New OMEGA AMD driver

[remilafo]

Hello All

 

For the AMD GPU users out there i have to report EXCELLENT improvements with this new AMD omega driver release on Dec 9th 2014.

 

I have a quad-fire setup, 7990 + 2x7970 ..

 

For the games i play i saw these improvements.

 

Dragon age inquisition:  Holding solid 60fps (vsync cap) @ 3240x1920 resolution at full ultra..  Up from about 45 FPS.

 

Skyrim (heavily modded with a intensive enb) :  up from 45fps to about 95+ ...  a 100% improvement

 

Lichdom battlemage: another 100% improvement ... this game can still use alot of optimizations imo. a single GPU is about 15-20FPS on ultra and i get about 55FPS with 4 gpu...

 

.....    Thank you AMD, this driver was fantastic.

 

In non-gaming related news... the new AMD video up-scaling is pretty damn cool also.

 

Watching 720p or 1080p videos from HDD or Internet they get up-scaled and rendered . pretty significant visual improvement. Not quite the 4k comparison im sure amd was going for but still much better than native 1080p stretched to 4k.

 

remi lafo.

[pants18]

just installed for my 7950

[Juganog]

Been looking at the 8gb 290x's if amd can boast such a strong driver on it it may push me to go buy one

[TechFan@ic]

Skyrim (heavily modded with a intensive enb) :  up from 45fps to about 95+ ...  a 100% improvement

 

remi lafo.

This is very interesting, I was wondering did Skyrim actually scale at all in CrossfireX before the Omega drivers ?

As far as I'm aware Frame Pacing doesn't work in Skyrim because it's a DX9 game. This would be really good news if the improvements extend to Skyrim as I have a second HD 7950 coming next week and I play a ton of heavily modded Skyrim with my own tweaked ENB.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

Meh only a few fps improvements for me on heavily modded skyrim with intensive enb (only have a single card though...)

[remilafo]

This is very interesting, I was wondering did Skyrim actually scale at all in CrossfireX before the Omega drivers ?

As far as I'm aware Frame Pacing doesn't work in Skyrim because it's a DX9 game. This would be really good news if the improvements extend to Skyrim as I have a second HD 7950 coming next week and I play a ton of heavily modded Skyrim with my own tweaked ENB.

 

Skyrim scaled very well with multi-gpu even before this patch.  Given how the enb is coded i think a powerful cpu is needed.

 

for me 1 gpu = 100%

2 gpu = 190-195%

3 gpu = 275-280%

4 gpu = 350- 375%

[SkilledRebuilds]

Hello All

Lichdom battlemage: another 100% improvement ... this game can still use alot of optimizations imo. a single GPU is about 15-20FPS on ultra and i get about 55FPS with 4 gpu...

 

..... 

Weird, Previous to the patch I had awesome performance with a single card.. Maxed out of course... 55+fps with System in SIG

Have not tried since... it's not installed currently.

[TechFan@ic]

Skyrim scaled very well with multi-gpu even before this patch.  Given how the enb is coded i think a powerful cpu is needed.

 

for me 1 gpu = 100%

2 gpu = 190-195%

3 gpu = 275-280%

4 gpu = 350- 375%

Do you use some sort of frame limiter ? like RadeonPro or Afterburner ? Because otherwise I don't believe that you'll see a huge benefit in Skyrim because frame pacing isn't enabled for it.

[remilafo]

Been looking at the 8gb 290x's if amd can boast such a strong driver on it it may push me to go buy one

 

For skyrim 4gb is plenty, even 3GB which is what i use is fine.  Depends what you do actually.

 

heavy modding with big textures that 4Gb or even 8Gb will go along way. But remember the 290X isn't that much faster than the 7970/280X  only about 10-15%...   IMO enb's is what really changes the appearance of skyrim and for that compute power is what you need, so a 295X would be more appropriate for that.

 

a 290x with 8gb will live longer than a 4gb card. Like it will probably support games even 5 years from now, although you might find yourself starving for compute power.  You could do what i did..

 

I originally bought 1 7970 and it was awesome.....   but i eventually got a second 7970 when they went down about 150$.

 

I only just recently got my 7990 for 440$ off newegg and that was a damn steal.

 

Remi lafo.

[remilafo]

Weird, Previous to the patch I had awesome performance with a single card.. Maxed out of course... 55+fps with System in SIG

Have not tried since... it's not installed currently.

 

Recall i play at 3K, 3240x1920 ...  I would also get 50+fps at 1080p on ultra.

[remilafo]

Do you use some sort of frame limiter ? like RadeonPro or Afterburner ? Because otherwise I don't believe that you'll see a huge benefit in Skyrim because frame pacing isn't enabled for it.

 

For skyrim i don't use radeonpro, it's not needed.  I use Radeonpro on Dx11 games (lichdom, DAI, Tomb raider etc.) to get sweetfx to work, it is unfortunately needed as a pass through like a post-post processor.

 

You are right about skyrim and frame pacing, it doesn''t make much of a difference, However it does not do nothing either.  If your force Vsync = ALWAYS ON in CCC and frame pacing in on, i found this to help ALOT with smoothing of stutters in skyrim.

 

 

Oh also a note about stutters in skyrim, this is caused by skyrim more so than AMD/drivers. It's the way skyrim consumes Vram, lucky for use you can control how much Vram skyrim gets via an enb.  You can remove stuttering completely by setting the availible Vram for skyrim to LESS than your total Vram this way you will always have enough overhead to allow texture memory to swap around without getting OUT OF MEMORY basically which causes the stuttering.

 

remi lafo

[Juganog]

For skyrim 4gb is plenty, even 3GB which is what i use is fine.  Depends what you do actually.

 

heavy modding with big textures that 4Gb or even 8Gb will go along way. But remember the 290X isn't that much faster than the 7970/280X  only about 10-15%...   IMO enb's is what really changes the appearance of skyrim and for that compute power is what you need, so a 295X would be more appropriate for that.

 

a 290x with 8gb will live longer than a 4gb card. Like it will probably support games even 5 years from now, although you might find yourself starving for compute power.  You could do what i did..

 

I originally bought 1 7970 and it was awesome.....   but i eventually got a second 7970 when they went down about 150$.

 

I only just recently got my 7990 for 440$ off newegg and that was a damn steal.

 

Remi lafo.

i will be buying a 4k monitor also so the extra ram helps alot or i wouldnt consider updating from my 770 then consider crossfiring in the future also considering to going to X99 later next year so im nto worried about how long things are gona last i know how fast things update

[TechFan@ic]

For skyrim i don't use radeonpro, it's not needed.  I use Radeonpro on Dx11 games (lichdom, DAI, Tomb raider etc.) to get sweetfx to work, it is unfortunately needed as a pass through like a post-post processor.

 

You are right about skyrim and frame pacing, it doesn''t make much of a difference, However it does not do nothing either.  If your force Vsync = ALWAYS ON in CCC and frame pacing in on, i found this to help ALOT with smoothing of stutters in skyrim.

 

 

Oh also a note about stutters in skyrim, this is caused by skyrim more so than AMD/drivers. It's the way skyrim consumes Vram, lucky for use you can control how much Vram skyrim gets via an enb.  You can remove stuttering completely by setting the availible Vram for skyrim to LESS than your total Vram this way you will always have enough overhead to allow texture memory to swap around without getting OUT OF MEMORY basically which causes the stuttering.

 

remi lafo

I'm not a fan of V-Sync at all due to the frequent 60-30 jumps and the input latency in general. You're absolutely right Skyrim stutters even on single GPU cards but it's not really as bad as one would think and I really don't mind it that much. I've already changed the VRAM limits in Skyrim to make full use of my 3GB 7950.

 

Tom's Hardware has managed to manually introduce frame pacing to any game successfully by setting a maximum frame limit that matches your average FPS and it eliminated microstuttering completely on 7990s even before frame pacing was introduced or even discussed. So I would definitely recommend trying that I know I'll definitely be testing it out as soon as I get my second 7950.

As far as CPU goes I'm running an i7 2600 at 4.4Ghz so I'm covered there, although I did test Skyrim with the same settings and ENB on my FX 8320 at 4.6Ghz and got the exact same performance.