AMD "Never Settle" 12.11 Driver - benchmarks are in!

[joe_H]

Tried out 12.11 beta 4 drivers on my MSI 7950. First thing I noticed is that my idle temps went from 37C to 52C. It appears that my card is not downclocking to 150/300 anymore at idle. Anyone else have this problem?

Performance gains may have to wait...I'm not going to have my system idling 15C higher than usual.

 

[Rvenger]

My suggestion would be to do a clean install of the drivers. Did you remove the old ones? Is it running at 800/800?

 

[wand3r3r]

Try disconnecting the monitor and then if that doesn't work reinstall/clean/wipe the drivers.

 

[DiogoDX]

Tried out 12.11 beta 4 drivers on my MSI 7950. First thing I noticed is that my idle temps went from 37C to 52C. It appears that my card is not downclocking to 150/300 anymore at idle. Anyone else have this problem?

Performance gains may have to wait...I'm not going to have my system idling 15C higher than usual.

Seems to be a known issue in this driver. Possible fix:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1319122/12-11-beta-12-10-whql-7xxx-reference-user-idle-clock-bug-fix

 

[sze5003]

Yeh that's a pain to do lol I would rather wait. CCC still has not even notified me of new drivers.

 

[Rvenger]

If you back off back to 12.8 does it fix the issue?

 

[joe_H]

If you back off back to 12.8 does it fix the issue?

Yep, reverting back does fix the issue. I didn't uninstall the previous drivers, and I've never needed to in the past. I can give it a shot and see if that makes any difference.

Thanks for the link Diogo. May give that a try...although I may just wait until the driver gets certified, and hopefully the problem is fixed by then. I guess that may be why the driver is still in beta status.

 

[joe_H]

Ok...did a fresh install of the drivers. Same result. Disconnected the two other monitors to make sure they werent interfering.

Tried setting up a hotkey for idle speeds as mentioned in the link above. While the hotkey worked to bring the speeds back down to 300/150, they stayed there when I launched a game. Therefore I would have to go back into CCC everytime I wanted to play a game, and undo the hotkey settings. Pretty annoying. I did test the drivers for a bit, and they seem great. I'm just going to have to wait until the clocks bug is fixed I guess.

18 pages in this thread....am I really the only person having this issue? LOL...

 

[The Alias]

sapphire 7950 is SOLD OUT blast it

 

[3DVagabond]

OCaholic has done a driver review for 12.11 on the 7970.

Probably the best feature, IMO, of their tests is they separate the synthetic results in their summary from the game results.

These are the results from every driver since the 7970 was released. Note that 11.12 drivers were not actually for the 7970. The 11.12RC were the drivers that were for the 7970. So, the dramatic difference (improvement?) from the 11.12 really shouldn't be considered. Discounting them we are still seeing a 19% improvement since release for the 7970. That's averaged for games in their entire benchmark suite. A suite that is not AMD centric.

On a down side they do hammer AMD pretty hard on the idle bug. It's not just in the 12.11 betas either. It's in the 12.10 whql. This makes me think of 2 things. 1, How in the hell did AMD miss this? 2, Proves that WHQL certification means nothing.

 

[Piano Man]

You wouldn't see it. The memory management inefficiency that improved shader core utilization was a problem related to GCN architecture, not VLIW. Therefore, there should be no significant increases for VLIW architectures in Project Cars. They are present for HD7970 though, ranging from 11-15%. This is why you should trade your HD6990 for a 7970 1100mhz Gigabyte! :awe:

Anyone see HD7950 925mhz Sapphire for $270 on newegg? Very good deal. If you sell all the games, that's like getting a 7950 for $170-180 and overclocked to 1100-1125mhz, this bad boy gives GTX680/7970GE a run for the $.

I just went ahead and pulled the trigger. (got mine off fleabay for 289 since it would cost more from NE for me). If this think OC's as well as the people on their reviews say, I should be sittin' pretty for awhile.

I remember getting this 5850 for 259 when it came out. I guess 30 more bucks after a couple years isn't so bad.

 

[sze5003]

I just installed 12.11 beta and my idle is fine and so are my temperatures. I used driver cleaner too and even tried 12.10 without any issue.

 

[An00bis]

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4776387
awesome
P8000 with 7850

Anyone else with 7850s or 7870s here? post your scores here

 

[skipsneeky2]

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4776387
awesome
P8000 with 7850

Anyone else with 7850s or 7870s here? post your scores here

I will run 3dmark11 now myself,see how well off my 1050/1450 7850 does in relations to yours.

I haven't ran a 3dmark program since i first got my 8800gts 512mb back in 2007.....the numbers going from a 7800gs and a p4 to the e6750 and 8800gts blew me away.:biggrin:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4778000 6802 graphics score

Just like the good old days,i typically always get the"your system scored lower then it should "disclaimer every time despite all my games running like they should,believe this time its not really liking those beta 12.11 drivers.

 

[RussianSensation]

sapphire 7950 is SOLD OUT blast it

It's back but the price went up $15 to $285.

I just went ahead and pulled the trigger. (got mine off fleabay for 289 since it would cost more from NE for me). If this think OC's as well as the people on their reviews say, I should be sittin' pretty for awhile.

Nice! Let us know how it overclocks.

Tried out 12.11 beta 4 drivers on my MSI 7950. First thing I noticed is that my idle temps went from 37C to 52C. It appears that my card is not downclocking to 150/300 anymore at idle. Anyone else have this problem?

My idle clocks work fine, but I get 2D artifacts on the desktop with bitcoin mining. With 12.8s and 12.9 Betas, the same overclocks are rock solid in games or bitcoin mining. Going to wait for official driver release on these ones.

 

[Plimogz]

updating to 12.11 betas w/dotnet4 from 12.7betas (or was it 12.9betas, i forget) introduced some funky incompatibility with Afterburner 2.2.2 -- graphic glitches when scrolling in firefox and when snapping windows onto the edges of my win7 desktop, namely. Updating to AB 2.2.4 didn't help but switching to Trixx did, well, do the trick.

I've just received this TF3 7950 so this all comes at the same time as I'm clocking it up, and it did worry me quite a bit. But the apparently AB-related corruption would also occur with all other stock settings left intact and so much as 5 MHz underclock in AB.

Can't speak to the overall quality of 12.11s yet though, as I've just switched to this "new" open-box 7950 ($252 c.a.d AR, how can you go wrong?) and many uncertainties remain to be sorted out.

P.S. running a single monitor here, and have had no issues with idle voltages/clocks not functioning as expected.

 

[sze5003]

My 12.11 drivers give me dust and smoke in ultra bf3 gameplay in single player during the first mission and others where areas are dusty and Smokey. I think I will use 12.10 to see if it goes back to normal. That garage in mission 1 where your buddy gets sniped, if you have it on ultra you can't even see inside there unless you put it on all high again. Also, with these drivers the ultra settings seemed a little too bright and washed out as compared to what I was using 12.8 where the game looked fine.

 

[Plimogz]

is it supposed to be dusty and smokey, per the game? I mean, if you're playing single player and there's no possibility of another player turning down his gfx options in order to gain a competitive advantage over you, wouldn't you want it to be dusty and smokey to enhance the environment and such?

 

[An00bis]

I will run 3dmark11 now myself,see how well off my 1050/1450 7850 does in relations to yours.

I haven't ran a 3dmark program since i first got my 8800gts 512mb back in 2007.....the numbers going from a 7800gs and a p4 to the e6750 and 8800gts blew me away.:biggrin:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/4778000 6802 graphics score

Just like the good old days,i typically always get the"your system scored lower then it should "disclaimer every time despite all my games running like they should,believe this time its not really liking those beta 12.11 drivers.

Did it again and got a 6800 like you did, seems to me that this driver makes my OC scale way better, Until now the difference between 1150 and 1250mhz was about 100 points, now I think it would be about 1000 points. Awesome driver, btw, one thing made me kind of angry about the little "driver war" that's happening now. I realize that amd always made pretty shitty drivers that get good only after a few months, but nvidia released their "response" driver really quick, almost like they made the gpus slower on purpose just so they will be able to do this in case amd releases a driver like this.

 

[sze5003]

is it supposed to be dusty and smokey, per the game? I mean, if you're playing single player and there's no possibility of another player turning down his gfx options in order to gain a competitive advantage over you, wouldn't you want it to be dusty and smokey to enhance the environment and such?

Yeh it was bad like there was a sandstorm in there. You could not see anything at all. I didn't have that Issue with earlier drivers. Just thought it was weird.

So you guys were able to overclock higher with these drivers ? I'll have to try going past 1170/1580 on my card.

 

[DiogoDX]

Ok...did a fresh install of the drivers. Same result. Disconnected the two other monitors to make sure they werent interfering.

Tried setting up a hotkey for idle speeds as mentioned in the link above. While the hotkey worked to bring the speeds back down to 300/150, they stayed there when I launched a game. Therefore I would have to go back into CCC everytime I wanted to play a game, and undo the hotkey settings. Pretty annoying. I did test the drivers for a bit, and they seem great. I'm just going to have to wait until the clocks bug is fixed I guess.

18 pages in this thread....am I really the only person having this issue? LOL...

I just read on another forum that the problem is related to the use of DVI. Switching to hdmi fixes the problem.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Did it again and got a 6800 like you did, seems to me that this driver makes my OC scale way better, Until now the difference between 1150 and 1250mhz was about 100 points, now I think it would be about 1000 points. Awesome driver, btw, one thing made me kind of angry about the little "driver war" that's happening now. I realize that amd always made pretty shitty drivers that get good only after a few months, but nvidia released their "response" driver really quick, almost like they made the gpus slower on purpose just so they will be able to do this in case amd releases a driver like this.

Yeah how amd as well waited so long and pulled this off is kinda annoying as well,i had started threads pretty much set on replacing this card with a Evga FTW gtx670 or a $470 gtx680 then all of a sudden these drivers come out and its like wow.

I spent plenty of hours trying to figure out a suitable card and monitor to replace my 1280x1024 one and my 7850...then 12.11 gives such a huge performance boost,if i kill msaa in BF3 my card is actually bottlenecked now LOL which never was the case before.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Did it again and got a 6800 like you did, seems to me that this driver makes my OC scale way better, Until now the difference between 1150 and 1250mhz was about 100 points, now I think it would be about 1000 points. Awesome driver, btw, one thing made me kind of angry about the little "driver war" that's happening now. I realize that amd always made pretty shitty drivers that get good only after a few months, but nvidia released their "response" driver really quick, almost like they made the gpus slower on purpose just so they will be able to do this in case amd releases a driver like this.

Look at the release notes for Nvidia's "response" driver. They averaged 2% in a bunch of irrelevant games, and 15% in a game that is ridiculously old that no one plays. It's not a response, and they advertised it as such by creatively only using the largest increase in the oldest game to paint it in a more positive light. The new Nvidia drivers are laughable compared to 12.11 cats.

 

[Keysplayr]

Look at the release notes for Nvidia's "response" driver. They averaged 2% in a bunch of irrelevant games, and 15% in a game that is ridiculously old that no one plays. It's not a response, and they advertised it as such by creatively only using the largest increase in the oldest game to paint it in a more positive light. The new Nvidia drivers are laughable compared to 12.11 cats.

Yes, extremely laughable seeing how the latest Nvidia drivers, no matter how hard you try, will not run a Radeon. No comparison there. And the 12.11's are merely 10 months of overdue performance and architecture tweaks culminated in one driver. As I have read, there is about a 17%? is it? increase in performance from launch til now for the 7xxx series. Not bad at all but also expected. I'll take several Nvidia driver updates at 2% each and not complain. They add up.

 

[ocre]

Look at the release notes for Nvidia's "response" driver. They averaged 2% in a bunch of irrelevant games, and 15% in a game that is ridiculously old that no one plays. It's not a response, and they advertised it as such by creatively only using the largest increase in the oldest game to paint it in a more positive light. The new Nvidia drivers are laughable compared to 12.11 cats.

seriously? troll much?
its like wow, every single thing you said is a joke. To start off with, nvidia's "response driver" is no such thing. Its been months in the making and as much as you would love for them to create entirely new drivers in as little as 24hrs, its completely impossible. This is totally false. Nvidia did not create their driver in spite of AMDs 12.11, sorry pal.

then the "using the largest increase". Yeah, thats kinda what "up to" means. Its the highest you can expect in the specific case they specify. AMD uses the best case claims in every release note and in all their marketing to. Even in the 12.11 case. Nvidia is doing nothing out of the ordinary, again sorry pal.

I know your just looking for the drama but your really reaching for substance. Misleading and manipulating. Besides, we all are impressed with AMDs results. They got solid gains from top to the bottom. There is no reason to try to start a flame war. Sorry pal