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AMD Graphics Games

AMD To Retire Catalyst Control Center Drivers, Rolling Out New Crimson Platform (hothardware.com) 113

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-catchup-a-bit-faster dept.
MojoKid writes: AMD has gone through significant changes as a company over the last few months. Recently, we've seen them enter into a joint venture with Nantong Fujitsu for final assembly and test operations. They've also formed the new Radeon Technologies Group, led by longtime graphics guru Raja Koduri. Today, AMD is announcing another big change, and this one affects a piece of software that you may have running on your systems right now, if there's a Radeon graphics card on board. AMD is ditching Catalyst Control Center in favor of software dubbed Radeon Settings, which is a critical part of what AMD is calling the Radeon Software Crimson Edition. Radeon Software Crimson Edition is completely re-architected and is claimed to offer new features, improvements to stability and responsiveness, and performance improvements as well. The update will include a new Game Manager, video quality presets, social media integration, simplified EF setup, a system notifications tab, and more. It looks as though the first version of the software will be out this month.
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AMD To Retire Catalyst Control Center Drivers, Rolling Out New Crimson Platform More

AMD To Retire Catalyst Control Center Drivers, Rolling Out New Crimson Platform

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  • A friggen video driver... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02, 2015 @10:56AM (#50847381)

    A friggen video driver with 'social integration' and 'system notification' - and then they cannot understand why their driver runs slow, is full of bugs and users prefer the Free driver.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I want my Facebook and Twitter account full of "Doug's Radeon Driver has successfully been restarted after an error."

      • Re:A friggen video driver... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SQLGuru ( 980662 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @12:01PM (#50848061) Homepage Journal

        You're also missing the other side of it.......

        While you're playing COD, rendered right on top of the guy you're trying to kill is a notification because your mom wants you to send her another Candy Crush ticket. And because of that --- BOOM, headshot.....only you're the recipient, not the giver.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by IMightB ( 533307 )

          Who the fuck cares? you'll respawn in 30 seconds either way. If you really care about not having notifications popup, how about logging the fuck off of facebook before you start playing. Are you really going to be playing a serious game, and expect Social media notifications at the same time?

          I say let drivers be drivers, let social media be social media and never should the two meet.

    • That's the thing, it's not just a video driver and hasn't been for many years now. We have things like the internet and streaming. Stuck in 1999?

  • I don't want a control center, and I certainly don't want a "game manager". Tell your marketing critters to focus on the bitmaps on the cardboard carton the hardware ships in.

    I just want a driver. Hint: that's not a 100 Mb downloaded installer.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Nonesense! You want something that let's AMD know what games you are playing, when you play them and for how long so they can provide you with optimised settings! (and also ads for other games you may like :) )

  • I'd stop to post about how useful social network integration will be for my graphics driver's settings manager prog but I need to go visit the bike shop to buy some birthday presents for my koi.

    • I'd stop to post about how useful social network integration will be for my graphics driver's settings manager prog but I need to go visit the bike shop to buy some birthday presents for my koi.

      Don't forget to buy them the tight little shorts, you don't want your fish to look silly when they are out riding around!

      Seriously, these morons should have to call the install "Useless Crap & Drivers". It's the same thing with updates for Flash, Java, or almost anything these days. If you are going to try and install software not already on my system, then you should be required to call it something like "Chrome Browser Installer with Flash Update" or "Ask Toolbar Installer with Java Update". Put the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )

        I'm super seriously hoping these features make it in to the nouveau package! "David's breaking random shit again, watch now!"

  • I've always removed CCC from my startups, I'm sure I'll do the same with Crimson.

  • Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cloud.pt ( 3412475 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @11:05AM (#50847473)

    Game Manager, social media integration, system notifications tab...

    Seems to be ticking all the right boxes on my graphic driver customization shit list. Please bring more clutter to an already confusing piece of software that should have as main focus its simplicity, transparency, and not meddling in tasks my OS and Browser are supposed to be doing...

  • ... until the 'social network interaction' bit. For a moment there, I thought they were getting rid of the bloat that has been plaguing these drivers for years.

  • Social media, game center? (Score:3)

    by aaaaaaargh! ( 1150173 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @11:10AM (#50847537)

    Why can't they just provide a working graphics card driver and a simple, straightforward and working settings manager for it? What is wrong with AMD?

    My next graphics card will be an Nvidia for sure.

    • Re:Social media, game center? (Score:5, Informative)

      by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @11:29AM (#50847737) Journal

      Hate to break it to you, but even as a fully signed up supporter of the green team, I have to admit their driver-bloat situation is no better. It's around 170mb for a set of Nvidia drivers these days, most of which is for their ludicrously over-engineered "Geforce Experience" crap. Oh, plus all of the Nvidia Shield intergration, which I'm sure is of huge interest to both of the people who've bought a Shield tablet.

      There are valid reasons to go for an Nvidia card - heat, power consumption, general stability - but a lack of driver-bloat sadly isn't one of them.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by TypoNAM ( 695420 )

        Yes, nVidia's installer file is getting bigger and bigger each year, however at least most of it is optional (graphics drivers and control panel for it aren't), unlike AMD's installers where it wasn't possible to opt out of Raptr garbage. GeForce Experience, PhysX, 3D stereo features, and such are completely optional even in their latest driver for my GTX 970.

        When I last had to install AMD drivers for Windows for a family member late last year, cause their laptop had a ATI embedded card in it, it feels like

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Xenx ( 2211586 )
          It's entirely possible to opt out of Raptr during install, as long as you do custom install. I've been doing it for years when updating the driver.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by TypoNAM ( 695420 )

            I always do custom/advanced option when using installers, provided when they actually have that option. I can definitely say that there was no such optional component labelled "Raptr" -or- "AMD Gaming Evolved App" at the time I last used their installer. They probably finally made it optional after so many complaints. It says a lot when you enter "raptr" very first search suggestion is "raptr uninstall".

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Xenx ( 2211586 )
              At most, only once in the last 2+ years has raptr ever installed without me wanting it. I say at most, because I cannot be sure I didn't just forget to uncheck it. I also constantly update my drivers both with release and beta drivers. I'm not doubting your experience, just stating it's atypical from the behavior of the installer since they started including Raptr.
        • GeForce Experience is NOT optional if you want to use Shadowplay, a hardware feature i paid for.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ADRA ( 37398 )

        Whine much? Really, if 170 MB is spilled milk, look at your NV driver download directory to see every copy of your installer every downloaded.

        I think Geforce experience is great. I optimize to play games, and they seem to do their darnedest to 'optimize' the gameplay graphics experience. I couldn't be more happy wasting some bits on making my life easier.

    • Because it's not 1999 and gaming is a LOT more than what it was back then.
  • Have I misunderstood what they could do with social media integration? I wouldn't mind being able to link it to my YouTube or Fb account and then get my gameplay or sketching recorded and posted up with a quick click.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slaker ( 53818 )

      I'm guessing the social integration has more to do with streaming/recording for Twitch and Youtube than anything to do with Facebook.That stuff is kind of a PITA to set up,so if it's automated somewhere or other, I can see a case made for that adding value, sorta.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Xenx ( 2211586 )
        There's also the fact that Raptr had community game profiles to optimize settings. They could quite easily also be expanding upon that idea.

      • I guess that wouldn't be so bad. If so somebody needs to notify the marketing department that "social media integration" has gone from buzzword to electro-shock word.

      • Re:why the hate with social media? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dinfinity ( 2300094 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @12:50PM (#50848621)

        That would actually be useful, but considering that one of the screenshots [hothardware.com] shows 'Follow AMD' with the mandatory shitload of social media icons in the main overview of the settings interface of a fucking driver makes me think that this has marketing department vomit sauce all over it.
        You know: "We need to raise the profile of AMD and generate buzz on social media' or whatever the fuck it is they say.

        I'm betting that in the overview where you can change clock settings there's going to be a share button which automatically posts a Twitter message and Facebook status update saying: "Just overclocked my AMD Radeon 1234XX to 1000Mhz, bitches! #AMDrulez #overclockingBoss #beastmode #caturday"

  • But does it have an email client? (Score:3)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @11:16AM (#50847595)

    /emacs

    Seriously WTF. I never forgave AMD/ATI for the OpenGL Rage driver debacle in the late 90s. Haven't looked back. nVidia, for their sins, at least have decent and timely driver updates.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spauldo ( 118058 )

      Yeah, I had a Rage Fury MAXX (or something like that) that only had Windows drivers for 98.

      Didn't matter on Linux, but I had some work to do on IIS for work and installed W2K Server on a second drive and set up dual boot. It gave me 640x480, 16 colors.

      Their excuse: it's a gaming card, and people only game on Windows 98.

      It really didn't matter that much to me from a practical standpoint - my home machine was Linux-only most of the time. But I decided since ATI wanted to dictate what their users could use t

    • I see you weren't one of the unfortunate people with a DX9-only NVidia laptop card when Vista came out. From the Beta 2 days through until around six months after release, there were two choices of driver for my GeForce GO 7600:
      1) The "official" driver, which ran at about 40% of the framerate the card was capable of and lacked such basic features as "preserve aspect ratio" scaling.
      2) The current "beta" or "unsupported" driver, which ran at full speed with full features but was so unstable it would crash eve

  • Re-architected (Score:3)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Monday November 02, 2015 @11:16AM (#50847599) Journal

    Re-Archtitected? Architected isn't even a word.

    No. Just....no.

  • A bigger pile of steaming horse droppings by any other name, will still smell...

  • Not much real news here. The only thing that sounds good here is that they are unifying the UI on a cross platform toolkit. Instead of using .net (and some odd port to linux) they are going to be using QT.

  • Or will they make all the same mistakes all over again? A big part of what was wrong with CCC is that it was super-bloated. I understand when a driver package has a large footprint because it supports a lot of hardware. I don't understand when it has a large footprint because the configuration GUI is a gigantic turd.

  • What is this madness? Why is everybody trying to push stupid shit on me? I've been avoiding the Gaming Evolved app for years now. Why do I need this? Has the world gone mad?
    • Yes. This is the future we feared when Steam raised its head. A hundred different logins and services running on your machine that demand to be updated or refuse to work. We are squarely back in the mainframe era again. For the record, i like Steam a lot, but i saw where it would lead. Now i have Steam, Origin, Gog.com, Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Epic game launchers on my machine, plus the graphics drivers will soon require a login. Windows 10 all but requires a MS account so another service login there. Yes t

      • This is the future we feared when Steam raised its head. A hundred different logins and services running on your machine that demand to be updated or refuse to work. We are squarely back in the mainframe era again. For the record, i like Steam a lot, but i saw where it would lead. Now i have Steam, Origin, Gog.com, Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Epic game launchers on my machine,

        Agreed. It's a train wreck. It makes me sad when the only non-connected version I can get is for game consoles.

        The good news is (at l

        • GOG Galaxy doesn't require you log in to launch games. It isn't required for anything in any game at all, in fact. I'm not saying that GOG won't eventually change their tune, but their promise right now is that Galaxy will never be required for any gaming. You can download the games, install the games, update the games, and play the games without needing Galaxy. If you do have Galaxy, you can use it as a simple launcher without signing into your GOG account.

          You do (legally) need a GOG account to download GO

          • the games themselves are free of all DRM, including sign-in requirements.

            They kind of have to be since most of them are just glorified batch scripts that run games via dosbox.

            It's technically possible to DRM it (encrypt the game image and only decrypt it once you're signed in) but I'd be very surprised if Gog ever did it.

  • Have to agree wholeheartedly with the other people commenting here who dislike the social media integration aspect of these new drivers!

    IMO, this sort of functionality NEVER belongs in a device driver package (even IF the package also bundles related applications such as control panels or optimization tools). Social media integration should be handled at the application level, by the games or other software someone chooses to install on a machine.

    I'm even willing to go so far as to accept than an operating

  • Change the name of the software, add some obnoxious and invasive "features" = Profit????

  • The problem is "graphics mini operating system" koolaid drunk by AMD. I just want to run my shit and not be hampered by delusions of grandeur and scope creep of vendors. As a consumer I don't want an operating system I want a driver. Sure as heck won't stand for graphics drivers communicating with Facebook.

    For years I made a point of staying away from AMD because their drivers have always sucked/crashed and CCC is a bloated piece of crap. It is good they want to focus on fixing these problems yet all I

  • About freaking time. Software has always been ATI/AMD's biggest problem, and the Catalyst Control Center at this point is ancient and awful. They've just been tacking new stuff on to it, kludging together something for each successive release to try and keep up with Nvidia, but making it worse each time. All they're doing here is integrating the Gaming Evolved Experience features into the software for manually controlling the GPU. It's to simplify things for the majority of people who wouldn't know the diff

  • AMD... (Score:2)

    by bogie ( 31020 )

    Lures you in with cheaper prices...

    Screws you over with buggy drivers...

    Will it tweet @AMD every time the gpu driver crashes?

  • Back in my day... (Score:3)

    by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Monday November 02, 2015 @12:35PM (#50848433)

    In the days of yore, ATI Radeon drivers were easy to work with - a simple, clearly labeled set of tabs that allowed monitors and GPU settings to be manipulated in the least amount of time possible...and the files were >50MB.

    The latest iterations of the Catalyst Control Center are highly convoluted, poorly labeled, oversized, and just generally terrible to work with. If the interface from the Radeon 9000 series made a comeback with nothing but the required INF/CAT/CAB files for the new cards, that would be the single greatest thing they could do, and I see no reason why this isn't completely possible.

    I'm unopposed to there being a "Radeon Studio", where other functionality can be used. If they made it a place to use their hardware accelerated video transcoder and allowed the creation of a RAM disk (and provided a place to put a Twitter feed, I guess...), that would be wonderful. There is not, however, a need for these functions in the drivers.

    This really isn't that complicated.

    • Even then, since they bought out the Radeon Pro dev, quite some time ago, I still do doubt will grant Crimson will some of the same things.
      I.E
      The biggest being all those options related to Vsync, tripple buffering, and max render FPS

  • I've been an AMD user for some time, and I can only describe their drivers as bloated and clunky. So it is good that it is getting replaced. That said, it sounds like they are replacing it with something even more bloated. Hopefully it works better. What they really need to work on is getting it to actually run video well, and handle basic features like multi-monitor setup well. Some improvements might include an install process and upgrade process that doesn't require some sort of voodoo dance, reading th

  • All those great new features... "and more"! I can't just wait to install the very first version of their completely re-architected software on my system to find out what "more" they will do to me!

  • What is the point of bloating drivers with some social networking crap when you are unable to get simple things like reliable HDMI sound after windows wakes from sleep?

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