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

[GTO_PAO11]

Beautiful article. AMD or Dell needs to read this ASAP.

[Arestavo]

I just got off the phone with Alienware, and had to get a supervisor involved. He will be giving me a call back no later than this coming Friday with information regarding proper AMD drivers. I paid for a working computer, darn it! If the desktop version works - then the laptop version better work a month+ after release! Or, don't sell the darned thing!

So, we need to put the pressure on Dell/Alienware to get AMD off their butts and get us a real, supported driver. Please take the 20 minutes and become a squeaky wheel until Dell/AMD greases us with proper drivers!

Until then, my beloved Skyrim remains unplayed

[GTO_PAO11]

I just got off the phone with Alienware, and had to get a supervisor involved. He will be giving me a call back no later than this coming Friday with information regarding proper AMD drivers. I paid for a working computer, darn it! If the desktop version works - then the laptop version better work a month+ after release! Or, don't sell the darned thing!

So, we need to put the pressure on Dell/Alienware to get AMD off their butts and get us a real, supported driver. Please take the 20 minutes and become a squeaky wheel until Dell/AMD greases us with proper drivers!

Until then, my beloved Skyrim remains unplayed

Good job,good sir. If AMD releases good support for crossfire, gurantee you will see good results in SkyrIm and Batman AC.

[Zero989]

Thanks for the support guys if you don't speak no body will hear you so please post your findings about crossfire and driver issues here this is the place

now we have a known website who write a well detailed article about us and the problem we have so this is a good start and hope other websites like engadget and the verge will follow us too

special thanks to Brian K Co-founder of Tech Inferno here is the link
A Consumer Nightmare - Alienware M18x-R2 + AMD 7970M Crossfire | Tech|Inferno

Why didn't Brian come interview me? Haha... owner of 6970M/6990M CF M18x R1's. Tries 7970M CF for a day... SWITCHES to a DESKTOP and nVIDIA-based PC. I literally spent $3900 just to avoid AMD's drivers. No regret and not looking back at all.

[Peter]

Well, ive gone through further with my AMD inquiry regardin to driver issue. This time, i had on hand some basic driver issue with few games that ive played so far, which ive explain to AMD support, AT end of my inquiry ive just put a note that if i wont able to play game with AMD cards after payin almost more then 3G, then better for me switch Nvidia cards. Ive got reply from AMD (Im not postin whole conversation cosz i dont like to criticize )

Response and Service Request History:

We do not create laptop drivers we only have reference drivers that are used for display purposes only. Dell will be the one to provide the optimized drivers for your specific laptop. Unfortunately at this time there are no official drivers for the 7970M but the next driver release will contain the reference drivers for the 7970M. When this is released Dell will take the reference drivers and optimize it for your specific laptop. Unfortunately there is no release date on when the next driver will be released.

The final decision is up to you. If you want to take the offer from Dell to switch it for an Nvidia card to play your games then it’s an understandable reason."

So from replay, seems like Dell is the only one answerable!!! Or may be Dell gettin more profit from Nvidia cards so they are pushin ppl to get Nvidia. (Ive just thought of it, maybe im wrong or right :S)

[Quadzilla]

The whole when the driver will be released thing and NO ETA is seriously troubling.

Since Dell will still have to get a proper driver from AMD and then do its own thing with it, that might be up to a couple months before something truly official comes out for the 7970m since AMD has no ETA .

People will be 4 months into owning the machine before they get a driver that should have been there from day 1 or atleast within the first week.

[jivemaster]

Yes Dell are responsible for providing drivers to end users, but AMD are responsible for supplying the reference driver to Dell. So while Dell must service the end user, I can see the difficulty in doing so when the source of the driver isn't giving them anything to work off. Dell can't create the drivers from scratch - AMD is the only one who can.

It may have been more sensible for the card to be held back for supply to end users by Dell until which time as proper drivers were supplied. The issue here is that everyone wants the biggest and greatest and Dell's competitors would be offering those cards to their consumers, and Dell would loose business as being the only player in the gaming laptop market not supplying the latest card, due to concerns regarding proper driver support. Considering AMD's complete disregard for the mobile market, proper drivers may never appear.

AMD should step up and provide mobile drivers directly to end users just as nvidia has begun doing over the last couple of years. I don't understand the customisation for your laptop nonsense because it's their card plugged into a standard mobo and outputting to a display. What is there to customise?

AMD will always remain the powerful cheap alternative to nvidia, providing cards with more power for less money, at the expense of trash drivers and a care factor of zero.

[numb18]

I had issues today playing rift, both gpu usage fluctuated between 0-20%... I had 10-15 fps. In the end I had to disable crossfire and run it off one gpu, ran perfectly on one. But whats the point of having crossfire if we can't use it?

[Mr. Fox]

Hey Peter, I'm glad AMD clarified the misinformation they previously provided to you. At least they are getting a bit closer to telling the truth now. I'm still taking Alienware's side on this one and placing 100% of the blame on AMD for producing garbage. I suspect the wheels were in motion, orders were being fulfilled and AMD dropped the ball in the 11th hour by not coming through with the goods when they were supposed to. After the fiasco that totally ruined my first 6 to 8 months of M18x ownership being attributable to defective AMD graphics cards, I should have known better. I was willing to discount the 6900M series being a engineering abortion and chalk it up to being a fluke lemon product, but it's like deja vu with 7970M. Unless they do some sort of amazing magic with drivers very soon, I have a feeling I may regret giving AMD a second chance to win me back as a customer. I am generally an optimist and very forgiving, which normally serves me well. This is one circumstance where that may turn out to not be the case.

Unfortunately at this time there are no official drivers for the 7970M but the next driver release will contain the reference drivers for the 7970M.

It appears that AMD's driver team hasn't figured out how to make their own hardware function properly. I find that very disturbing. The fact that they released hardware to manufacturing and shipped the product to their business partners (OEMs) without a fully functional driver speaks volumes about what kind of company AMD is, and it does so in an extremely unfavorable manner.

When this is released Dell will take the reference drivers and optimize it for your specific laptop. Unfortunately there is no release date on when the next driver will be released.

Hmm... used they word "unfortunately" twice in the same paragraph. That's not good. They are also making an assumption that Dell will or would customize the reference driver. That is not necessarily accurate. If they make decent drivers, then there will be no reason for Dell (or other companies) to need to tweak it. It would function properly as provided by AMD.

The final decision is up to you. If you want to take the offer from Dell to switch it for an Nvidia card to play your games then it’s an understandable reason.

Based on this response, it seems that AMD no longer cares about their enthusiast customer base, or its own business reputation. It makes me wonder why they even bothered manufacturing an enthusiast-grade graphics cards if this is how they roll. Maybe now is a good time for Alienware, Clevo, Origin and other high performance laptop manufacturers to abandon AMD altogether and stop selling systems equipped with AMD hardware.

[Quadzilla]

The part that confuses me the most about AMD is they are selling god knows how many times the amount of Mobile cards vs Desktop cards these days or alteast the chips to go in the cards.

You would think for that reason alone they would focus 99% of the man power they have towards good mobile drivers instead of almost acting like the mobile market does not exist.