Official Radeon 7950 Review and discussion thread

[Roadhog]

Well, with the games I play, my AMD drivers are fantastic and I haven't had a problem in games with them yet. That's with have two 5870s, 3x 6970s, and now 3x 7970s. The last driver problem I had that annoyed me was actually with my 8800GTX and constant driver recovery issues I had with that. Probably what made me go to AMD.

[ViN86]

Originally Posted by slaWter

I know what you mean by that concept. But let me ask you a question. When you're out with friends and having a dinner at a nice restaurant and then someone of your group brings up a sports topic, do you all stand up, leave the restaurant and go to a sports bar to talk about it?

I don't come here to talk about AMD drivers but I saw Xion's remarks about the current driver state and I just mentioned that it apparently hasn't changed much. I know Xion used AMD around the time when I did, so I thought it was the right place to post this. The other option would have been to not post anything. Because replying to a post in a different thread leads to fragmentation.

This was never a big deal on this forum as long as it's not pointless flaming. But you should know that Xion and I aren't after that. That's why I don't understand why you suddenly have issues with that. Is is because you're currently using AMD cards?


To answer your question, the 5970 was the last AMD card I used. I didn't post about the current AMD driver state, I just pointed out that it apparently hasn't changed much. Other well respected members of this forum provided info about the current drivers. So you can't accuse me of lying.

I also have an Nvidia card. I'm not looking for a debate. I just want to keep topics in respective threads and keep this section under control. Yes, I am sensitive to it because all Rollo did was derail and flame threads, so sorry for that, but I just don't want a repeat of what happened last time.

[Xion X2]

Vin has asked me not to post driver-related comments in this thread, and I respect his wish. I do have to say though that I have concerns about that. Not everyone who is considering buying one of these cards is going to think "Hey, let me check out the driver thread over there and see if there are any issues with the card or drivers." No, they're going to look in this thread as this is the discussion thread for the 7950. One would automatically expect feedback from those who have owned the card or read reviews about it to reside in this thread, as people usually do not frequent drivers threads until after they've bought the hardware and experienced driver issues.

I understand not wanting to turn this into a drivers griping thread, but I think brief and concise descriptions of what issues users are having should be allowed. Otherwise, I think some people are going to be missing out on some good feedback from other users who could potentially save them some time, trouble and money.

That is all I was trying to do. As slawter mentioned, the furthest thing from my mind when posting what I did was to steer people toward either AMD or Nvidia. I am completely bi-partisan when it comes to hardware. I don't care who has the better card.. I will buy it. At the same time I feel obligated to warn others if I have extensive experience with a product and feel that it's not meeting quality standards.. especially one that will cost buyers over 400$.

As an aside, I have to say.. roadhog.. you're the only Crossfire 7xxx user I've seen who's having no issues with his games. You do seem knowledgeable when it comes to hardware, so I guess I'll have to take you at your word and chalk it up to chance/system configuration. The Skyrim "stuttering" issue in particular puzzles me, because two other users were able to replicate that problem from my setup while you weren't. I'm glad that you're not having any issues, but from what I've seen a lot of Crossfire 7xxx users are.

[Xion X2]

Originally Posted by Redeemed

Here is my opinion regarding 7xxx series CrossFire-

I think it isn't that people are having "so much trouble", I think they're tired of being early adopters.

It's both, actually. I've owned several multi-GPU setups over the years.. a few as an early adopter, like 8800SLI and 4870XFire. Never seen the volume and severity of issues that I experienced with 7xxx Crossfire as an early adopter. Every game that I owned/played over a period of a week was impacted in some way or another. I even had to use an unconventional uninstall method when my 570s arrived to get them out of my system since the AMD driver wasn't showing up in the Windows program list.

The rest of your post I do agree with, though.

[Roadhog]

Originally Posted by Xion X2

As an aside, I have to say.. roadhog.. you're the only Crossfire 7xxx user I've seen who's having no issues with his games. You do seem knowledgeable when it comes to hardware, so I guess I'll have to take you at your word and chalk it up to chance/system configuration. The Skyrim "stuttering" issue in particular puzzles me, because two other users were able to replicate that problem from my setup while you weren't. I'm glad that you're not having any issues, but from what I've seen a lot of Crossfire 7xxx users are.

I wasn't running the same driver set as you IIRC. I had problems with OpenCL on 12.2 so I went back to 11.12 RC11. I am on 12.4 preview now, and still no problems. I do have to say that 12.4 preview does run skyrim much better.

Really, I only play BF3, Skyrim, and Minecraft...

[Xion X2]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

I wasn't running the same driver set as you IIRC. I had problems with OpenCL on 12.2 so I went back to 11.12 RC11. I am on 12.4 preview now, and still no problems. I do have to say that 12.4 preview does run skyrim much better.

Really, I only play BF3, Skyrim, and Minecraft...

Before I sold my cards I tried every driver release up to the 12.3.. so I think it was 4 different drivers that I tried. Skyrim stuttered on every one of them, and the resolution to it was always repeatable. Alt-tab to desktop, alt-tab (twice) back into game. Gone.

Everyone has a different setup, so maybe it's a system configuration issue. You have an expensive monitor I remember you saying so you're probably at a higher res than me. I saw the screen just barely resize at the loading screens to where I could barely make out a border. Then once the new area loaded and after all the textures loaded in is when I'd get the bad stuttering. The screen resizing seemed like it could be what was causing the problem.