ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Gaming Redux: Drivers, Drivers, Drivers
As luck would have it, we "uninstalled" the new drivers at one point, only to find that the drivers remained but Catalyst Control Center was gone. A quick test revealed that STALKER: Clear Sky performance was back to where it started, and so we performed another comparison of the beta drivers with and without CCC. Here are the results.
Out of 12 titles, only one shows even a tiny drop in performance. What's surprising is that two games (Crysis and Fallout 3) show moderate performance improvements, while two other games improve substantially. Empire: Total War jumps up 43%, and STALKER: Clear Sky almost doubles at 82%. This is something we just happened to stumble upon, and it brings up some severe concerns.
When the Catalyst Control Center first launched, there were many complaints about how slow it was and how much memory it consumed. Over time, ATI improved things to the point where most people stopped bellyaching, but we've never been truly happy with CCC and its use of bloated .Net programming. Now we're left to wonder if CCC handicaps other titles, and if so what will be done to fix it. Perhaps the situation only occurred because we were using beta drivers, but we've had our complaints with ATI's desktop drivers in the past as well.
Again, we can't emphasize enough the importance of getting a unified driver program for laptops and desktops, preferably with enough testing that performance doesn't degrade over time in older titles. When you couple that with a desktop driver program that already has problems, NVIDIA is definitely in the "drivers" seat [Ed: Sorry, bad pun] for mobile gaming solutions. Whether that's actually an interesting topic for most of you is a different matter, naturally....
As a final point of comparison, we wanted to show how our desktop system compares to the laptop. You might be surprised how close things are in most of the titles, considering all of the performance advantages that the desktop holds (faster CPU, twice as much GPU memory, and faster GPU core/memory speeds).
Fully half of the titles are only 10% to 25% faster on the desktop system, which we didn't expect at all. We figured on something close to a 40% improvement across the board, and we're not sure what bottlenecks are holding back performance in these six titles. Empire: Total War, Far Cry 2, Mass Effect, and STALKER: Clear Sky are all 35 to 55% faster, which is more in line with what we expected to see. The remaining two titles, Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena and FEAR 2: Project Origin, actually didn't surprise us very much. Both of these titles are almost three times as fast on the desktop, which is almost certainly caused by a lack of CrossFire profiles. Remember that virtually every new game released after these drivers will not have a valid CrossFire profile. You can try renaming the executable in hopes of getting CrossFire to work, but that can be hit or miss and isn't an ideal solution by any means.
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buzznut - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
Looky there, I went and missed "bash AMD day"Damn, they're prolly still reeling.
Johnmcl7 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
In the specs for this machine it lists an 8x DVDR drive initially, then refers to it as a blu-ray drive just further down - I assume the first entry should read bd-rom/dvd-r combo.I have to say the pictures are extremely disappointing as the main shots of the laptop are badly underexposed concealing most of the details. I do realise these machines are not easy to get a picture of but normally the pictures in reviews are pretty decent. It would be good to see some pictures with some standard items (DVD cases or something) when the laptop is open to get a better idea of the scale, I think the sleek look makes it look smaller than it is especially given it makes the D901C look small which I didn't think possible.
As for the laptop itself I did consider one of these mainly because the price was good but decided against it due to the size/weight. I had a Dell XPS 2 then M1710 and I think that's really the upper limit to carry around with me. I have an XPS M1730 at the moment and it never leaves the house as combined with its huge powerpack makes it quite a bit bigger and heavier than the M1710, there's no way I would go bigger again.
It's a shame to see the driver situation is so poor when the performance is clearly there, it's not very encouraging for other companies to pick up mobile ATI parts either.
mrbios - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Jarred (or anyone who may purchase this notebook), I have a different Asus laptop that has the same multimedia touchpad, and I did find a way to disable it. Go into the Mouse control panel, go to Device Settings, expand tapping, click on tap zones, and uncheck "enable tap zones".garydale - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Why is it so difficult to get good display drivers for games? The OpenGL interface is well defined so what's the problem with writing a driver for it that game developers can have confidence it will work according to spec.?Is this a case of the hardware manufacturers screwing up with the driver or the game developers trying to get around the API to work directly with the hardware or a bit of both? Frankly, I don't care. If I want to play a game on a computer, it should install and work just like any other piece of software or hardware.
Hopefully AMD/ATI's release of details of their API will help bring stability and performance, at least for Linux games. Now will NVidia follow suit and allow the open source community to build their own drivers to end this proprietary "buggy driver" lunacy?
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I believe most of the driver updates are to optimize the way the GPU executes certain code. In theory, the drivers should run all code properly but not optimally. The reality, sadly, is that the "properly" part is only correct about 80% of the time with new titles. Add CrossFire into the mix and that seems to drop down to 50%. If you have a regular dual card CrossFire setup, disabling CrossFire in the CCC often solves compatibility issues, but that's not an option on the drivers I've received for the W90Vp.In the case of Empire: Total War it looked like the drivers were rendering properly on one card but not on the other. If I grabbed a screenshot via the PrintScreen button, everything looked correct, but looking at the screen only the landscaping and sky were always visible and correct. The units, trees, buildings, etc. were only visible about 10% of the frames, which pretty much means you can't play the game.
mbaroud - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
I own one the W90VP-A1.I have been dyingto update the drivers, it sucks running on OUTDATED drivers :(
nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
If these are simply mobile desktop replacements why doesn't somebody get on making a desktop built into the screen already?And I don't mean the hideous monstrosity that is the Dell XP1.
I am all for laptops, but this form factor is silly above 15.4" in my opinion.
(that said, I love the tech, it is very cool.)
Jackattak - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Dunno if you've been asleep for the past two years but just about every major PC manufacturer offers a desktop built-in to the screen nowadays, none of which are "hideous" (strictly my opinion, but I find it hard to find a screen "hideous", and that's essentially all these offerings are is a screen).garydale - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
It's generally cheaper and faster to run multiple desktops in the locations you need than to lug a "desktop replacement" around. Just keep your documents (and other settings) on a USB key or implement an Internet synchronization scheme.The simple fact is that you cannot get anything that can be reasonably called a laptop to match the performance of a desktop. Laptops don't have the space for multiple drives, they can't dissipate heat as well, and they certainly can't accommodate expansion.
To get the same performance of a desktop in a mobile platform, you have to wait for the technology to become available then pay a premium for the privilege. People have been saying laptops are getting near desktop performance for decades. What is actually happening however is the price of admission for an application platform has been decreasing.
You can get a resonable desktop today for what a hard drive would have cost you twenty years ago. However, if you want cutting edge power, you need a desktop or larger.
frozentundra123456 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
The charts are technically labelled incorrectly. I believe for instance the first chart, black bar, means the ratio of nVidia performance to ATI, not percent improvement as it is labelled. Saying "102 percent improvement" actually means that the nVidia solution is twice as fast as the ATI, which from reading the rest of the article appears not to be what the author meant. The rest of the charts are labelled in this way also.