ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Gaming Redux: Drivers, Drivers, Drivers
As luck would have it, we "uninstalled" the new drivers at one point, only to find that the drivers remained but Catalyst Control Center was gone. A quick test revealed that STALKER: Clear Sky performance was back to where it started, and so we performed another comparison of the beta drivers with and without CCC. Here are the results.
Out of 12 titles, only one shows even a tiny drop in performance. What's surprising is that two games (Crysis and Fallout 3) show moderate performance improvements, while two other games improve substantially. Empire: Total War jumps up 43%, and STALKER: Clear Sky almost doubles at 82%. This is something we just happened to stumble upon, and it brings up some severe concerns.
When the Catalyst Control Center first launched, there were many complaints about how slow it was and how much memory it consumed. Over time, ATI improved things to the point where most people stopped bellyaching, but we've never been truly happy with CCC and its use of bloated .Net programming. Now we're left to wonder if CCC handicaps other titles, and if so what will be done to fix it. Perhaps the situation only occurred because we were using beta drivers, but we've had our complaints with ATI's desktop drivers in the past as well.
Again, we can't emphasize enough the importance of getting a unified driver program for laptops and desktops, preferably with enough testing that performance doesn't degrade over time in older titles. When you couple that with a desktop driver program that already has problems, NVIDIA is definitely in the "drivers" seat [Ed: Sorry, bad pun] for mobile gaming solutions. Whether that's actually an interesting topic for most of you is a different matter, naturally....
As a final point of comparison, we wanted to show how our desktop system compares to the laptop. You might be surprised how close things are in most of the titles, considering all of the performance advantages that the desktop holds (faster CPU, twice as much GPU memory, and faster GPU core/memory speeds).
Fully half of the titles are only 10% to 25% faster on the desktop system, which we didn't expect at all. We figured on something close to a 40% improvement across the board, and we're not sure what bottlenecks are holding back performance in these six titles. Empire: Total War, Far Cry 2, Mass Effect, and STALKER: Clear Sky are all 35 to 55% faster, which is more in line with what we expected to see. The remaining two titles, Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena and FEAR 2: Project Origin, actually didn't surprise us very much. Both of these titles are almost three times as fast on the desktop, which is almost certainly caused by a lack of CrossFire profiles. Remember that virtually every new game released after these drivers will not have a valid CrossFire profile. You can try renaming the executable in hopes of getting CrossFire to work, but that can be hit or miss and isn't an ideal solution by any means.
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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.