AMD Catalyst News: Catalyst 13.9 released for Windows. Available at http://game.amd.c

[AMDave]

Driver version: 13.152
More...

[NeoGen]

That is interesting... they are working on 13.10 beta for a bit (I have it on my machine) and release 13.9?

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...etaDriver.aspx

[NerdLifeAMD]

i guess its still in beta . so aside from supporting new cards should i update my crunchers?
I don't run crossfire or play any of those games so i don't think ill bother unless im doing new installs on anything

[NeoGen]

I just looked it up and it's a shame AMD didn't introduce the frame pacing feature they have been working in the beta releases on this one, many gamers would have rejoiced.

[NerdLifeAMD]

I just looked it up and it's a shame AMD didn't introduce the frame pacing feature they have been working in the beta releases on this one, many gamers would have rejoiced.

so i dont have time to play games these days... a temporary situation i hope
but after reading your being bummed out i started looking into this Frame Pacing
Im confused. is it suppose to level the frames by limiting them?
typing in Define Frame Pacing is not even showing any useful info

[Dirk Broer]

You should try 'frame pacing' to get useful info, like this

[NerdLifeAMD]

thanks dirk. I looked those posts over and i see the fixes for games example the second gpu hanging at 99% usage.
however it looks like they are just explaining what known issues its going to fix. hardly a reason for creating
a new name for something? I was hoping it was as implied by the name maybe going to reserve and perhaps buffer bandwidth.
for example ever been playing a game and turned around in a 3d environment and your frame rate jumps and drops ?
I was hoping it was going to be something new to keep your frame rate as a more constant FPS. I was hoping for a explanation
of the technology. if its just bug fixes maybe that's why i cant seem to find anything like that. admitting ive never used cross
fire on any of my own systems .....yet. so perhaps that's why it don't seem like a big deal to me . I also
did come across something that said this is a serious issue with the 7900 series.

[NeoGen]

Frame pacing is a technique employed on the driver level (and possibly hardware too) to make the frames be rendered at an even pace, every so many milliseconds. For example if your GPU is running a game and renders 60 frames in 0.2 seconds and freezes for the other 0.8, technically it is still running your game at 60 frames per second, although this scenario is an exaggeration and the game would be unplayable.

Ideally to run perfectly at 60fps your GPU should render each and every frame at exactly 16 miliseconds, no more and no less, in order to obtain a perfect 60 frames over 1 second. Many hardcore gamers turned over to NVidia because NVidia's drivers and GPUs produced very smooth and close to perfect frame pace during gameplay, unlike AMD's Radeon's that jitter anywhere from 8 to 80 milliseconds while rendering frames, even though they produced the same 60 frames in a second as NVidia did.

I agree that 99% of the people will not even notice this effect even on a blind test, but hardcore gamers frowned upon AMD's GPUs because those milliseconds lost meant ever-so-slight visual stutters that can get them killed when in professional tournaments. So AMD tweaked (or is tweaking) their drivers in order to make them more evenly paced when rendering frames.

Now... wasn't that a nice story telling moment?