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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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!