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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nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Well. . .If there was a PCI-e standard for mobile, then maybe you could choose your graphics and the laptops would have to work properly with standard drivers?
What if you used DisplayPort for the interface to the display? Then you could plug in any graphics chip and it would work with the standard drivers.
You would of course need "thermal" stages, where you had a cap on the amount of power that it could dissipate, but if you wanted to set your PC on a fan and cut out a vent you could move up.
I think that a standard needs to be set already. There is no excuse for making a handful of extra or different pins, or form factors off by a few millimeters just so that you can't build your own system or upgrade it.
I would hope that as time progresses you could put a faster chip on a smaller more advanced process into an older laptop, or just choose the exact graphics you want (IE less powerful) in a system with the processing power you need.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Unfortunately, the biggest reason for a lack of unified mobile GPU standards is that OEMs along with ATI and NVIDIA like to compete in a variety of ways. Look at Apple and imagine trying to tell them they their laptops need to conform to a standard layout.It *could* happen, and for higher performance laptops with discrete GPUs like the W90Vp, that would be ideal. In fact, the GPU modules in the W90 look very similar to the GPU modules from NVIDIA. The problem is, no one wants to do the work to make sure upgraded GPUs would work -- plus you need to worry about having not just a standardized form factor, but standardized heatsinks/fans.
Ultimately, a standardized notebook form factor would probably lose more customers than it would gain. Everyone would complain about the "boring design and aesthetics", and the number of new bugs/problems we'd see would probably skyrocket. But hey, maybe someone will prove me wrong on this and make the idea work....
Goty - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Wait, NVIDIA managed to release drivers on all platforms simultaneously ONCE and suddenly they have a unified driver model? I'd have to wait and see if that trend continues down the road, but I'm not holding my breath.There's also the issue that a large number of notebooks simply won't accept the drivers directly from NVIDIA.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
NVIDIA previously had a mobile driver program where they committed to quarterly updates, and they delivered on that three times (though the first wasn't quite "quarterly"). The drivers started out several months behind the desktop releases, and now we have drivers released on all platforms twice (185.81 and then the final 185.85) - though granted they're mostly the same thing.As far as laptops where the NVIDIA drivers won't work, are they in the "unsupported" list? They've worked on every laptop I've tried, which ranged from 8600M to 9500M to 8800M SLI to 9800M. What laptops specifically don't work or have problems? Or are these problems caused by old and cluttered Windows installs where malware or something else gets in the way?
If NVIDIA doesn't continue to release unified drivers, we'll certainly point it out, but at the same time they've already strongly committed to minimum quarterly updates. That's more than anyone else has done for mobile graphics.
rbfowler9lfc - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Really impressive battery life. You can watch a 1080p movie on the road, as long as it doesn't last longer than 1h. Bah!