AMD has decided to stop issuing monthly
updates to its Catalyst driver updates. Good
Ih, go away! Not again, click, click. Don’t
care! At least, that’s the usual monthly exchange I’ve had with my PC for the
past few years until I upgraded to a GeForce GTX 689. That’s because I’ve been
using AMD graphics cards, from the Radeon HD 4850 through the 5850 to a 6870.
They were good cards, but the monthly nag to update my drivers niggled like a
big, stupid fly buzzing in and out of my ear. I probably even shouted out loud
to my PC. Sometimes.
Driver
GeForce GTX 680
Of course, like any self-respecting
enthusiast, I like to make sure that my PC is performing as well as possible,
but that doesn’t mean I want to go through the hassle of uninstalling my
graphics drivers, reinstalling new ones and restarting my PC every month. It
grates even more when you look through the release notes and see that the only
fixes are for a game you don’t even own, at a particular resolution your
monitor doesn’t even support, and the graphical glitches you were hoping to
resolve in another game aren’t even mentioned.
Perhaps the most annoying monthly reminder
came from my media centre PC, which has a Radeon HD 3450. I haven’t updated the
driver for 18 months, because I haven’t needed to – if it ain’t broken, don’t
fix it, especially when you risk breaking your PC in the process. Every now and
then, I found that the previous version of Catalyst didn’t uninstall properly,
and installing the new version meant I could no longer open the Control Center,
requiring a long and tedious voyage through the check box badlands of Regedit
to get it working again.
I can see why AMD adopted this strategy.
ATI drivers had a terrible reputation for stability when Catalyst was released,
and it took a few months of .NET tweaking to make the Catalyst Control Center
run smoothly and quickly. AMD needed to improve its reputation, and the idea of
monthly updates must have seemed appealing, while also giving AMD bragging
rights over Nvidia’s comparatively irregular ForceWare updates.
ForceWare
updates
It didn’t work though. In a rush to get a
new update out of the door every month, AMD’s driver team must have undoubtedly
had to place some issues on the To Do pile, and Nvidia certainly doesn’t seem
to have suffered from not knocking out new driver updates every month.
Thankfully, all this is now in the past – this month AMD announced that it was
no longer going to release monthly driver updates, but instead release a new
driver every now and then with plenty of fixes, much like Nvidia’ strategy.
I won’t be sad to see the back of it. I
like to keep my PC’s hardware and software maintained, but there comes a point
where it stops being useful and actually just becomes annoying. Good call, AMD.
I don’t care if it was a money-saving decision – it was the right one.
In other news, this month also sees the
introduction of a new regular section called the Engine Room, in which we’re
going to look at a game engine every month, and see how it’s changed PC gaming,
particularly when it comes to graphics and hardware features. The first one is
all about Unreal Engine 3.
Unreal
Engine 3.
Finally, we’re teaming up with our friends
at bit-tech to create a tech and gaming pub quiz. As a fan of both ale and
quizzes, I fully support this endeavor, and will be penning some of the
questions too. If you think you’ve got what it takes to be on a winning team,
then check out the details on p10 and submit your entry.
