AMD Releases Video Driver for Windows 8 Consumer Preview

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• Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link

  The built-in driver should be good enough for WDDM 1.1 cards. Or for that matter, the current Catalyst driver should be fine (though you'd have to do some extra work to get it to install).
  
  The only real purpose of this driver is to enable WDDM 1.2 for the cards that support it (AMD's DX11 cards).

• Aikouka - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link

  I guess this might explain why they missed their usual monthly Catalyst release as 12.1 is still available on their site as the latest stable release.

• Glibous - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link

  My guess would be their trying to make the final touches on their 12.2 drivers and combine VLW4/5 & GCN into one package instead of the fragmented driver packages we've seen since GCN released (Preview releases I mean, not WHQL obviously). Seeing how GCN is a major architecture change compared to their VLW architecture. They must be trying to understand how the hardware works while optimizing the drivers.
  
  Honestly, I expected this. I'm also expecting major performance improvements down the road. I just hope AMD comes through.

• chizow - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link

  Honestly this is a major issue and concern as a worst-case scenario for AMD after their 3rd major arch in the span of a little over a year. How long, if ever, will it take to merge their different driver branches that support the 3 different driver archs on their last 3 generations of video cards?
  
  I guess that's a major benefit of Nvidia's driver and GPU arch, backward compatibility. All goes back to CUDA and a true vision and commitment to that vision as it seems Nvidia keeps building on their GPU architecture with backward compatibility while AMD just continues to release new features on new GPUs but no support on older ones.

• Zingam - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link

  No, NVIDIA doesn't build backward compatible cards. They've just managed to guess the future proof architecture at once years ago. While NVIDIA was making GPGPUs, AMD was making GPUs for games.

• chizow - Thursday, March 1, 2012 - link

  No Nvidia built an architecture that did both well because they saw the similarities involved with HPC and GPU rendering. AMD is only finally realizing this.
  
  They also put the legwork into developing CUDA and ensuring full forward and backward compatibility with their CUDA-capable GPUs going back go G80.
  
  Also when I refer to backward compatibility, I'm talking about new or improved features, like 3D Vision, PhysX or SGSSAA that may have been introduced after a product launch but are still compatible with the older cards too.
  
  For example, Nvidia rolls out SGSSAA by accident with Fermi and the functionality is available for 8800GTX too: http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,748911/Geforce-...
  
  Now look at how AMD handled the situation with SGSSAA with DX9 only on certain cards...now DX10/11 finally but only on 7-series, but you get the idea. GCN is going to be more of the same for GPU compute but luckily for AMD, they don't have much of an HPC business to disturb with the discontinuity.

• CeriseCogburn - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link

  Yeah, like 3 monitor surround gaming for the GTX200 series, introduced after the cards launched - so like a big added value for that whole series, which is still right now a great value to take advantage of as 2x 260 2x 275 2x 280 and 2x285 are really nice triple monitor sli combos some under $200 right now.
  Plus the ambient occlusion addition in the drivers that went back to the G80 in that case I think. ( amd fans told me they hated shadows in games when that happened - lol )
  Now since ambient occlusion is kind of standard like in BF3, it's great of course say amd fans - thanks to Nvidia....

• CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link

  So now amd has abandoned gpu's for games, as you and yours have claimed nvidia did with gpgpu's.
  How does it feel to be abandoned by amd ?
  How does it feel when they don't give one whit about you the gamer ?
  ( I suspect your tune carrying will suddenly undergo a 180 degree transformation).