ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
ATI's Mobile Driver Program -- or Lack Thereof
ATI unfortunately hasn't done much to improve their mobile driver program as far as we can tell. Manufacturers can request a new driver drop, but there may be a delay in getting that out to the users. Let's assume for example that you're running a high-end gaming laptop and a brand new game comes out. What if, similar to Far Cry 2 or Fallout 3, and your drivers are too old? As we saw late last year, ATI had to go through several driver revisions and hot fixes before CrossFire worked properly with both of those titles... and that was for desktop ATI graphics users.
What happens if a similar situation occurs and you're running the ASUS W90Vp or some similar "gaming" ATI laptop? Titles such as F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Call of Duty: World at War, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II, or Empire: Total War -- to name just a few recent releases -- very likely will not fully utilize the capabilities of your notebook. You would probably still need to wait a few weeks for a hot fix on a desktop PC, but on notebooks you could literally end up waiting months -- and that's assuming your notebook manufacturer actually releases an updated driver.
Is this a problem? We certainly think so, and ATI needs to do better in this area. We talked about this issue with NVIDIA a lot around the launch of the 8800M, and 18 months later we've gone from haphazard mobile driver updates from manufacturers, to quarterly driver updates, to what appears to be an all-in-one integrated driver program. It would have been nice if ATI had done the same thing during that time, but it's not too late to turn over a new leaf. Looking at the desktop GPUs, ATI is able to compete fairly well with NVIDIA, particularly in the price/performance category. With ATI apparently showing interest in reentering the high-end mobile GPU market, they need to develop a program similar to NVIDIA's mobile driver program if gamers are ever going to take them seriously.
With the availability of new mobile drivers from NVIDIA comes the question of performance. For this review, we updated the drivers on our Clevo D901C notebook to check for performance improvements. Much of what we test doesn't appear to have benefitted, and in fact several titles showed reduced performance relative to the drivers from last year. However, many recent games have benefited, and it's likely many other newer titles will see increased performance. We are including several new titles in this review, and going forward we will use these results. That means we will also remove results from previously tested laptops where we haven't used a recent driver. You can of course refer back to previous notebook reviews to see those scores.
NVIDIA isn't the only one who gave us new drivers, however. We spoke with ASUS after initial testing showed subpar performance in several titles. They in turn spoke with ATI, and we received a special driver drop from ATI a couple of days later. We tested with the new drivers, and not surprisingly performance improved in many of the latest games. There are still titles that appear to lack CrossFire support, and we encountered other issues that we will discuss later. The biggest problem unfortunately is that regular users don't have the ability to speak with their press contacts and get a new driver. The updated driver is not publicly available, so while we will look at how it affects performance we will also include results from the original driver.
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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.