ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
ATI's Mobile Driver Program -- or Lack Thereof
ATI unfortunately hasn't done much to improve their mobile driver program as far as we can tell. Manufacturers can request a new driver drop, but there may be a delay in getting that out to the users. Let's assume for example that you're running a high-end gaming laptop and a brand new game comes out. What if, similar to Far Cry 2 or Fallout 3, and your drivers are too old? As we saw late last year, ATI had to go through several driver revisions and hot fixes before CrossFire worked properly with both of those titles... and that was for desktop ATI graphics users.
What happens if a similar situation occurs and you're running the ASUS W90Vp or some similar "gaming" ATI laptop? Titles such as F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Call of Duty: World at War, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II, or Empire: Total War -- to name just a few recent releases -- very likely will not fully utilize the capabilities of your notebook. You would probably still need to wait a few weeks for a hot fix on a desktop PC, but on notebooks you could literally end up waiting months -- and that's assuming your notebook manufacturer actually releases an updated driver.
Is this a problem? We certainly think so, and ATI needs to do better in this area. We talked about this issue with NVIDIA a lot around the launch of the 8800M, and 18 months later we've gone from haphazard mobile driver updates from manufacturers, to quarterly driver updates, to what appears to be an all-in-one integrated driver program. It would have been nice if ATI had done the same thing during that time, but it's not too late to turn over a new leaf. Looking at the desktop GPUs, ATI is able to compete fairly well with NVIDIA, particularly in the price/performance category. With ATI apparently showing interest in reentering the high-end mobile GPU market, they need to develop a program similar to NVIDIA's mobile driver program if gamers are ever going to take them seriously.
With the availability of new mobile drivers from NVIDIA comes the question of performance. For this review, we updated the drivers on our Clevo D901C notebook to check for performance improvements. Much of what we test doesn't appear to have benefitted, and in fact several titles showed reduced performance relative to the drivers from last year. However, many recent games have benefited, and it's likely many other newer titles will see increased performance. We are including several new titles in this review, and going forward we will use these results. That means we will also remove results from previously tested laptops where we haven't used a recent driver. You can of course refer back to previous notebook reviews to see those scores.
NVIDIA isn't the only one who gave us new drivers, however. We spoke with ASUS after initial testing showed subpar performance in several titles. They in turn spoke with ATI, and we received a special driver drop from ATI a couple of days later. We tested with the new drivers, and not surprisingly performance improved in many of the latest games. There are still titles that appear to lack CrossFire support, and we encountered other issues that we will discuss later. The biggest problem unfortunately is that regular users don't have the ability to speak with their press contacts and get a new driver. The updated driver is not publicly available, so while we will look at how it affects performance we will also include results from the original driver.
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tynopik - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
the charts are a COMPLETE DISASTERthe first few, I'm still not sure what they're trying to say
the FRAPS charts are better, but:
1: thousandth's of a frame per second? talk about unnecessary precision
2. NO CONSISTENCY. different tests were run for each game, it's bizarre
we have:
- W90Vp OCed / W90Vp 1080p OCed / W90Vp (new drivers? who knows?)
- OCed New Driver / OCed Init Driver / Initial Driver
- OCed New w/o CCC / OCed New Driver / OCed Init Driver / Initial Driver
3. The HD (1920x1080) benchmarks suddenly switch over to 1680x1050 with Mass Effect
- even though you have 2 charts for 1680x1050 results (one on the 1080p page and one on Standard gaming page), the results don't match (for instance on the 1080p page it says the Q6600 had 51.674 fps in Mass Effect while on the standard page it says 53.375)
I can tell it took a lot of time to run all these benchmarks on all these different platforms, but you have to FINISH!
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
The 1080p Mass Effect listed as 1680x1050 is merely a typo. I'll correct the labeling of the initial charts - I didn't subtract the 100%, but it makes for an easier chart since there aren't negative values. The earlier poster is correct that it's a ratio, so 100% means equal performance.JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
FWIW, I initially "finished" at 5:30AM. I have now edited the graphs, added a bit more commentary, and inserted a page analyzing the overclocking results of the W90Vp. Enjoy!strikeback03 - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link
One more - last page first paragraph under the photo, I'm guessing you said "ear splitting" but Dragon has 'your spreading" there for the description of the volume levels.Jackattak - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
LOL poor Jarred... ;) Get some rest, mate!Thanks for the article. Was nice to see benches on a system like this. Why anyone would lug around a 17er I have no clue, though. I think the 15.4" form factor is the perfect balance of size/weight/performance.
I just wish more manufacturers offered higher-end GPUs or at least gave more options for end user installable discrete GPUs (would love to slap a 8800M GT 512 in my XPS1530).
The0ne - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I have a loaded vostro 17" with wuxga and it's very nice. However, lugging it around with me on oversea business trips can become tiresome. This thing is almost 12lbs O.o I can't imagine having this at all even if I wanted the specs.Most people don't realize those extra small lbs will drag you down sooner than you ever can realize :)
The0ne - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Oh, and this comming from a guy that's actually in shape and built lolGolgatha - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
"ATI's Mobile Driver Program -- or Lack Thereof"Seriously, if they want to sell a multi-thousand dollar laptop, they better have drivers available the same day as the desktop GPUs. I can't imagine anyone buying a gaming laptop with anything but nVidia GPUs inside it.
BTW, I have 4870 1GB cards in Crossfire on my desktop, so this isn't a post to just bash ATI. However, they do need to get with their industry partners and correct this issue fast.
Zoomer - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Don't know what the fuss is about, I recall installing up to date ATi drivers on my 9600 mobility and possibly even the Rage 3D (can't really that well, unfortunately).*Requires mobility modder or inf editing.
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
The ATI Catalyst drivers on their website "install" without apparent issue, but they don't actually update the drivers - just the CCC. In the past, ATI may have provided drivers that would work with all of their chipsets, but that's not the case with modern GPUs as far as I can tell. Certainly, it's a problem with HD 4870 CrossFire.