I need to do some additional testing before I can provide that. What I can tell you is GTX 680M is clearly faster, but I haven't looked into utilization yet.
Do you mean you think the 680M is clearly faster even if the AMD drivers were perfect or are you including the lower performance the 7970M might suffer from.
By the way, in some of notebookcheck testing, the Clevo based laptops were having some cpu throttling issues. There weren't any such thing in the P170EM, right?
I'm asking because the numbers are the average performance, which include the problems with the Enduro switching. That might change the picture, for example, in the BF3 benchmarks, no?
With the Hotfix and Enduro the P170EM 7970M is still generally slower than the P170EM 680M Optimus. If we remove Optimus and Enduro, things might change but we haven't had a chance to test that yet (see final paragraph). As for throttling, correct: I saw no indication of problems even during my torture testing. If you put it on shag carpet in a 100F room, yes, you'll probably throttle, but sitting on a table in a 70-80F room with a 100% load on CPU and GPU I didn't see any throttling after two hours (and CPU/GPU temperatures had stabilized at around 87C for over an hour).
A comparison between an Enduro enabled and an Enduro disabled laptop (say Clevo vs AW) would be really, really cool. That would show the true difference between a fully working 7970M and the one running on Enduro (which is the most important thing, not how 7970M compares to the 680M)
I'm pretty sure the Pitcairn core that is used in the 7970M is 7 months old. Sure, there will always be odd driver issues, but nothing of this scale so far in I would think.
I agree. This is one way, though not entirely on a level playing field, for us to gauge by how much % Enduro cripples the card. I'm sure the hotfix will alleviate some of the underutilization problems, but how far is it from bypassing Enduro altogether? I'm curious.
OK, well all I keep seeing is talk about this 7970M, what about those of us with these half baked 76xx cards (7690M XT) (re branded 6770M) with an Intel gpu chip (3000)? Is this new enduro driver going to fix us? What I'm looking for is some assurance that we with these AMD/Intel monsters will get the help we need from this "New" driver set. What we are looking for is to be able to download our updated drivers directly from AMD, not the laptop makers.
What I need is to be informed on is how AMD's new driver will interact with those of us that have these laptops with both AMD and Intel GPU's.
I'm still waiting for AMD to answer my last Email to their support section on this also.
The Hotfix likely won't help you, but the 12.9 Beta should install at least. If it's like my VAIO C, though, the global switchable setting page won't work right now. The next public driver will hopefully fix this and provide full support for all 6000M and 7---M (and maybe 5000M?) Enduro/Dynamic Switchable laptops.
Thanks for at least replying to my question, geared more for AMD.
I'm sitting here holding time, and hope your right about the "next" driver. I'm also hoping that the "next" driver doesin farctt support the 6000M cards as this 7690M XT is a re branded 6770M, and when drivers are installed is identified as such in device manager, I assume because AMD as yet to "support" their Radeon 76 series cards. But hope they code the driver to see MY card as its labeled.
All I'm looking for from AMD is some assurance of that, even if it is "the next" driver, or the next. And some reasonable information on how it would work with my Intel 3000 my secondary gpu for battery use.
Thank you once again for reaching out to AMD for us the customers.
You say 7700/7800M users aren't affected "as much", which I disagree with. I have an HP Envy 17 with 7850M, which is definitely being affected quite a bit. Check out Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for example: http://i.imgur.com/o2rqJ.png
MAX 67% GPU utilization, and I was getting ~ 34-36 fps. Very bad for multiplayer indeed. I was running 1920x1080 @ High texture, Low shadows, 0xAA, 16xAF. Reducing settings further only results in lower utilization, and visuals, not higher frame rates.
This all on the public 12.9 beta of course.
From the looks of things though, I can't wait to get my hands on that hotfix you have there ;P.
Jarred would you be able to test Sleeping Dogs, Saints Row 3 and/or GTA IV? Saints Row 3 seems heavily impacted by the utilization issue, and Sleeping Dogs also doesn't scale too well. I am interested in GTA IV because that is the game I play the most.
I'll be adding Sleeping Dogs, Max Payne 3, Guild Wars 2, Borderlands 2, Sniper Elite V2, and a few other games to the list of benchmarks for comparing GTX 680M with HD 7970M -- mostly as a one-time affair I think, unless someone can make a really good case for ditching some of the current games we're testing and adding new titles?
max payne 3 runs really well with enduro already, you can probably skip that. crysis 2 with dx11 and hi res textures runs pretty bad however, as does ARMA 2.
thanks for testing and help 7970m customers... can you please test the performance of max payne 3 running this fix? This game (running on directx 11) is VERY affected by enduro
Hey, great and extensive work, thank you. I'm a little bit worried about the performance gains being low at the top end settings. But then again the actual level detail settings are abstracted away in the chart.
It would be of great use if DCS World titles could be compared as well, for example BlackShark 2, A10 or even the free Su25.
Likewise Arma2 which runs quite badly with the Enduro problem.
That is expected, because the issue is related to display information not being transferred quickly enough. The higher the frame rate, the more information that needs to be pushed, and at low details, you have very high frame rates.
The problem we've seen in DCS and Arma is that at high settings the performance is also very slow compared to similarly matched NVIDIA counterparts, for example GTX 580 which should rank about where 7970M does.
How much is a good TV cost? And how much is a mini computer or a netbook cost? Add the two together and you'll have a smarter TV with a better price. I have the Sony Google TV and I must say it was the worst purchase I'd ever made. It's overpriced and underpowered. It sucks, period.
Always come back here for info now,good site for gpu info.
Now, any insight for those of us with these 76xxM gpu's? any kind of inside rumor of how/when/if the hot fix's or drivers will help us? Or when we will be able to downbload updates directly from the AMD driver page?.
I actually don't know if the hotfix will do anything for other cards or not; it might, so when it goes up (if it has support for non-7970M GPUs), give it a try.
I need one clarification here: I can buy a laptop with this GPU for the price similar to Nvidia 660M based laptop.So my question is can we deactivate Enduro altogether on Clevo based laptop as I will use it as a desktop replacement and not care about abttery life or energy saving (as it saves anyway more than desktop). So,can somebody answer me this, please? Thanks in advance.
AMD drivers blow chunks. Have they ever released a card that doesn't have serious ongoing issues for years ? (and I don't mean pre hd2900)
They just suck, badly.
I'm going to hear about all the unlocked future potential again, and how great their hardware is.... for years a fan will spew that ... "on down the line this may be the future proof I've always wanted!! gush gush "...
How sad it is. A friend says it's sucky coders and engineers at amd. Who cares what it is.
I want to know what card they have ever released that wasn't a walking plague.
I really agree with you but in another hand you have a NVida Cards that always too much money for the hardware and even to play 3D games you HAVE to pay a extra buck per month.
Isn't there any conpetidor that play a fair price(Not the crazy chip AMD) and a good Suport(That not make you sell car to buy).
they realy are spliting the marketing into 2 kind of users. one that do not want to pay the real price for hardware and the second that are able to pay any price for a hardware.
You just need to decide what you want :
Pay cheap for a hardware that do not work how it suppose or Use all your money to have a good hardware and have no time to play at all.
The term hotfix is used for a quick release that repairs a certain critical problem. I might sound like an xxx but I bought this card over 3 month ago and nothing was fixed. Neither quick nor hot. I just cannot understand that sort of customer treatment. There must be some serious problems in that company going on that we don't know about. Learned my lessons. Yes to AnAndTech, NO to AMD. Since I'm the one everyone of my friends and friends of friends ask about what hardware they should buy I can at least help others to stay out of that problems.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
39 Comments
Back to Article
hulawafu77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Link link to the hotfix. C'mon, leak it. We've only been waiting 3 months for this :DJarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
I wish I could. One more week and you should get it.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
A new force in mobile graphics has arrived! AMD epic failure ! Enjoy it forever.junky77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
of the 680M and 7970M?JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
I need to do some additional testing before I can provide that. What I can tell you is GTX 680M is clearly faster, but I haven't looked into utilization yet.junky77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
thanksDo you mean you think the 680M is clearly faster even if the AMD drivers were perfect or are you including the lower performance the 7970M might suffer from.
By the way, in some of notebookcheck testing, the Clevo based laptops were having some cpu throttling issues. There weren't any such thing in the P170EM, right?
I'm asking because the numbers are the average performance, which include the problems with the Enduro switching.
That might change the picture, for example, in the BF3 benchmarks, no?
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
With the Hotfix and Enduro the P170EM 7970M is still generally slower than the P170EM 680M Optimus. If we remove Optimus and Enduro, things might change but we haven't had a chance to test that yet (see final paragraph). As for throttling, correct: I saw no indication of problems even during my torture testing. If you put it on shag carpet in a 100F room, yes, you'll probably throttle, but sitting on a table in a 70-80F room with a 100% load on CPU and GPU I didn't see any throttling after two hours (and CPU/GPU temperatures had stabilized at around 87C for over an hour).junky77 - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
thanksBy the way, I also think that one direct comparison should be against the GTX 675MX as it's similarly priced, at least in the Clevo case.
Montage - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
A comparison between an Enduro enabled and an Enduro disabled laptop (say Clevo vs AW) would be really, really cool. That would show the true difference between a fully working 7970M and the one running on Enduro (which is the most important thing, not how 7970M compares to the 680M)Montage - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Both with 7970M and same specs of coursejunky77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
that would still won't eliminate other AMD's driver problemarcticjoe - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
With Alienware m17x r4 you can disable enduro, which fixes the problem.junky77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Enduro might not be the only problemKeep in mind that the 7970M is a new core and all. Drivers might not be mature yet
Death666Angel - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
I'm pretty sure the Pitcairn core that is used in the 7970M is 7 months old. Sure, there will always be odd driver issues, but nothing of this scale so far in I would think.arcticjoe - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
enduro is definitely the problem, it has been confirmed by countless users. disable enduro = good performance, cant disable enduro = bad perfromance.Seanzky - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
I agree. This is one way, though not entirely on a level playing field, for us to gauge by how much % Enduro cripples the card. I'm sure the hotfix will alleviate some of the underutilization problems, but how far is it from bypassing Enduro altogether? I'm curious.arcticjoe - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Jarred, just curious whether over-clocking 7970m gives any increases in performance or if the card is still hitting the PCIe bandwidth bottleneck?HOODY - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
OK, well all I keep seeing is talk about this 7970M, what about those of us with these half baked 76xx cards (7690M XT) (re branded 6770M) with an Intel gpu chip (3000)? Is this new enduro driver going to fix us? What I'm looking for is some assurance that we with these AMD/Intel monsters will get the help we need from this "New" driver set. What we are looking for is to be able to download our updated drivers directly from AMD, not the laptop makers.What I need is to be informed on is how AMD's new driver will interact with those of us that have these laptops with both AMD and Intel GPU's.
I'm still waiting for AMD to answer my last Email to their support section on this also.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
The Hotfix likely won't help you, but the 12.9 Beta should install at least. If it's like my VAIO C, though, the global switchable setting page won't work right now. The next public driver will hopefully fix this and provide full support for all 6000M and 7---M (and maybe 5000M?) Enduro/Dynamic Switchable laptops.HOODY - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Thanks for at least replying to my question, geared more for AMD.I'm sitting here holding time, and hope your right about the "next" driver.
I'm also hoping that the "next" driver doesin farctt support the 6000M cards as this 7690M XT is a re branded 6770M, and when drivers are installed is identified as such in device manager, I assume because AMD as yet to "support" their Radeon 76 series cards. But hope they code the driver to see MY card as its labeled.
All I'm looking for from AMD is some assurance of that, even if it is "the next" driver, or the next. And some reasonable information on how it would work with my Intel 3000 my secondary gpu for battery use.
king-dubs - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Hey Jarred,Thank you once again for reaching out to AMD for us the customers.
You say 7700/7800M users aren't affected "as much", which I disagree with. I have an HP Envy 17 with 7850M, which is definitely being affected quite a bit. Check out Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for example: http://i.imgur.com/o2rqJ.png
MAX 67% GPU utilization, and I was getting ~ 34-36 fps. Very bad for multiplayer indeed. I was running 1920x1080 @ High texture, Low shadows, 0xAA, 16xAF. Reducing settings further only results in lower utilization, and visuals, not higher frame rates.
This all on the public 12.9 beta of course.
From the looks of things though, I can't wait to get my hands on that hotfix you have there ;P.
TrantaLocked - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Jarred would you be able to test Sleeping Dogs, Saints Row 3 and/or GTA IV? Saints Row 3 seems heavily impacted by the utilization issue, and Sleeping Dogs also doesn't scale too well. I am interested in GTA IV because that is the game I play the most.JarredWalton - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
I'll be adding Sleeping Dogs, Max Payne 3, Guild Wars 2, Borderlands 2, Sniper Elite V2, and a few other games to the list of benchmarks for comparing GTX 680M with HD 7970M -- mostly as a one-time affair I think, unless someone can make a really good case for ditching some of the current games we're testing and adding new titles?arcticjoe - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
max payne 3 runs really well with enduro already, you can probably skip that. crysis 2 with dx11 and hi res textures runs pretty bad however, as does ARMA 2.spettow - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
thanks for testing and help 7970m customers...can you please test the performance of max payne 3 running this fix?
This game (running on directx 11) is VERY affected by enduro
bn880 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Hey, great and extensive work, thank you. I'm a little bit worried about the performance gains being low at the top end settings. But then again the actual level detail settings are abstracted away in the chart.It would be of great use if DCS World titles could be compared as well, for example BlackShark 2, A10 or even the free Su25.
Likewise Arma2 which runs quite badly with the Enduro problem.
TrantaLocked - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
That is expected, because the issue is related to display information not being transferred quickly enough. The higher the frame rate, the more information that needs to be pushed, and at low details, you have very high frame rates.bn880 - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
The problem we've seen in DCS and Arma is that at high settings the performance is also very slow compared to similarly matched NVIDIA counterparts, for example GTX 580 which should rank about where 7970M does.CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
AMD has no driver issues, that's a thing of the past....(rolls eyes for the thousandth time as sarcasm drips)
sonny73n - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
How much is a good TV cost? And how much is a mini computer or a netbook cost? Add the two together and you'll have a smarter TV with a better price.I have the Sony Google TV and I must say it was the worst purchase I'd ever made. It's overpriced and underpowered. It sucks, period.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Wrong article I take it?HOODY - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
Always come back here for info now,good site for gpu info.Now, any insight for those of us with these 76xxM gpu's? any kind of inside rumor of how/when/if the hot fix's or drivers will help us? Or when we will be able to downbload updates directly from the AMD driver page?.
thanks........................
JarredWalton - Sunday, October 7, 2012 - link
I actually don't know if the hotfix will do anything for other cards or not; it might, so when it goes up (if it has support for non-7970M GPUs), give it a try.darcotech - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
I need one clarification here:I can buy a laptop with this GPU for the price similar to Nvidia 660M based laptop.So my question is can we deactivate Enduro altogether on Clevo based laptop as I will use it as a desktop replacement and not care about abttery life or energy saving (as it saves anyway more than desktop).
So,can somebody answer me this, please?
Thanks in advance.
TrantaLocked - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
Enduro cannot be disabled.KyleH334 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Come on where is this hotfix AMD, it's Wednesday now and I'm getting super impatient!!CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
AMD drivers blow chunks.Have they ever released a card that doesn't have serious ongoing issues for years ?
(and I don't mean pre hd2900)
They just suck, badly.
I'm going to hear about all the unlocked future potential again, and how great their hardware is.... for years a fan will spew that ... "on down the line this may be the future proof I've always wanted!! gush gush "...
How sad it is. A friend says it's sucky coders and engineers at amd. Who cares what it is.
I want to know what card they have ever released that wasn't a walking plague.
locking86 - Wednesday, October 10, 2012 - link
Hey Cerise,I really agree with you but in another hand you have a NVida Cards that always too much money for the hardware and even to play 3D games you HAVE to pay a extra buck per month.
Isn't there any conpetidor that play a fair price(Not the crazy chip AMD) and a good Suport(That not make you sell car to buy).
they realy are spliting the marketing into 2 kind of users. one that do not want to pay the real price for hardware and the second that are able to pay any price for a hardware.
You just need to decide what you want :
Pay cheap for a hardware that do not work how it suppose or Use all your money to have a good hardware and have no time to play at all.
loop1982 - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
Well, where is that hotfix now?The term hotfix is used for a quick release that repairs a certain critical problem.
I might sound like an xxx but I bought this card over 3 month ago and nothing was fixed.
Neither quick nor hot.
I just cannot understand that sort of customer treatment.
There must be some serious problems in that company going on that we don't know about.
Learned my lessons. Yes to AnAndTech, NO to AMD.
Since I'm the one everyone of my friends and friends of friends ask about what hardware they should buy I can at least help others to stay out of that problems.