first ones to come up with the idea, but I know they're not the only reviewers using that benchmark.
Re:I read: AMD updates video driver (Score:5, Informative)
AMD didnt have a class action lawsuit requiring them to purchase new laptops for end users involved in the claim.