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  • meacupla - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link

    I don't think drivers would help as much as price drops would...
  • TiGr1982 - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link

    It seems, that AMD pretends that nothing is happening, so no official price drops so far (after GM204 release) AFAIK.
  • The Von Matrices - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Their lineup has too many cards to just drop the price on all of them. If AMD did that, then there would be $10 price differences between each model. I wonder which will be discontinued.
  • TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Yes, and it seems that currently GM204 drops all of their cards lineup -
    like dropping a card-house...
  • Samus - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    I think they're still cleaning up all the poop that dropped out two weeks ago.

    Once that mess is taken care of they'll focus on price drops.
  • Tetracycloide - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Needs both really. Implementing downsampling in the drivers would help at least a little.
  • TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    May be of interest to somebody, probably:

    It seems that this new package (14.9 WHQL) may have issues with old APUs - on my TV box with E2-1800 (Brazos, very first AMD APU in fact) with so-called HD 7340 (80 VLIW5 shader integrated GPU) 14.9 WHWL installed fine, but CCC started crashing constantly, so I had to return back to previous 14.8 for APUs on this box (that package works fine, however).

    Nevertheless, 14.9 WHQL (news subject) is working fine with my big desktop GCN-based HD 7950 (aka R9 280), so, in my personal experience, this 14.9 WHQL is more aimed towards discrete GPUs.
  • TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    WHQL, I meant, and Zacate, not Brazos (same thing though).
  • heffeque - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    I've got a E-450 and was thinking of installing Win8.1x64 (clean). I'll try 14.9 first, just in case it's just your system failing, but if mine does too, I'll know that 14.8 works fine.

    Thanks for the heads up!
  • atlantico - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    The 14.9 WHQL drivers fixed the DisplayPort problem I had with 14.4 WHQL on my HD7950, so I'm a happy camper and can use DP again!
  • Jumpman23 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    What was your DP problem? I had some artifacts on the screen from using DP.
  • atlantico - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    There was a timing problem that occurred with my monitor (Dell U2713HM) and the HD7950 through DisplayPort that cause some flickering at first and then it just lost the signal completely. Just got a blank screen.

    DVI worked fine, but DisplayPort just couldn't establish a connection with the monitor. I could use the monitor's DisplayPort with my MacBook Pro just fine, but my Windows desktop tower could not with the 14.4 driver.

    This was fixed immediately after I installed Catalyst 14.9 WHQL and DisplayPort works once again as if nothing ever happened! :)
  • atlantico - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    All right! I've been waiting patiently for WHQL drivers :) Not that there was anything wrong with the 14.4 drivers, they've been working super stable for all this time, but I appreciate fixes and even "marginal" improvements.
  • slatanek - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Why no live blog from the Microsoft event today? Not even a mention about it? Seriously!?
  • Ammaross - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Because this is AT and they only go to Apple events, of course.
  • TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    [Offtopic]
    Not really, the whole MS Surface Pro line (3 generations) was covered on AT nicely.
    [/Offtopic]
  • creed3020 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Installed this version last night on a brand new build with my MSI Gaming R9 270X ITX within a Windows & ecosystem. First time in a while that a driver install has gone so smoothly and didn't crash....
  • atlantico - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    I've actually never had an AMD driver install crash or fail in any sort of way, and for the longest time I was using the beta drivers regularly.

    That being said, use DDU for all drivers, AMD and Nvidia before installing new ones. Uninstalling the drivers completely before installing a new version is always a good move. Not necessary in most cases, but a good move.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Funny thing is that I installed the 14.9 drivers on a 290X system, and when I uninstalled them to switch to an NVIDIA GPU... BSOD. If you deal with installing/updating/uninstalling drivers on a regular basis, I have to say that AMD's drivers can be a much bigger pain in the butt than NVIDIA's. Thankfully most people don't switch between AMD/NVIDIA on a regular basis.
  • TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    AMD drivers didn't like your intention to switch to NVIDIA GPU :)

    Jokes aside, yes, in my personal many years Radeon experience (I'm historically use only Radeons, never had anything from nVidia besides Tegra 3 Android tablet, which is offtopic here),
    there can be two major issues with AMD driver package installation/uninstallation:

    1) BSOD when actually installing/uninstalling video driver itself (when the screen goes black for a moment)
    2) Crashes of .NET-based CCC.exe (Catalyst Control Center) if something is incompatible/inconsistent (e.g., see my comment above - in my case, 14.9 WHQL didn't work with old tiny AMD Brazos APU)
  • Parhel - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Major PITA install for me. I figured I could just 'upgrade' so I installed the new driver without uninstalling the old one first. I do not recommend that!
  • TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    Same thing for my AMD Brazos box, you're not alone. Even completely uninstalling didn't really help. Had to return to the previous 14.8 for APUs. Not a big deal though, absolutely.

    Welcome to the world of AMD Catalyst /Sarcasm
  • atlantico - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    If you use DDU then everything is uninstalled and you can't blame AMD for your BSOD. Literally everything is cleared out with DDU, it's as if you never installed anything.
  • jdrch - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    "I have to say that AMD's drivers can be a much bigger pain in the butt than NVIDIA's."
    - I've used both on multiple machines and have had the exact opposite experience.
  • jdrch - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link

    "I've actually never had an AMD driver install crash or fail in any sort of way" - This has been my experience exactly.

    "Uninstalling the drivers completely before installing a new version is always a good move. Not necessary in most cases, but a good move."
    - You'd think so, but I tried that once with an Nvidia Quadro on a Dell Precision and got caught in a horrible bootloop in which Windows Update would detect the card as new hardware and pull drivers for it, thus causing the Nvidia driver installation to fail. I never managed to fix the problem. Haven't done a clean GPU driver install since, and so far that's worked out well for me.
  • atlantico - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    @jdrich: damn that's rough, ok I'd qualify it then with "in most cases on desktop towers it is a good move to completely remove the drivers"... and as before, it may not be necessary to do so.

    I'm not religious about computer voodoo and my ideas never work for laptops, which are their own universe, often with very custom drivers and chips to make things run smooth.

    What I'm saying is this: on my desktop tower (which probably weighs 20+kg containing the large version of everything) it has served me well, especially when using beta drivers, to completely uninstall GPU drivers before installing new ones.

    I was far to generic in my previous claim and you're right. It's not always wise or appropriate to unstall GPU drivers completely.
  • creed3020 - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    Do you have any systems with APUs? I personally don't find them any friendlier that dGPUs for installs. Just curious.

    I've seen installs on top of previous versions almost always fail. I got to the point where I archive all my old versions just in case I cannot install the new version...
  • Rock1m1 - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link

    Still has the Display standby issue for me: A lot of times the display does not wake up when when it is on standby.
  • TiGr1982 - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link

    What's your GPU/card?
    (I never had this problem on my Radeon HD 7950 Boost with any AMD drivers so far)
  • atlantico - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    What is your system, GPU and OS? I'm not 100% sure this is a GPU issue.
  • TeXWiller - Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - link

    My standby-problem was mediated by switching to HDMI from the DVI interface with a Sapphire 7750 card. With an older FirePro (HD5000 generation), the problem doesn't manifest itself.
  • mangapc - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link

    I get the BSOD after installing the 14.9 driver on my Windows 8.1 machine. I am running two 7850 in crossfire. Had to downgrade to 14.4 to have a stable system.
  • Wylie - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link

    After using DDU I installed 14.9, locks up my system when attempting to run any game. Most unstable driver I ever installed for my R9 295x2 card. Rolled back to 14.7 RC3, everything works fine.
  • Collossous - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link

    I download it the 14.9 drivers and now it won't let me use dual graphics, all I get is a black screen. I had to revert back to 13.9 and now it works but I get an error in the event logs AODDriver4.2.0 failed to start, it can't not find the file specified. No crashes or BOD but rather annoying.

    A8 3870+6670.
  • Wylie - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link

    AMD looking into all the installation issues

    http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/GPU...
  • Rock1m1 - Tuesday, October 7, 2014 - link

    Still they have not fixed the issue when the display does not wake up after going in standby. It is under their 'known issue' and is a really old problem.

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