AMD Unlikely to Fix DX9 Games Bugged by Adrenalin Driver

[MuhammedAbdo]

nvidia has there share of incompatible games, we just cry less about it.

I have NEVER encountered a game that refuses to work on NVIDIA Pascal or Maxwell hardware, and I play TONS of old games. Sure there is the occasional bug, but a game that ouright refuses to work? NEVER.

 

[rtwjunkie]

When I read the title I thought it was 50% of DX9 titles. Turns out it's 5 games. Install older drivers when you want to play those titles and case closed.
Although I would hate it if I had to rollback drivers every time I wanted to play these games, and the fact that they managed to screw it somehow is inexcusable, it's also not the end of the world.

Except, in addition to what the wise frog said, it may not be only hardware limited in the future either. MS seems to think it needs a new OS every 6 months now, with regular WDDM updates.

The point you can roll back to will keep moving forward, so that rollback is not a solution.

 

[Romulus2K4]

There is a large amount of retarded AMD fanboys out there who are coming to AMD's defense with excuses like "This is 2018, move along, quit crying" etc. which I believe is pathetic. This doesn't help consumers of AMD products, what this does is force them to switch over to the green side, and never look back again.

This can not be a legit excuse for not supporting older software. And even when DX9 was current-gen, AMD's support at launch for plenty of games were shaky, and there are countless games that still run with sub-par performance to this date, like ARMA 3.

After paying for the product, it's not the end user's headache that AMD's card has terrible performance due to another brand's meddling middleware (when applicable) in gaming titles. And some developers made it obvious that AMD (which back then was ATi) wasn't very cooperative. And now, they are telling people that the software/games they own isn't worth the effort to be made playable? From the open-source-good-guy, AMD has suddenly become the bait and switch company.

Take Vega Frontier Edition, for instance. A card, that was specifically aimed at "Graphical Computing" is now being touted as the "Blockchain Pioneer" in a matter of months. Steve over at GamersNexus can tell you more about that, or Linus.

 

[Prima.Vera]

real men copy the working driver files into the game folder and play the game like a sensei

Not sure if that works...

 

[yeeeeman]

Why don't you just use Crimson drivers instead? Why do you always need to be on latest driver? I haven't updated my GTX950M drivers for over a year and it's all been fine...

 

[Romulus2K4]

Not sure if that works...

It may work, it may not. There is a thread over at Guru3D that is no longer maintained in the hopes of achieving the same objective. But if you're using .dll files from an older driver, there's a good chance that the game will simply crash because of different forks of the drivers being incompatible.

Why don't you just use Crimson drivers instead? Why do you always need to be on latest driver? I haven't updated my GTX950M drivers for over a year and it's all been fine...

Yeah, why not just stick to outdated drivers? Drivers that do not have compatibility with the latest OS updates, newer game profiles, performance improvements/fixes? While you're at it, why not just stick to Windows 98?

Facepalm dot jpeg

 

[MuhammedAbdo]

FineWine keeps getting better and better LOL! Just shows how much of that myth is actually BS. And the comments of AMD fanatics about not caring about the issue is DISGUISTING! This 101 PC folks. You can't break backward compatibility of PC games and expect a free pass.

 

[champsilva]

Why don't you just use Crimson drivers instead? Why do you always need to be on latest driver? I haven't updated my GTX950M drivers for over a year and it's all been fine...

Meaning, you're still using Windows XP right?

So let's say you have a 2018 game, Star Wars Battlefront III for instance, a new driver was released and you loved this game, but you also loves The Witcher 1, so, evertime you want to play either of this games you will have to uninstall driver, install older one to play TW1, reinstall newer to play SWBF3?

 

[iO]

Oh no, AMD doesnt want to fix again what the game developers screwed up more than a decade ago...

 

[Romulus2K4]

FineWine keeps getting better and better LOL! Just shows how much of that myth is actually BS. And the comments of AMD fanatics about not caring about the issue is DISGUISTING! This 101 PC folks. You can't break backward compatibility of PC games and expect a free pass.

The HD 7000 series and the R 200/300 series of cards did see a lot of improvement in performance as the drivers for them matured, allowing them to outperform their original nvidia counterparts substantially in some of the more recent games, till Polaris and VEGA cards became a priority.

You will not see reviewers benching cards like the GTX 770, GTX 780 or the GTX 780 Ti in their benchmark suite, but you'll see a couple of R9 200 cards. The AMD cards from the HD 7000/R 200/R 300 did age better. But the same can't be said for the Fury lineup. So I wouldn't pass off FineWine as simply a myth. I myself had a GTX 770 and a HD 7950 side by side and I saw how things unfolded.

If TechPowerUp wants another scoop, I can give them one right now. Some keen soul tried asking AMD to add HBCC support for the Fury/Fury X cards. Here's how they responded:

Source: Here
​

And ever since the RX 400 series of cards launched, older cards have seen a drastic loss in performance in newer titles. You can say all you want about the newer architecture being more efficient in tasks like Tessellation and all, the performance figures in some of the more recent titles just don't add up. Planned obsolescence is something both nvidia and AMD are guilty of, it's just that how and when it happens is relative to how the ball is rolling.

Oh no, AMD doesnt want to fix what the game developers screwed up a more than a decade ago...

Yeah, AMD doesn't want to fix what developers screwed up more than a decade ago.. only that if you uninstall AMD's Latest Adrenalin drivers, and install an older driver, it un-screws whatever the developers managed to screw up a decade ago. Isn't that odd?

 

[MuhammedAbdo]

But the same can't be said for the Fury lineup.

Yup, GameGPU just published an article about 2017 games, 980Ti is 30% faster than FuryX @1080p, 1440p and 4K. Even a 970 is faster than 290X.
http://gamegpu.com/test-video-cards/podvedenie-itogov-po-graficheskim-resheniyam-2017-goda

 

[Aquinus]

Some keen soul tried asking AMD to add HBCC support for the Fury/Fury X cards.

Wasn't HBCC a feature added to GCN 1.3 chips? Don't confuse it with delta color compression which was added in GCN 1.2.

 

[GenericAMDFan]

Lol! If this was a Star Wars movie, the title would be 'The rage of the shilling bots'.

'Whaaaa! I'll never buy AMD again!' Well, don't. I couldn't care any less. With so much brain capacity you deserve what you get.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

Please bookmark this link so next time you won't make this crucial mistake of ignoring the argument and attacking the character instead, I know I know it's always easier to attack people instead of arguments.

Fact is that AMD is being sloppy here there is no excuse for this and it very well warrants the switch to Nvidia.

 

[Romulus2K4]

Yup, GameGPU just published an article about 2017 games, 980Ti is 30% faster than FuryX @1080p, 1440p and 4K. Even a 970 is faster than 290X.
http://gamegpu.com/test-video-cards/podvedenie-itogov-po-graficheskim-resheniyam-2017-goda

GameGPU IMO publishes sketchy stuff at times. Try TechSpot, they did a better job on demonstrating this. Looking at the suite of games GameGPU used to bench, I am not at all surprised by the outcome. But at the end of the day, it shouldn't be the end user's headache about sponsored games having lower performance on specific hardware.

 

[TheDeeGee]

So paying a premium for Nvidia pay off

 

[Romulus2K4]

Wasn't HBCC a feature added to GCN 1.3 chips? Don't confuse it with delta color compression which was added in GCN 1.2.

HBCC or High-Bandwidth Cache Controller is a VEGA only feature (at the moment) and wasn't even around when GCN 1.3 came out. Not sure who's confused here.

When AMD first demonstrated VEGA's HBCC capabilities, they explicitly mentioned that the VEGA engineering sample wasn't running an optimized driver and was using the Fury drivers, or something of that sort. HBCC has relations to HBM, which Fury the has.

 

[Space Lynx]

After this article I will indeed be passing on AMD Vega 2 and Ryzen 2 build I was planning. Man, I was really excited to go back to the red team just for the nostalgia of my poor teenage years. I am older now and even though I wish I had more options, I guess I will just stick with Intel and Nvidia yet again. Ugh.

 

[SIGSEGV]

I lol'ed hard to this news. Personally, if I were AMD, I will do the same move.
keep moving forward, haha

 

[Romulus2K4]

To be honest, this could just be the AMD rep misunderstanding/misinterpreting the situation. It has happened before.

This isn't the first time an AMD rep has done something like this.

VSR or Virtual Super Resolution was introduced with AMD's Catalyst Omega drivers, 14.12 for the first time. It's support was limited to AMD's R9 290/290X initially, and was added to Tonga/Fury cards later. Though the Fiji and the Tonga cards could VSR up to 4K, the Hawaii cards were only limited to 3200X1800. AMD's official response was that the older hardware lacks hardware scalers, and that the support can not be ported over to them at all/same extent. Sounds legit.

..till, some people managed to figure out registry values and enabled VSR on older cards, the HD 7000 series to be specific, and even though the HD 5000/HD 6000 series of cards didn't officially have the option visible in AMD's Graphical Control Settings, they had the ability to use VSR too. Only then, AMD's official response changed. But shockingly, one of their reps said that they will be bringing support for VSR to only R9 280/R9 280X cards, and not on the older HD 7000 cards, and that R9 280/280X cards have this certain scaler(!) present that the HD 7970 doesn't. Then people literally ripped him a new one, and eventually VSR support came to HD 7000 cards too.

So, I wouldn't say that AMD won't fix the issues just because on of their reps said so. But if what the rep said is the approach AMD's taking, undoubtedly, it'd be a step backwards.

Update: S3r1ous over at Guru3D forums has managed to find something that could also be the cause.

Apparently, The Windows 10 OS Update, KB4051963 (OS Build 16299.98) brings the following changes/fixes:

​

So it might be worthwhile to update your Windows 10 installation if you're facing issues. Though that still doesn't change the fact that the crashes go away when you switch to an older driver, and the appalling response from AMD's rep.

​

 

[HD64G]

I am almost sure that this will be fixed. The AMD rep who responded did very bad imho ruining the company's name in gamers community. A solution should be easy for a few games. If they don't fix it or even propose a walkaround not needing going back and installing older drivers, it will hurt AMD for sure. This response was clearly bad marketing.

 

[Aquinus]

HBCC or High-Bandwidth Cache Controller is a VEGA only feature (at the moment) and wasn't even around when GCN 1.3 came out. Not sure who's confused here.

When AMD first demonstrated VEGA's HBCC capabilities, they explicitly mentioned that the VEGA engineering sample wasn't running an optimized driver and was using the Fury drivers, or something of that sort. HBCC has relations to HBM, which Fury the has.

The driver might impact how it performs but, just because it's in a modified Fury driver for pre-release and both cards use HBM (remember, Vega has HBM2 not HBM1,) doesn't mean Fury has the hardware to handle it. HBM likely has very little to do with it and probably boils down more to the memory controller effectively handling where and how video data gets stored based on a driver setting. Also my mistake, it was added in GCN 1.4, not 1.3 but, that is beside the point. There are likely hardware limitations that prevent applying this to older GPUs. It's like asking why GCN 1.1 cards don't support delta color compression and why the driver can't be updated to use it: because the hardware doesn't support it.

VSR or Virtual Super Resolution was introduced with AMD's Catalyst Omega drivers, 14.12 for the first time. It's support was limited to AMD's R9 290/290X initially, and was added to Tonga/Fury cards later. Though the Fiji and the Tonga cards could VSR up to 4K, the Hawaii cards were only limited to 3200X1800. AMD's official response was that the older hardware lacks hardware scalers, and that the support can not be ported over to them at all/same extent. Sounds legit.

VSR is a very different thing though because it was more of a matter of "how well will the GPU drive it," not a "can the GPU even do it." Changes to how video data gets stored tends to require hardware changes due to the latency-sensitive nature of DRAM whereas with VSR, it was more of a "how well will it perform and do we want to expose a setting if it's likely going to run like crap every time." It's kind of like async compute on GCN 1.0. Sure, you can run it but, if it's not going to help and sometimes could cause performance regressions when it is used, why bother enabling it?

...but, if you're still convinced, maybe you should give AMD a call and offer them your expertise to "fix their drivers," since you seem to know how this all works. I'm sure they could use another C developer to work on their drivers.

 

[Easo]

I just bought C&C 3 collection on Steam, damnit.

 

[RejZoR]

Lol! If this was a Star Wars movie, the title would be 'The rage of the shilling bots'.

'Whaaaa! I'll never buy AMD again!' Well, don't. I couldn't care any less. With so much brain capacity you deserve what you get.

If you want to get limited to a one vendor because you're forced that way and not by choice of your own preference, then you're also a part of a problem. This nonsense will only get fixed if people are outraged over it. People made one hell of an outrage over a freaking SHORTCUT AMD dropped on desktop with one driver, but now that they broken entire range of games for a certain API, everyone's like "oh well, whatevers lol". NO. Because when NVIDIA will have an absolute monopoly, they'll have even more shit software than they already have because they already have partial monopoly. It's why they don't even bother improving their NV CP, it's the sole reason why it looks like something dragged into this year from 2005. Trust me, you don't want that no matter how big of a NVIDIA fanboy you are.

Besides, if AMD said, "Ok, we won't be dedicating any performance improvements to DX9 API from now on" I'd say OK, fair enough. Games run fast anyway since cards have so much more raw performance it doesn't even matter anymore. But if games refuse to start entirely, that's a HUGE issue that NEEDS to be resolved.

 

[R-T-B]

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

Please bookmark this link so next time you won't make this crucial mistake of ignoring the argument and attacking the character instead, I know I know it's always easier to attack people instead of arguments.

Fact is that AMD is being sloppy here there is no excuse for this and it very well warrants the switch to Nvidia.

The fact that a guy named GenericAmdFan just said this is frankly, disturbing. As it should be to AMD fans. This simply cannot be defended... or so I'd hoped. But TPU has a way of proving me wrong, it seems... very sad.

If you want to get limited to a one vendor because you're forced that way and not by choice of your own preference, then you're also a part of a problem. This nonsense will only get fixed if people are outraged over it. People made one hell of an outrage over a freaking SHORTCUT AMD dropped on desktop with one driver, but now that they broken entire range of games for a certain API, everyone's like "oh well, whatevers lol". NO. Because when NVIDIA will have an absolute monopoly, they'll have even more shit software than they already have because they already have partial monopoly. It's why they don't even bother improving their NV CP, it's the sole reason why it looks like something dragged into this year from 2005. Trust me, you don't want that no matter how big of a NVIDIA fanboy you are.

Besides, if AMD said, "Ok, we won't be dedicating any performance improvements to DX9 API from now on" I'd say OK, fair enough. Games run fast anyway since cards have so much more raw performance it doesn't even matter anymore. But if games refuse to start entirely, that's a HUGE issue that NEEDS to be resolved.

RejZor, today, the world needs that whining people often complain about. Let her rip.

 

[notb]

When I read the title I thought it was 50% of DX9 titles. Turns out it's 5 games. Install older drivers when you want to play those titles and case closed.

This news is not about how many games don't work. It's mostly about how AMD responded. "It's old, we don't care."
So today it's maybe 5 games. In a year it could be dozens. What then?

AMD is a CPU-first company. It's no doubt that their Radeon department is severely starved in resource..

So they should just sell the graphic part - something they shouldn't have bought in the first place. They're the second largest dedicated GPU manufacturer. It's a big and important role. It should be given to someone who cares.

There is a large amount of retarded AMD fanboys out there who are coming to AMD's defense with excuses like "This is 2018, move along, quit crying" etc. which I believe is pathetic. This doesn't help consumers of AMD products, what this does is force them to switch over to the green side, and never look back again.

I think the funnier part is how AMD fans used to say that red cards age much better and so on. It's often the first argument that appears in discussions.

Take Vega Frontier Edition, for instance. A card, that was specifically aimed at "Graphical Computing" is now being touted as the "Blockchain Pioneer" in a matter of months. Steve over at GamersNexus can tell you more about that, or Linus.

This I didn't know. https://pro.radeon.com/en/product/radeon-vega-frontier-edition/
I'm still laughing!
Literally, they've put mining before productivity and gaming. At least it's finally official...
"High Efficiency Performance for Coin Mining, Content Creation and Gaming"

BTW: it's not "developing blockchain solutions", but "coin mining". That's "pioneering" in the AMD's alternative reality.

Oh no, AMD doesnt want to fix again what the game developers screwed up more than a decade ago...

People make mistakes all the time. But lifetime of games is longer than of GPUs. Some game studios might not exist anymore. Games are not being patched for years. Yes, it's AMD's role to make it work.

It's very similar to what we've seen when Ryzen launched. AMD fans yelling that it's software developers fault that it's not utilizing 16 threads.

To be honest, this could just be the AMD rep misunderstanding/misinterpreting the situation. It has happened before.

So AMD should add a $0.1 "premium" to each card and employ better reps. Such things don't happen as often in the Blue and Green camps. Or other large companies, for that matter.

In a properly organized corporation any information that goes outside is carefully analyzed. I work in finance and every message prepared for media or financial supervisor is read by at least 2-3 people beside the author - usually including a board member.

Also, don't underestimate how important these kind of messages are - especially in case of a publicly traded company.