OpenGL & Vulkan

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone, my name is Jacques

I was supposed to post in "OpenGL & Vulkan" as suggested by developer xhuang, but since I am a newcomer I am only allowed to post here.

I am having performance and bug issues in certain games which mostly seems to be driver related to my RX 480 and a lot of other RX 400 and 500 Graphics cards when I read through the forums.

My current system configuration:

Windows 10 64-bit

MSI Radeon RX 480 Gaming X 8G

MSI 990FXA Gaming Motherboard

2x 8GB DDR3 1866Mhz HyperX Fury RAM

FX 8350 processor at stock clockspeeds and motherboard settings.

One DirectX9 game that definitely degraded in performance since Crimson 16.9.2 is Unreal Tournament 3 Black Edition:

* I can confirm a constant 62FPS+ on driver version 16.9.2 on most maps, but

* Since approximately Crimson 17.7.1 or 17.7.2 up until the current 18.10.2 drivers performance has degraded dramatically in this game for my card and can easily be observed in the following scenarios,

     > Frame rate fluctuates between ~30FPS-62FPS (when framerate smoothing is enabled in-game) on almost all of the maps, but is more apparent some of the following maps:

     > In capture the Flag on Facing worlds the higher up the castle you get, the lower the FPS, GPU Usage gets; in addition, when flying away in spectator mode and looking towards the map FPS

        falls down to 30FPS, but in Driver 16.9.2 it stays at 60FPS consistently.

     > In warfare on Market place when looking at the center-node from the enemies base FPS also drops down to 30-40FPS with low GPU usage.

     > It is important to note that this problems was not apparent in 16.9.2 and that not of the CPU cores max out when this low GPU usage scenarios occur.

Another DirectX9 game that seems to be affected by newer Drivers is Stalker Call Of Prypyap, although the game supports DirectX 11 features, I think the game is natively DirectX9.

To name games that seem to always have performance issues with any of the drivers and this setup even though CPU usage doesn't max out on any of the eight cores are,

* Far Cry 3 (30-40FPS in hometown, but the GPU usage issue was eliminated in this game when paired with the i5 8400. In addition, the performance is related to Water Quality setting)

* The Elder Scrolls of Skyrim

* Just Cause 3 (FPS fluctuates between 30-60)

* Call of Duty WWII

* Crysis 1

* Crysis 2

* Crysis 3 (the GPU usage issue is still persistent in this game when paired with the i5 8400)

* Arma 3

* Hitman 2016 (improves a little when switching to DirectX12, but introduces a lot of stuttering)

* Wolfenstein The New Order

* Wolfenstein The Old Blood

* Sniper Elite 3 doesn't render textures and graphical effects properly when the Mantle executable is used.

Rage developed by ID Software:

> This game performs quite well, but does not render character and vehicle shadows properly when paired with an AMD card, even though it does with intel onboard graphics and nvidia graphics.

Wolfenstein The New Order and Wolfenstein The Old Blood:

> In these two games I believe their are definitely OpenGL driver issues, since not a single CPU core is nearly maxed out at any time, but there are numerous areas where frame rate fluctuates between 30-60FPS while GPU usage is low in these areas.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus:

> This game performs exceptionally well, but recently there exists an unplayable graphics issue, where the water in the submarine shines so bright it lights up the whole room and you can't see anything but white light in the room.

To conclude, in the majority of the cases with the games listed above, the problem is low GPU utilization in areas where the CPU is not showing bottlenecking on any of the eight cores.

Hope this can get to the driver team.

Kind regards

Jacques

[dipak]

Hi Jacques,

I've whitelisted you and I'm moving this thread to "OpenGL & Vulkan" forum.

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

Hi dipak​

That's great news, thank you very much!

[xhuang]

Hello, I've already reported your issues to the DX team and i will keep you updated.

[hitbm47]

That's awesome! Thank you xhuang!

[leyvin]

It's important (while will be quite time consuming) to provide Delta Performance Benchmarks for each Major Driver Release.

Speaking personally with a variety of RX 400/500 w/AMD Processor Systems., I've not seen performance degradation between the Major Releases; however individual Optional Releases can have issues.

I'd also highly recommend performing a Clean (using AMD's Driver Clean Up Utility) to ensure that you have a Clean Chipset and Graphics Driver between tests... as legacy issues can often be retained when not doing a Clean Installation., which is especially true from Crimson on-ward.

Now something to note is that 16.9.2 is the final Driver that uses Legacy Support for APP and ADL., meaning that while it might appear as if the Driver is at fault, you'll actually find that there are issues being caused by 3rd Party Software (MSI Afterburner, Rivatuner, etc.) that rely upon said legacy interfaces.

There are other changes that occurred following said Driver,. such a Native Mantle Support was removed in-favour of Mantle-via-Vulkan., and while they are similar there are some differences that can cause stability or performance issues... the same is true for applications that utilise OpenCL, as well as changes in how Memory Management / Access is handled with the removal of UMA / Hybrid Crossfire (with Crossfire deprecated in Adrenalin onward, and now uses Multi-GPU instead of the Crossfire Interface).

Now as noted., I've not experience any performance degradation myself... however that doesn't mean there has been any improvements either., so classically poor support / performance will remain such.

For example the "Smoothed Framerate" Option in Unreal Engine 3 Games., has for as long as I can remember resulted in *very* inconsistent performance on Radeon Graphics... but then since the introduction of the DirectX 11 "Enhancements", there was also a bigger leaning from Epic to better support GeForce Graphics.

•

As for Wolfenstein The New Order (and it's DLC New Blood)., it's performance again has been historically bad on all Hardware; but the changes to OpenCL Support are the root cause here. You'll experience similar issues on Rage in terms of performance, still keep in mind the ID Tech 5 Engine was Carmack' last Engine and since the ID Tech 3 Engine he quite consistently included NVIDIA / GeForce Specific "Enhancements" to the Engine; which on OpenGL is much more commonplace as for Optimisation on GeForce it's best to use the NV Extensions.

Hitman 2016 (DirectX 12)., while I'm aware was a showcase piece for DirectX 12 from AMD because via Benchmarks it could show improved performance, it's a poor implementation of the API; and those frame stutters have existed since launch with Square Enix (EIDOS) never addressing it, especially on pure AMD Platforms.

Beyond this the rest of the titles listed are Intel "Preferable" and typically bottlenecked by the CPU., even if it doesn't look like your CPU is the cause of the Bottleneck; they're heavily CPU Bound and rely upon Intel Optimisation approaches. Some of these issues are alleviated with Ryzen-Based Systems., but you'll still be CPU Bottlenecked.

A lot of the "Issues" you're experiencing either you didn't notice them (for whatever reason) on the older Driver, but were still present; or are a legacy issue that isn't been resolved due to no performing a Clean Driver Installation.

Others., you're providing very little information on.

Videos, Screenshots, Consistency / Replicability (with Steps) to Reproduce the issue and Performance Telemetry.

Specifically showcasing areas that the issues are most predominant. This can then provide a basis to work from in regards to replicating the issues within Lab Conditions (with Profilers) to pin down the potential issues; otherwise it's near impossible, especially if the issues can't be replicated.

As noted above, while these issues might be common for you; and maybe even a handful of other people... it doesn't mean that they're universal issues.

It could entirely be an issue with specific Software you're running (say like Anti-Virus Software., VoIP Software with Overlays., etc.); so removing as many of these potential causes as possible, and replicable tests when said issues are guaranteed to occur provides a good basis to work from.

[hitbm47]

leyvin​ thank you for your effort, although I wouldn't say it was necessary to this extent.

I am a newcomer to this forum, but certainly not a newcomer to computers, I have recently developed a web-based system for a new business and have been programming for nine years now, and have also done an advanced multiprocessor programming module on university and an operating systems implementation module where, according to my knowledge, it is up to the operating system and CPU drivers to allocate the resources to the CPU in an efficient manner; furthermore, the only thing the external programmer can do is to create threads in their source code and make certain no "race conditions" occur by mutual exclusions with techniques such as locking. I have personally not seen an Application Programming Interface that allows you to optimize code for specifically only AMD- or Intel CPUs in a programming language, since that is up to the Operating System.

I understand and have tried almost all these methods you have mentioned, and can assure you in this case it is not the 3rd party programs causing the problems, since I do not have anything else installed than my graphics driver and the latest windows updates, because I have reinstalled windows 3 times in the last week and a half to see if Windows 7 might have helped improving the performance, but showed exactly the same results in Unreal Tournament 3 with driver 16.9.2 and then newer drivers than 17.7.1.

I addition, I did not mean that their was degrading performance in all games and specifically said that Unreal Tournament 3 is definitely one such game that has degrading performance with RX 400, RX 500 cards in drivers newer than 17.7.1. The reason why I am saying it is more specific to the RX series cards, is because we have an R9 280x that performs perfectly on the latest 18.10.2 drivers in Unreal Tournament 3 with the same CPU.

Furthermore, I also have an i7 870 2.9Ghz and it has exactly the same performance issues as my FX 8350 when combined with the RX 480 even though the FX 8350 has better multicore performance, but approximately the same single core performance.

The reason why I have not uploaded screenshots, is because I did not have the time and I could've cheated by limiting the frame rate with FRTC in Radeon settings, so it holds just as much value as mentioning the figures in this text and I can't take videos of every scene, because we do not have uncapped Internet bandwidth.

I feel I was rather specific in the details of how to recreate the issue in Unreal Tournament 3, in which maps and in which locations of the maps. I admit I wasn't that specific in the other games due to time constraints and trying to keep it short and simple, but in the two IDTech 5 Wolfenstein games almost half of every map has frame rate issues and low GPU & CPU utilization in those areas with these CPUs. To elaborate on these Wolfenstein's, I have seen performance videos on youtube.com where similar nvidia GPUs & FX 8350 CPU do not have these low GPU utilization and FPS issues in the same areas, but as you have said this is partly due to the ID Tech 5 engine featuring things like Nvidia GPU transcoding, but I do not believe this to be the only cause since the CPU handles the megatextures when using an AMD GPU.

And there are a lot of games performing very well on the newest drivers that have not seen degrading performance, but specifically Unreal Tournament 3 has, and possibly the STALKER games since I have experienced more performance issues in them than on when using 16.9.2. In addition, Hitman: Blood Money has flickering shadows in the tutorial mission and later missions on all the wooden logs and a lot of static objects which was also not persistent in driver version 16.9.2. Furthermore, I am not currently experiencing performance issues in RAGE, just the shadows that are not rendering properly or sometimes not at all when using any of our AMD Radeon Cards, but they do show properly on Intel and Nividia graphics drivers.

One more thing, I am always using the latest Windows versions and doing clean installs of the Display Drivers before I submit these type of reports, and I test them with and without performance monitoring tools.

I am not trying to be difficult at all, I am just trying to inform the driver team of the issues that exist and I am genuine in the Frame Rate figures that I have given in my first post and would like to help AMD in fixing them so that I can enjoy their products as well.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone

This is an example of the performance in Skyrim, and please note I have also tested it without MSI Afterburner, with Steam in-game FPS monitor and then without any third party monitoring programs and the low performance due to utilization is still present.

This is on the latest recommended Adrenaline Driver 18.9.3 and also the newest optional driver, and is definitely not a CPU bottleneck.

Skyrim also has performance issues on 16.9.2, but not as frequent as in the latest drivers, only when near the bridge at the river just to the right of Whiterun. This particular screenshot is at the first mine when you just escaped from the dragon at the start of the game; in addition, in this picture you can see my GPU speed downclocking due to underutilization, it is supposed to be at 1303Mhz which is the stock boost clock of this card which it easily maintains in games such as Battlefield 4 within safe temperatures.

The 19% represents my automatic GPU fan speed at that moment.

This is the problem I was trying to describe, no hardware bottlenecking, just hardware underutilization with current drivers in certain games.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

I have now found this to be CPU-, game- related when testing with both GTX 1060 and RX 480.

[hitbm47]

These are some pictures of RAGE and Unreal Tournament 3. I must also note that RAGE performance has also degraded in current drivers which was not present.

The black bar where I am aiming in the picture of RAGE is the only part of the shadow being rendered of the quad wheeler.

Furthermore, the picture of unreal tournament showcases the performance issue with all the drivers I tried after 16.9.2 (17.7.1 was possibly still good).

[hitbm47]

Good day everyone

I would just like to find out if there are any new findings on this subject.

I have tested the scenario's in 18.9.3 and the newest driver 18.11.2 and the performance problems are still present.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone

I have started a separate thread for RAGE here:

https://community.amd.com/thread/238306 

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

This was fixed somewhere in July, and is hopefully still fixed

[colesdav]

Hi,

Are you saying Crysis 3 performance issue is now fixed? 
I forgot to get back to you but I have lots of 3DMark API overhead runs on various AMD GPUs if you are still after that data.

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

Hi colesdav‌

No this comment is specifically referring to OpenGL Shadows in RAGE 1.

No worries You are welcome to post them in this post https://community.amd.com/thread/240814  if you like, but don't feel pushed to do it.

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone

I am pleased to let you know that the driver teams have notified me that they are making progress with Rage and Unreal Tournament 3.

They have fixed the shadow bugs in Rage, which might be included in the next driver, and they have found a cause and fixed the performance drop in Unreal Tournament 3, but the fix will have to go through a series of approvals before being included in the mainstream driver.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone

I downloaded 19.5.1 which was released yesterday and I have found that none of the fixes are present in my version yet.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone,

I have started a new thread for Hitman 2 Silent Assassin, where I am experiencing a huge loss in frame-rate,

https://community.amd.com/thread/239384 

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone,

I started a new thread for the Elder Scrolls of Skyrim here, https://community.amd.com/message/2912717 which is still experiencing GPU under-utilization on 19.5.1 drivers.

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

I am going to mark that thread as solved since it seems CPU related regardless of using Radeon or Nvidia.

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone,

I started a new thread for low FPS and GPU utilization issues for Crysis 3 here,Crysis 3 low FPS drops & low GPU utilization with RX 480 .

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone,

I started a new thread for Wolfenstein The Old Blood issues here, https://community.amd.com/message/2913267 

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone

I would just like to inform you that the fixes that were found for Rage and Unreal Tournament 3 is not present in the next official driver yet, which was released yesterday on the 3rd of June. Although it seems like a re-release of 19.5.2, there is a 1MB difference from the 22 May version, where 1MB can be a large sum of code changes.

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

In addition, I assume it is an official driver release, since it does not contain the "optional" keyword in its' title. To be honest I was optimistic that it would be included in this release, but according to previous driver release dates, it could be 2-3 months for the next official driver release.

[hitbm47]

No changes for 19.6.1 in this regard.

[hitbm47]

Just did a clean install of driver 19.6.2

Although there were a change to the OpenGl driver version, the fixes for Rage and Unreal Tournament 3 is still not present / taking action in the driver.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone,

So I have started a new post here, https://community.amd.com/thread/240814 , on AMD vs Nvidia overhead in API Overhead test in 3DMark, if you would like to post your findings.

3DMark is currently on discounted sale at the steam store.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hey guys

I am very glad to let you know that the shadow fix for RAGE is working in my 19.7.1 driver!! But I am also sad that the performance fix for Unreal Tournament 3 does not seem to be present yet

Thank you to the OpenGL team! Hopefully OpenGL performance can be improved on as well, I still have to do further tests in this regard, but currently in Rage it seems to fall just short of 60FPS quite often.

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone,

I have opened a new thread for screen tearing issues in theHunter: Call of the Wild when Radeon Chill & FreeSync are both enabled, here, https://community.amd.com/message/2918650 

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

@AMD

I really do not get it, Unreal Tournament 3 is still stuck at 38-42FPS in the latest 19.7.2 driver. I took screenshots of my GT 710 beating the RX 480 at 640x480 resolution by 20FPS. Thereafter, I decided to buy a recertified Palit GTX 1060 3GB which turned out to be a better deal than the RX 480 at half the price, since its' GSync is more stable on my FreeSync display, than the RX 480's FreeSync is on the AMD FreeSync display.

I seem to be missing something, maybe that AMD made a deal with major game developers to port all games since 2000 to Vulkan/DirectX12? It does not seem that way to me.

Here is the RX 480 @ 640x480,

Here is the Nvidia GT 710 @ 640x480,

Here is the Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB @ 1920x1080,

Please note that 64FPS is the config limit I have set for FrameRateSmoothing = "64FPS", the GTX 1060 actually achieves 70-90FPS in this scene on my FX 8350 CPU. Furthermore, according to this article and my understanding, AMD still doesn't support Command Lists? Performance, Methods, and Practices of DirectX* 11 Multithreaded Rendering | Intel® Software 

Please have a look.

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone one,

Here is a new thread on current stuttering/hitching in quite a few games when played with a Radeon RX 480,

https://community.amd.com/message/2927403 

Kind regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

I have found and posted the solution in that thread.

Regards

Jacques

[hitbm47]

Dear dipak‌ dorisyan‌

Unreal Tournament 3 is still experiencing horrible frame-rate drops with Radeon Graphics drivers (including 19.10.2) down to 40FPS with a RX 480 and Ryzen 5 1600. Whereas my GTX 1060 is achieving 150FPS+ in the same areas in the exact same system.

The driver fix relating to, too much "ambient/occlusion calls" mentioned to me was never applied.

Here is a thread of a Navi user still experiencing these issues with Unreal Engine 3/4 games even on a new architecture, Unreal Engine games running terrible with microstutter 

Kind regards

Jacques

[zinx]

I heard that the game The Outer Worlds is also slowish even with the new driver updates.

Just wanted to report in.

[hitbm47]

Hi everyone

Please note that this thread has not been resolved yet even though it has been changed to "Assumed Answered",

Games such as,

- Unreal Tournament 3

- Crysis 3

have drastically degraded in performance with Radeon Driver releases since the end of 2016 and has not been fixed yet.

Kind regards

Jacques

[leyvin]

I have a Ryzen 5 1600 (Non-X) and RX 480 (ASUS Dual OC) … and don't have said performance issues with the listed games.

The problem with leaping to blaming Drivers and that AMD need to resolve the issues you're experiencing is there can be a myriad of potential issues with quite a few be likely unique to your specific rig or combination of manufacturers. 

Of course this _could_ potentially have been caused by a specific Driver Update, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the Drivers per se causing it but rather a flaw / bottleneck within your own Rig. 

I've got to go to work in a few minutes., but I'll look over this thread more when I get home to see if I can't help pin down what the potential issue is causing your specific problem... but as either yourself (or someone) is saying that swapping out to the GTX 1060 said issues disappear, well there is a good chance the issue is with the Graphics Card itself. 

Have you been sure to maintain it... such-as clean out any dust accumulated and replace the thermal paste?

Polaris Cards do tend to have a habit of running themselves quite hard while gaming, even when not being fully uitilised (it's an artefact of how DX 10/11 works with GCN); which NVIDIA Hardware doesn't tend to suffer from, for reasons I won't go into now.

As such I'd recommend doing maintenance on said card every 12 months (for Lite / Avg Gaming) or 6-8months (for Heavy Gaming) … just to make sure the temperatures aren't needlessly high.

Heck, I know until fairly recently (Drivers 18.9 and above) the Fan Speed and Automated Temperature Balancing was 'broken' on the Polaris Series Cards... this meant they tended to run MUCH Harder than they should've done., in-fact over a 3 month period I saw a rise from a normal 42 - 65c to 55 - 80c with the Fan getting much louder than it should (and trust me, it's already BAD on the ASUS Dual... like my new RX 5700 XT Reference with a Blower is noticeably quieter under 100% load).

Sure, it voids the Warranty to do such maintenance (which is silly imo) but at this point all RX 480 will be outside of Warranty anyway. 

So it's worth doing just to make sure the issue isn't something so simple... because with the Drivers registering things like Fan Speed and Temperature Control properly again; what it could be doing is sticking to the P-States set in the BIOS, which it won't be able to hit due to the need for said Maintenance. 

[hitbm47]

Hi leyvin‌ thank you for your in-depth response, which I have marked as helpful and liked.

It's not a leap to blaming their drivers, since I gave a lot of evidence and one of the developers (dipak , excuse me for tagging you) on this forum notified me on the 2nd of May 2019 that the DirectX driver team were able to reproduce the issue in Unreal Tournament 3, determined the cause as well (game creating a lot of occlusion queries) and was working on a fix, after I have first done thorough tests myself with 4 different computers and 4 different Radeon Cards to determine it to be driver related. In addition, if you investigate some of the latest links I have shared you will find numerous other Radeon users complaining about Unreal Engine games (including UT3), experiencing new performance issues with Radeon Cards.

Furthermore, I marked one of my posts on this forum as "Answered" with the solution where I explained it was necessary to re-apply the thermal paste on my RX 480, although it helped in other GPU intensive games it resolved absolutely nothing for Unreal Tournament 3 or Crysis 3.

As I have stated earlier in this post Unreal Tournament 3 was working fine up until 16.9.2 and thereafter all newer driver versions have huge frame rate drops in specific locations of Unreal Tournament 3 depending on the Single Threaded performance of your CPU and the specific locations in the game.

I have done these tests with numerous combinations of our hardware,

GPUs: HD 7970, R9 280X, R9 280, RX 480, RX 580

CPUs: i7 870, FX 8350, Ryzen 5 1600,

and they all produce the driver issue, so please look at my previous screenshots before assuming that I am leaping to conclusions and just blaming the drivers.

Try Unreal Tournament 3 BE on Warfare->Market District when standing at the back of the site and looking at the center node and you should experience massive drops in Frame Rate, I will attach screenshots of my RX 480 vs GTX 1060 with my Ryzen 5 1600 stock speeds. In addition, the performance dips happened way before I had any Nvidia drivers installed.

If you want to see other users recreating my problems in Crysis 3 with much stronger hardware than mine please leyvin investigate the link of the Crysis 3 post on this thread and you will find a lot of evidence there (colesdav‌ was very helpful here)

Please look at the names of the screenshots I am attaching as this will show you which graphics card I used in the screenshot.

RX 480 looking at back of site:

RX 480 looking towards center node with major frame-rate dip, during action this drops to 38-45FPS:

GTX 1060 looking at back of site, Fast Sync enabled thus 150FPS limit:

GTX 1060 looking at center node with much higher FPS:

leyvin‌ If you think this is acceptable for a 2009 game on a 4500 ZAR card, then I don't know what to think. These screenshots were taken with Adrenalin 19.10.2

Kind regards

Jacques

[leyvin]

This still doesn't necessarily mean a Driver issue. 

Have you reinstalled the Older "Working" Driver and taken note of the performance difference? 

Catalyst 16.9.2 (which as a note was the last to contain support for CPU Compute, Hybrid Crossfire and Overdrive) was released in Q3 2016., this was a little over a year after Windows 10 Launch.

There were some major changes to how DirectX worked (or rather Previous APIs were Feature Level Wrapped to DirectX 12) as well as a major update to WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) from 2.1 to 2.2 (we're currently on 2.3 as a note, and 2.0 launched with Windows 10).

On top of this Epic also were "Updating" their Engine at the time., both Unreal Engine 3 as well Unreal Engine 4 due to their New Management under Tencent; as this was also when all of their Windows Gears of War Titles (which were produced by People Can Fly, who now work on Fortnite) dropped all support for things like DirectX 12 in favour of a full Gameworks Implementation.

Now the issue you're describing is quite specific to a Large Concurrent Node Display., i.e. the ENGINE isn't Culling all of the Unnecessary Nodes Properly thus creating more work for the CPU / GPU. 

I typically have my System in Developer Mode, this could be a reason why it doesn't affect me; as the AMD Game Optimisation has access to the said Debug Tools that can enable / disable certain behaviours of DirectX... but before you rush out to enable that, keep in mind it does come at a 5-8% Overall Performance Penalty. 

In any case., while this behaviour could be resolved via Drivers and perhaps it was via the Terascale Optimisations but was overlooked with the switch to the GCN Pipeline... the thing is we are talking about Games that are over a Decade Old.

I'd further argue that it's actually a BAD consumer situation for us to expect the Driver Engineers to patch / fix issues created by Developers within their Engines.

A reason why NVIDIA likely isn't as affected by such is going to typically be because their Driver Team is AS large as some AAA Studios., and their Architecture frankly hasn't really changed much in the past 15 years, so fixes / optimisations they've done years ago (and forgotten about) will work as well on Pascal as they did on Fermi.

AMD conversely has had 3 Major Architectures and 2 Instruction Architectures in the same timespan, well a Driver Team of (last time I checked) a Dozen people.

From my perspective., Drivers are supposed to ensure that API Calls "Work as Intended" without the need to perform custom CTM Dispatches... or today provide said same "Expected" behaviour from CTM ISA Calls.

They SHOULD NOT be used to correct mistakes from Game / Application Developers., but this seems to have become an ever increasing expectation from Consumers.

When something doesn't run well on both NVIDIA / AMD... sure people will complain a little to Developers about a poor Engine, but still expect Drivers that Fix it.

Where-as when it only affects on; which keep in mind that AMD are the ONLY ones who Implement a Strict Adherence to OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX and Metal (at least on the Desktop; for Mobile Devices, Qualcomm and Imagination Technologies also do the same; hence why Tegra is simply ignored in the mobile space) 

It's rare for the AMD Drivers to not run an API on their Hardware as it was designed to work... VERY RARE. 

That reason is why I've exclusively used AMD Powered Rigs for all my Development since 2005, because it makes it a very consistent platform that perfectly aligns with all of the Documented Behaviours of an API (particularly DirectX, which their Architecture is has ALWAYS been designed for) 

To me none of these problems sound like they're actually driver related. 

Sure, AMD could probably figure out some Driver-Side Fix., but again I'd rather they didn't … I'd rather Developers themselves were being held accountable for problems with their Engines., or Microsoft for changing the behaviour of DirectX. 

I mean the thing that frustrates me the most about NVIDIA and their Drivers is., you're NEVER getting true 1:1 for what the Hardware itself can do... because they rely heavily on Drivers to jerry-rig to their Architecture in order to massively reduce the workload actually being dispatched.

You want an excellent example of this., Doom (2016) or Wolfenstein II - New Order … record a few minutes going through the same areas on AMD and NVIDIA; then do a compare and contrast on a Frame-by-Frame Basis. You'll immediately begin to notice that the NVIDIA Drivers are doing a lot of things to maintain "similar" performance to their AMD Counterparts; by substantially reducing the workload. 

Now does this make much of a difference from a Gamer' perspective., eh well no. So these could potentially be things that the Engine itself does., but that's not the point I'm making... that there is some headroom for Performance Improvements or not, is neither here-nor-there; what is notable is these are things that NVIDIA does in the background without TELLING anyone; just so they can either claim performance crowns in quite a few games, or just to get reasonable performance out of their Architecture. 

The same is true in regards to why it took 5 years longer for Microsoft to release DirectX 11.3 with Multi / Async Threading Support., with DirectX 12 being the only way to get those and exclusively on Windows 10 until last year than they promised AMD. You know the two key features that allow AMD Hardware to ACTUALLY Fully Saturate their GCN Compute Units instead of nearly 1/3rd of the Hardware simply sat doing nothing because it isn't designed for Monolithic Threads with no Thread Scheduling Engine; because it wouldn't have needed one HAD these things been released when they were supposed to be.

And it's merely coincidental that NVIDIA (who was graciously supplying Microsoft with all of their Development Hardware) just happened to not support such in their Hardware particularly well until recently … and now they need it for their latest "innovation"., suddenly it has been released.

Just as it's coincidental we saw a substantial rise in Gameworks Adoption by Developers during said same period. 

Yet, I'm not seeing many (if any) people lining up to hold Developers feet to the fire over this. 

As noted what you're asking for is basically AMD to fix OTHER people' mistakes... and that's a bit unfair and unreasonable. 

[hitbm47]

leyvin I do appreciate the effort you have put into that comment, but have you read the part where I noted that the driver team were able to reproduce the performance drop when testing 16.x.x versions versus 17.x.x-18.x.x ? Yes I have tested it myself numerous times by reverting back to 16.6.2 on my launch disc, which isn't available for download from AMD anymore, and then Unreal Tournament 3 is back in the 70FPS+ even on a FX 8350 or i7 870. In addition, as I have stated it happens on 4 of our Radeon GPUs which I listed.

I am not stating that it is completely AMD's fault since I have read that their drivers are usually strict to the API Specification, but the performance drop is definitely related to a change(s) in the driver, since there were no updates applied to Unreal Tournament 3 during the period of (2016 to present time) and reverting to 16.6.2 or 16.9.2 gives the performance back even on the current version of Windows 10. Maybe the Radeon Driver had a optimization before 17.x.x for this specific issue but it is definitely not active anymore and I am not expecting AMD to fix the game developers work, but I do not find the loss of valuable performance acceptable in the case that a fix was present and isn't anymore.

Most people, including myself, bought the Radeon RX 480 for a solid gaming experience at an expensive price, and it is therefore not unreasonable to expect older games to perform AT LEAST on PAR with how they used to on much weaker systems and not worse, otherwise we all have to keep a PC lying around for every decade's games?

Most gamers do not just buy a PC to play the next two years releases, but to play their whole Steam-, Origin-, Uplay-, GOG-, Epic- game library of ALL TIME.

I bought a Radeon exactly because I was aware of the potential it showed in Vulkan & DirectX 12.

People blame game developers just as much, but that is also quite another ball-game because they have to deal with the restrictions of API's and the complexity of multi-threading.

No where did I state AMD should fix other people's mistakes!? Why would you put false words in my mouth? I simply noted that the fix that was present at some stage hasn't been reapplied or applied as they told me it would. If you are going to accuse me of things I didn't write I am not going to converse with you further.

Regards

Jacques

[leyvin]

As I noted... 16.9.2 was the last Driver to include Legacy Driver Support. 

Unreal Tournament 3 (2005) and Crysis 3 (2008) are VERY old games now.

A major issue I have with Modern Drivers is they are insanely large (and slow) BECAUSE they're encumbered with at this point a Generation of Fixes, Hacks and Workarounds for specific Games.

I mean to this day there remains a 25MB "Hack" in all Modern Graphics Cards to support Quake / Quake 2 and Quake 3's OpenGL Implementation that was hacked together... I'd argue that these Hacks should simply no longer exist, they take up valuable BIOS and Driver Code for Games that not only aren't popularly played today but are Open Source and Could/Should have their implementations updated by the Gaming Community or Developer to Modernise them. 

Now., let's say for a moment that there is a "Fix" for the Performance issue in the Legacy Drivers... which as I said, there might be.

It's important to keep in mind that we're talking about Millions of Lines of Code (a lot likely hasn't been in the Codebase for 4 years now, that's assuming they even kept it) that the Driver Team (which is tiny) would have to trawl through, the update it to be GCN Native; instead of being applied via the Terascale > GCN Interface Layer that they used to have in the Drivers. 

And these are frankly not things that necessarily NEED to be implemented by AMD., as the Unreal Tournament 3 Engine could be updated to a Newer Codebase (as the Final Patch for the game was NOT the Final UE3 Release Codebase) or even converted to UE4; which is arguably quite a trivial matter given all of the Assets, Kismet, etc. are entirely Compatible... something they did to ensure a smooth transition for Developers from UE3 to UE4 Development. 

Crysis is a little more difficult., as the Crytek Engines aren't strictly compatible; but frankly their Console Engine is more Modernised for the same Game., it's again a fairly trivial matter to make it Windows Compatible... or like ID Software they could always make it Open Source., as it's hardly going to affect their modern Crytek Engine Licenses. 

...

See from my point of view., I get new GPUs for Better Performance sure; but more specifically so that I can utilise the advancements that have been made.

Be that DirectX 12 / Vulkan… or DXR... or whatever it is. It's a major reason I've stuck with AMD Radeon despite their Performance rarely being Top-Tier. 

Their GPUs from 2012 onward are excellent for playing games being released today., as that's what they were designed to do.

AMD of course didn't do that with a 7 year plan in mind of course... I'm sure we were all expecting such titles to be available in 2014 - 2015, but the point is they've typically been ahead of the curve in terms of Tech. 

That they've also been quite good as Legacy Products (An RX 200/300-Series on Driver 16.9.2 remains one of the best "Classic Gaming" Setups you can have right now with exceptional compatibility across a wide array of games back to DirectX 8.1., and even better than avg. DirectX 7 / 8.0 Support as well) but I fully support their decision to remove Legacy Support with Drivers beyond that. 

I mean we were looking at 750MB Driver Packages., and that was JUST for the Graphics Drivers... today Adrenalin has ALL of the AMD Platform Drivers (CPU, APU, Chipset, Audio, Networking, RAID, Graphics, VR) and have a package that's just 320MB. 

There isn't anything stopping you from having Both Drivers installed.

One of AMD's (well ATI's) best innovations was making their Drivers LLVM., which to this day they remain big contributors to.

This allows you to have a number of Drivers Installed, which you can simply switch between as needed without the need for Uninstalling / Reinstalling / Rebooting.

If you have both Drivers installed, you can just go to Settings > System > Display > Advanced Display > Display Adapter > Driver > Update Driver [From List]

Select the one you want... hit OK and that's the Driver you're using. 

You can (if you're using an Admin Account) use a PowerShell Script linked to a Shortcut; that says something like "Legacy Mode" and "Modern Mode" or such and it'll do all that for you at a double click.