Topic of the Week

Topic of the week will be our weekly forum discussion in which we we will discuss a certain topic. We at Ocaholic are always about community interaction and involvement whether this be through your "Rigs of the day" , Interaction towards or news and reviews or entering our regular competitions.

In reward of your opinions and feedback we are offering this week 2 prizes. You have the choice of game coodes for Assassin's Creed Unity, Far Cry 4 or The Crew. The winners will be the 2 users who left the most comments.
This weeks Prize is brought to you by CYBERPOWERPC.


This weeks Topic - AMD Game Optimisation

What are your thoughts on this topic?
Do you think AMD should become more active?
Do you think AMD should release "optimized drivers" for certain games likes NVIDIA does?
Do you think AMD is doing a good job these days or would you expect more?
Other thoughts?


Here is a couple of reminders :-

- The Witcher 3 stability patch released for PC

-AMD did not release WHQL driver in over 160 days


PS: Spam, double posts, ... will be deleted.

Well ... personally I really don't get it why AMD switched away from their periodical driver updates. Imo that was a very bad move. I believe the way to go is to evolve drivers around game releases, meaning whenever a AAA title gets released a new driver should come along side with it. Apart from that AMD should do as much as possible to make sure games get optimized for their architecture. Imo NVIDIA is doing a better job these days, especially when it comes to the point just mentioned.

I think its not AMD's fault.
nVidia throw money at developers and they work with them to optimize the games so that the games having "Meant to be played on nVidia" thing will run better on nVidia hardware. nVidia in return get their GPUs sold with less effort and get away with a lot of money.
AMD on the other hand does not have so many assets like nVidia and they are not able to feed the greed of developers who only want to make money instead of thinking about end-user independent of platform.
Nvidia drivers get WHQL certification on the first day becaus ethey have money, AMD on the other hand release their drivers which are stable and finalized and work flawlessly. They just do not get WHQL certification because they do not want to spend money on that and IMO its totally fine.
I have used both company's GPUs and I love both of them. AMD offers best price/performance ratio to end user while nVida gives top notch performance but at a high price (Only Exception id 9XX series Especially GTX 970). nVidia also did some mis-marketing about the VRAM and ROP specification of their GPUs while AMD have a good reputation in this field.

If we talk about Latest Witcher 3, everyone knows nVidia have better tessellation capabilities than AMD but they just forced (Just my opinion) developers to set Tessellation in Witcher 3 to 64 times so that it becomes hard to play on AMD (Again my thought)

I loved my GTX 560Ti from Nvida and HD 6770 from AMD.
Now I am rocking on my 280x and when I bought it, its equivalent GTX 770 was 30% more expensive for the same performance.

I think AMD should be more active especially because they have big problems
and have not released a new driver updates this 160 days and ofc should release "optimized drivers" for certain games likes NVIDIA.There was a time, several years ago, when it appeared AMD was the absolute price-performance victor. Yet there is reason to believe NVIDIA's dominance won’t end soon. What is the issue ?? That’s arguable, but two problems stand out. Efficiency is the first. NVIDIA has pursued architecture updates aggressively and more quickly placed them in products while AMD, strapped for resources as it tries to compete in both CPU and GPU realms, has fallen back on re-branding existing chips in many of its cards.

Imo the whole situation with drivers from AMD used to be better. Back in the days when the 12.xx drivers were released, AMD did optimize their drivers specifically towards new games. There is a rather in-depth article on Anandtech, which explains the transition: AMD Discontinues Monthly Driver Updates

Afterwards with the 13.xx Series drivers there still were quite a few updates during the year and especially when a new game was released AMD published a driver which included optimizations. For some reason these game optimized drivers are not being released anymore. In fact, as already stated, since more than five months there hasn't been a new driver from AMD.

Personally ... I'm hoping that this has something to do with the launch Windows 10 and DX12. Hopefully DX12 will completely change the game and make it much easier for game developers to get the most out of GPU architectures. As we saw with Mantle the current AMD GPU architecture does have quite a lot of unused potential under bonnet and if that potential could be access easily, this could provide quite a boost.

Well said Rewarder !
AMD cards have lots of potential but it needs proper drivers and software. I have noticed a lot of stability and performance increase after their Omega driver release, they also released optimized drivers for Witcher3 but somehow its not enough. They need to keep an eye on gaming market and should release drivers more often when new games (especially like big titles as Far Cry4, AC Unity, Witcher3) are released.
Now I am looking for new 390x release if they make some improvement on driver side as well as on hardware. HBM is very powerful technology, now its on AMD how they will use it with DirectX12. I hope it will be a game changer.

Over the last few years PC gaming has become significantly more approachable to the everyday gamer, thanks to a combination of more affordable hardware and the availability of discounted digital game libraries through places like Steam etc. Developer relations is that the process of game optimization is nuanced and complex. The reason AMD and Nvidia are taking different positions on this topic. AMD genuinely tends to focus more on helping developers optimize their own engines, while Nvidia puts more effort into performing tasks in-driver. This is a difference of degree — AMD absolutely can perform its own driver-side optimization..While the price has gone down for both PC hardware and titles, more recently Nvidia and AMD have tried to alleviate even more gamer headaches with optimization software-AMD's Raptr-powered Gaming Evolved application and Nvidia's GeForce Experience beta.. Recently a bs has evolved that AMD hasn't released a single WHQL drivers in 160 days...Duh! a stable beta driver is all i need,simply works for me..

I think too that AMD GPU have a lot of good potential not so well used! I was on AMD with the great HD7970 and honestly I'm quite curious also for the new "beast" that will come out in these days. Since I'm not only a gamer but also a fan of overclocking, I think that AMD can do something of very good in this field.

I know and I understand that they didnt release WHQL drivers for over 160 days, but there are sill beta that works more or less good.

Quote:

Well said!

That headline (160 days and no new WHQL driver from AMD) is definitely provocative. Imo it's not too reassuring, especially for less experienced end-users, if there is Beta written behind a driver. Apparently we enthusiasts know that beta in this case means that the driver is definitely stable but as I mentioned, in the case of a less experienced user it might raise some questions.

Regarding optimizations towards engines: it could be that AMD is betting on one horse only in this case. Helping developers to optimize game engines towards AMDs GPU architecture is certainly a great and sustainable approach, but what about all the other games, which are not based on "optimized engines"?

I think that AMD got their last chance to compete on high level with their 300 GPU SERIES, NVIDIA is too far away, and i think AMD knows that, that's why it's pushing on consoles and on low/medium level graphic cards/apu, too mutch games are optimized for NVIDIA, they also have too mutch feature that AMD doesn't have, next months will be important for understand where AMD will go in graphic card market, i hope they will rise up the competition realeasing some good cards to compete with GTX980/980Ti. Let's see