Calling out to Alienware Support Where are our Official AMD 7970m Crossfire drivers ??

[Speedy Gonzalez]

Actually, no... not really. At least not reliably. Owning a system with CrossFire has involved more drama and end user effort than SLI for a while now. My AMD mobile CrossFire experience starts with the 4870M in the M17x R2. I had only a few minor issues with 4870M and 5870M CrossFire once Alienware released a new vBIOS that would allow the use of reference drivers. With 6970M and 6990M it was always necessary to mod the vBIOS, tweak drivers and do registry hacks to make them work better on my systems. They never worked correctly consistently. You have to do the same tweaks with 7970M (disable ULPS and enable CrossFireAutoLink in the registry) to get better than margin functionality from 7970M CrossFire. It improves the situation a great deal, but the results remain inconsistent and the product is unstable some of the time... more so with DX11 than DX9 and DX10.That's exactly what AMD wants people to believe, and that is not acceptable. Unfortunately, it seems that too many folks are willing to accept that excuse on face value. It's called "passing the buck" (or lying, to put it bluntly) and AMD seems to be pretty good about that. An AMD reference driver that supports the new chipset on the 7970M GPU hasn't been released to Dell or anyone else, and therein lies the problem. Reference drivers usually work fine without any special "features" added by the OEM, so that is just a total cop-out for AMD to make such comments. I have been using reference drivers for years without any issues relating specifically to the fact they are "reference drivers" instead of an OEM "optimized" driver... whatever that is supposed to mean. If AMD expects Dell, Clevo, Asus, MSI, HP, Lenovo, Acer and other OEMs to finish the job and fix everything they left broken, AMD has another thing coming. Anyone should be able to get excellent basic functionality from a reference driver and choose whether or not the small brand-specific tweaks or features that may sometimes be missing from a reference driver are worthwhile enough to continue using an obsolete OEM "optimized" driver.

I do not expect Dell/Alienware (or any other computer OEM) to develop drivers for hardware they did not manufacture. I don't expect them to do this for AMD, NVIDIA or any other device manufacturer and I would go as far as stating that it would be unreasonable to expect that from Dell/Alienware. However, I do expect Dell/Alienware to take care of me if AMD continues to neglect to provide proper driver support for its hardware. Dell/Alienware has always done the right thing by me and I consider them a trustworthy company among a mass of untrustworthy competitors. This is one reason I am not as wound up, disturbed or angry over the circumstance only a month into owning 7970M CrossFire. I do not believe they will leave me holding the bag. I am skeptical of AMD's product, for sure. But, 7970M CrossFire is powerful enough that it will be pretty dog gone awesome IF AMD can get its act together on the drivers and keeps it's act together by continuing to support its hardware with driver updates.

it's been 40 days since I received my M18X I have contact DELL multiple times with no results sometimes they don't even take notes of my issue I don't know if they are cutting costs or what but looks like there is only 4 guys working on support Jose,Pancho,Lencho y Manuel

at this point I don't expect nothing from DELL if they are working on something now just going to be another old reference driver from months ago and we know the 7970 is new tech not really supported by old drivers and another point to note we bought a video card that is supposed to be 100% compatible with our R2 and is not imagine you guys with the R1 what kind of support you can get if you guys are lucky the cards are even working to begin with

we may get help from AMD first when they release a desktop driver and some one mood it to work on mobile clearly DELL has better things to do than providing support to their customers and this may be the last DELL-Alienware product I purchased

[GTO_PAO11]

Ok, I just found out. For Arkham City, no matter what card you use, the fps will always be 60fps in DX11 and it can't be increased. Dx11 is bugged.

Only issues of Crossfire is Skyrim.

Can you post more issues in this thread so I can talk to Dell about this?

[Speedy Gonzalez]

Ok, I just found out. For Arkham City, no matter what card you use, the fps will always be 60fps in DX11 and it can't be increased. Dx11 is bugged.

Only issues of Crossfire is Skyrim.

Can you post more issues in this thread so I can talk to Dell about this?

the black screen flickering on menus a lot of games and batman akham city bench is actually better when you disable CF the bench is not locked at 60fps

sometimes you can't enable cf until you reboot

don't waste your time calling DELL" if you didn't paid $200 extra for north American support is insulting!

[GTO_PAO11]

What are the expected frame rates for Arkham City on crossfire in game(not benchmark)?

Tell me about other games that have issues as well. I am going to make way to notify them the issue. I know it sounds like a waste of time but I have some time on my hands anyway.

[regaltang]

Ok, I just found out. For Arkham City, no matter what card you use, the fps will always be 60fps in DX11 and it can't be increased. Dx11 is bugged.

Can I ask why you would ever want more then 60fps unless you had a 3D or 120hz screen?

[DumbDumb]

Can I ask why you would ever want more then 60fps unless you had a 3D or 120hz screen?

because it just looks smoother...

[regaltang]

because it just looks smoother...

Oh. I was under the impression that was technically impossible with a screen refresh rate of 60hz. With or without v-sync.

I'd agree completely that 120hz v-synced looks much smoother than 60hz v-synced.

[steviejones133]

Just a little something that came up on Today's conference call with Dell....although it wasnt "on topic" for discussion, it did come to light that as far as providing a driver for these babies, Dell's hands are somewhat tied as they only get to work with what AMD offer up. That kinda puts the ball firmly back in AMD's court and until such a time as they come up with something credible, I don't think Dell can actually perform miracles with crap drivers.

Just thought I would mention it for you guys with 7970m's who are going through the mill.....

[DumbDumb]

I thought id add a problem that has not been mentioned.. (maybe its just me)
but upon hibernation and sleep it does nit want to resume it will hang with a black screen..
also if you close your lid it will not pick back up when you open the screen..

brightness does not work.. up or down..

[steviejones133]

I thought id add a problem that has not been mentioned.. (maybe its just me)
but upon hibernation and sleep it does nit want to resume it will hang with a black screen..
also if you close your lid it will not pick back up when you open the screen..

brightness does not work.. up or down..

Those seem like "trademark" AMD problems to me. I dont think I ever had an AMD based machine that actually resumed successfully from sleep and brightness was always broken