Examining AMD’s Driver Progress Since Launch
Bioshock Infinite
“BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter like you’ve never seen. Just ask the judges from E3 2011, where the Irrational Games title won over 85 editorial awards, including the Game Critics Awards’ Best of Show. Set in 1912, players assume the role of former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, sent to the flying city of Columbia on a rescue mission. His target? Elizabeth, imprisoned since childhood. During their daring escape, Booker and Elizabeth form a powerful bond — one that lets Booker augment his own abilities with her world-altering control over the environment. Together, they fight from high-speed Sky-Lines, in the streets and houses of Columbia, on giant zeppelins, and in the clouds, all while learning to harness an expanding arsenal of weapons and abilities, and immersing players in a story that is not only steeped in profound thrills and surprises, but also invests its characters with what Game Informer called “An amazing experience from beginning to end.” From Bioshockinfinite.com
send me the 290 my hd 7970 is failing me
stop mining BTC/LTC then
None of your tested games was released when 7970 launch drivers became available. At the same time, all of your tested games were released by the time 290X launch drivers were available (even BF4 was specifically targeted by those betas). In that sense your findings are flawed. 14.7 doesn’t bring much to the table for 290X not because it is GCN and a known architecture but mainly because the launch driver was already optimized for those titles that you tested. Try the same approach with Watch Dogs or something as fresh and the picture will be different.
That;s true – most games were released pre- 11.12 RC11 but that doesn’t make the results invalid IMO, they are still built from pre-existing established APIs. I think the point about the GCN architecture that you’ve mentioned is more relevant, I also mentioned that in the conclusion: there is minimal scope for major gains in GCN performance as the architecture is already well optimised with drivers. Thanks for your input, will consider.
This is definitly interesting. Too bad it’s only for high-end gpu’s. Try testing this on lower-end and it would be worse. Also, the problem with AMD drivers is consistency: for mobility there are long known bugs with black screens and no video aceleration. There is still some bugged mouse cursor around. They mostly fix something and break something.
(i’m not an AMD hater btw)
Agreed. AMD drivers have bug issues (but so do many Nvidia driver releases). In that regard this article was not exploring bugs and driver issues but pure in-game performance, but yes that’s also something to consider that we may explore.
I was sent here from AMD FaceBook http://www.facebook.com/AMDUK?brand_redir=1
Am willing to bet the low end have more performance than the high end. And its the exact opposite for Nvidia.
There is no GCN 2.0 yet. GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1.
There is GCN 2, its the R9 290X (AMD have never mentioned GCN 1.1)
no there isn’t, GCN 2.0 has not even been announced yet. the 290X is GCN 1.1, it is very similar to HD7970 (GCN1.0).
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/2
How much longer until we can see Nvidia’s progress?
Still working on it, we’ve done the GTX 780 Ti testing and are currently sourcing a GTX 680 (we have one at HQ but trying to get it here for testing) for the equivalent testing.
http://www.eteknix.com/examining-nvidias-driver-progress-since-launch-drivers-gtx-780-ti-gtx-680/
I find this very interesting because i have a Gigabyte HD 7970 ghz edition gpu, which has slightly faster speeds than the XFX card. I have been thinking about upgrading my card to a 290x but i think now i will not. My card plays just about anything at max settings and i have had no problems since i bought it. Seeing the improvements from 7970 to 290x is nice but not enough for me to upgrade, yet.