Driver Update Addresses Radeon Frame Latency Issues 108
crookedvulture writes "AMD has begun addressing the Radeon frame latency spikes covered previously on Slashdot. A new beta driver is due out next week, and it dramatically smooths the uneven frame times exhibited by certain Radeon graphics processors. The driver only tackles performance issues in a few games, but more fixes are on the way. In the games that have been addressed, the new driver delivers more consistent frame times and smoother gameplay without having much of an impact on the minimum or average FPS numbers. Those traditional FPS metrics clearly do a poor job of quantifying the fluidity of in-game action. Surprisingly, it seems AMD was largely relying on those metrics when testing drivers internally. The company has now pledged to pay more attention to frame latencies to ensure that these kinds of issues don't crop up again."
Beta drivers improve 57xx too (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition the security hole with the aslr being disabled was also fixed last stable release 12.10.
This year ATI also stopped releasing a driver every month and instead focused on QA before certifying drivers.
ATI really is improving as they try to stay alive. Bravo indeed and my next card will be an ATI.
Re:Kudos to AMD for owning up to this (Score:2, Interesting)
They need a new standard: WFPS. Worst Frames Per Second. Find the slowest frame, and how many times that frame can be calculated in one second. Average is a bad way to judge things; perhaps part of the benchmark includes the view pointed at the sky with only 10 polygons, where it would obviously render at incredible speeds, driving the average FPS up. WFPS would give you a much better idea of what the system is actually capable of when under a full load.
This has been a problem on all cards (Score:2, Interesting)
And I mean ALL ATi cards since the early Radeon 7000's. And the problems aren't just isolated to Windows. You can't get a decent read on the vertical blank timings because their cards are simply shitty and will randomly have frame drops and latency. nVidia seems to have somewhat followed them in their path lately but they were pretty good before.
This is generally not a problem for gamers to lose 1 frame or have a couple of them a bit later (you can't notice it) but when you're doing psychophysics experiments, it becomes a huge fucking problem.