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  • H8ff0000 - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    Out of curiosity, have there been any driver updates lately that have made improvements to the performance of the 6000 series line of cards? Or did they just drop all work being done on them as soon as the 7000 series was released? It just seems downright impossible that there are no improvements to be made, especially towards new games coming out. Doesn't seem fair.
  • TrantaLocked - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    The HD 7000 cards were not doing so well compared to Nvidia's GTX 600 series. It was very clear at launch that the GTX 600 cards were a better value by quite a bit, so AMD has been putting in most of its driver development resources into the 7000 series out of necessity. I'm hoping they give some attention to 5000/6000 owners that are seeing bad performance in new games.
  • aicom - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    While that is true that the 7000 series underperformed compared to the 600 series, AMD did push pricing down so it matched up better with its competition on the green side. I don't think it was necessary to pour that much into driver development but it certainly helped them raise their absolute performance.

    Also remember that GCN was a totally new architecture for them. The VLIW5 and VLIW4 were very familiar architectures that had been around for many years. As such, the drivers for VLIW architectures were very mature with lots of code able to be shared between generations (with minor tweaks for VLIW4). When GCN came around, they had a much more dynamic computation platform that wasn't as cut and dry as VLIW was which required the optimization work to be done again.
  • JPForums - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    Wish I had seen this before I posted. Other than VLIW4 being a little newer than VLIW5 and therefore a little less familiar I completely agree with this.

    I think the reason they put so much into the driver development here is make sure all the kinks are worked out when they merge it into their APUs. AMD's fusion initiative needs a compute oriented GPU architecture that can be merged into the x86 ISA as an extension. They need to know GCN's weaknesses and how to mitigate them before they get there.
  • krumme - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    Paid or unpaid trolling?

    Anyway always a good chance to make the facts clear.

    For price parity, AMD cards today beats NV cards by 10-20% across the entire range.

    The 5/6000 series was always a better perf/usd than their nv counterpart. The only exception for the last 4 years have been the may juni this year.

    Anyone buying a NV card today simply gets far lower performance. No need to deny that.

    But nice try.
  • B3an - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    He was talking about at launch, And just because someone says something you don't agree with doesn't make it trolling.

    Silly little immature fanboy.
  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    Well krumme, I'd say you are an unpaid troll.
    Your 10-20 po'cent cheaper whine is the usual amd fanboy screed, or rather religious creed.

    LOL - fanboy is as fanboy does
    Thanks for the usual, although across the entire line is a nice gigantic stretchmark, hope you don't split in two...
    BTW - when amd is bought out soon, after the humiliating bankruptcy, do you expect more firesale pricing ? I mean you amd fanboys have destroyed them nearly utterly now, so when they finally die completely will you go whacko and pay 10 cents on the dollar, or will your collective fanboyism drive the prices sky high ?
    I'm going with the latter - the only time an amd fanboy will pay top dollar for am and card is when they are dead and buried.
    ROFL - yep, excellent prediction if I do say so myself.
    Please try to keep the cussing out nVidia to a minimum since we all know all of you will blame them for amd's failure.
  • fuzznarf - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    Talk about trolls..
    AMD isn't going to be bought out anytime soon. They have $1.2 Billion in cash on hand, $1.69 billion in revenue last quarter, and $100 million net profit. Q4 is already shaping up to be even better for the company thanks to PileDriver and Trinity.

    As for 'top dollar' the AMD 7970 out performs the NV cards for $30-50 less. and the 7970 Ghz edition does the same to the 680. The only reason AMD 7970 cards cost $540 at launch is because NVidia didn't even have a card available yet. They were 4 months late to the party if you don't count their paper launch. A lot of good that did when you couldn't get them.

    and for the record, I own 3 NV cards, and 0 AMD cards. The current line of AMD cards are just better. If i were to buy a top end card today I would get an AMD, not because I'm a fanboi but because they are currently better than the NV offering. Stop being an NV fanboi and pretending you are objective while spewing your misinformation and rumor.
  • Spunjji - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    Cerise is immune to being owned, which is a shame, because that just happened.
  • JPForums - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    The architecture of most of the 6000 series (like the 5000 series) is VLIW5. This is an architecture designed for DX9 efficiency. The 69xx cards were redesign with a width of 4 (WLIW4) to make better use of resources in DX10/11 games. Given shader architecture has changed, but the base 5 wide instruction width finds its origins in the 2900 that launched in April 2007. As such VLIW5 is largely a known quantity at this point. Though smaller improvements may yet be seen, I would not expect significant performance improvements in newer DX10+ games. The architecture is simply not as efficient at games built for DX10 and beyond. See AMD's VLIW5 slot utilization numbers:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-...

    The 69xx cards, however, were designed to be better utilized by DX10 and newer games. They don't have the inherent inefficiency that the lower end 6000 series has. Furthermore, VLIW4, while similar to VLIW5 on the surface, is a decidedly newer quantity in practice. It is probable that there is some performance that may yet be extracted in newer games with driver updates.

    The 7000 series (discretes) are based on GCN. GCN replaces the VLIW SPs with SIMDs. Interestingly, like VLIW4, GCN can process 4 four instructions at once. GCN, however, has a dynamic hardware scheduler and doesn't rely on compiler scheduling the way VLIW did. This and other supporting hardware gives it the ability to work on multiple wavefronts at once. While this makes writing code for GCN easier, it also makes writing drivers a whole new experience. I would guess that there is a fair amount of performance left (relatively speaking) that AMD is hard at work trying to tap. Here's an article on GCN if you are interested:

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4455/amds-graphics-c...

    Also, keep in mind, AMD may improve performance of older parts without calling it out specifically. Improvements made to the VLIW5 based (7000 series) APU graphics may find their way into the VLIW5 based 5000/6000 series parts.
  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    After endless days and hours of eternal tech screwing and hacking, a friend of mine got his no longer to be RMA'ed 6870 going to his personal satisfaction.... yeah it was drivers...

    His clone backups couldn't reproduce running correctly.
    Endless pure clean reinstalls - no.
    15 bios flashes - NOPE.
    user/../xml file hacking - NOPE
    TRIXXX nope
    on and on and on and on......
    Finally, going to Sapphire and downloading their 12.8 version ... did the trick...

    So the thing is - with amd, it may (probably WILL) take weeks off your life, and the rule of thumb is - don't use the latest driver... unless you have the current top videocard, and if things are working 2d/3d clocks etc no crashes etc - don't upgrade the driver.
    That's not hard and fast because it is very true sometimes a driver finally does an amd card good, and you get a nice perf increase....
    Hard thing is wasting your life finding it - and all the endless failures in between.
  • Medallish - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    I love how some people can't install drivers properly, I've exclusively used AMD graphics card since 2008, never have I had driver related issues, I didn't see it before I went with AMD and I haven't seen it after, appearently running an exe file is too hard a task for some people.
  • Gigaplex - Sunday, January 13, 2013 - link

    I've had driver related issues when trying to upgrade the drivers on a system with an Intel ICH9 chipset. If any USB device was plugged in, the system would BSOD during AMDs hardware detection routines. Worked fine on every other machine I've tried though, go figure.
  • Spunjji - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    Blah blah blah blah blah.
  • trajik78 - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    running Win8 and tried installing the .net4 drivers...hanging on the HDMI/DP audio driver for me...great.
  • Medallish - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    What's your system? I've installed it on my HTPC(A6 Trinity APU) so far it seems to work fine.
  • Yorgos - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link

    Since the X.org's new version in may-april all the amd graphic cards prior to the 5000 series are not supported, yet there was a beta in the summer that was abandoned when amd announced that they drop support for these cards. My concerns are not about improving performance on an old card but supporting the new versions of X.org in those old drivers.
    This problem for example does not exist in win 7/Vista/xp no matter what updates decides MS to do on these OSes.
    OSS drivers are far from stable and the greatest disadvantage is that they cannot clock the card properly or set the correct working profile(especially on laptops).

    Does anyone know if there is going to be that kind of update on those cards by AMD?
    Just to get it clear, nobody asks for performance fixes, or anything unrealistic for those card, I am talking about a small tweak on the card to support the latest X.
  • overzealot - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link

    I'm fairly certain they're not going to be releasing any further updates for those cards.
    That's the downside to not having a stable ABI (the reason MS drivers stay functional through updates).
    If you want the latest X, you're going to have to go the open source drivers. There's some promising improvements re: power management in the next few kernel releases, if you can wait that long.
    If you can't - stick with the last release that does support your card, or switch to a distro using an older X (or build your own). Enterprise-centric distros tend to be fairly conservative with X and other components as well, if support is what you're worried about.
  • klmccaughey - Wednesday, December 19, 2012 - link

    IF you are running Ubuntu 12.10 (it being the most acceptable OS for mainstream Linux, arguably) they SHOULD sort this out. They have made a commitment to Open Source and should stand by it.

    We need a solution to this.
  • slatanek - Friday, December 7, 2012 - link

    Performance improvement in this case has been made at the expense of quality. Since I updated the driver (7850) every object in the game has a weird looking "border" shadow around its edges. Looks as if all objects were badly cell shaded.
  • YEPP - Saturday, December 8, 2012 - link

    Recently purchased a HD 7850 and encountered the artifact/flicker bug, observed in Guild Wars 2 and Skyrim. Done some digging and this bug has been plaguing the HD 7000 cards practically since launch. Maybe the HD 7000 cards are broken in DX9 altogether. Surprised there is hardly any fuss about this issue, no tech sites had picked up on this!?
  • slatanek - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link

    hey, I get the same flickering issue with my 7850 (no oc) in iRacing which also runs on DX9. there's deffinetly something weird going on. I've tried going back to whql drivers and it's still there, it happens a bit less maybe (or its just me expecting it to happen less ;-)
  • dstoop - Monday, December 10, 2012 - link

    My 7850 did not display this bug on the old 12.6 drivers, and neither did my 7950, but once I upgraded to the latest release drivers (12.10?) i've had this obnoxious issue constantly in GW2. Really hoping they fix it, as 12.6 had an awful bug where the computer would sometimes bluescreen/lock up when the monitor turned itself off to save power.

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