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New Video Drivers!

L

LeeTBTS

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 6, 2015
19
3
Download the bootcamp drivers from within OSX to a USB stick, they contain a new driver for the m295x and all the other hardware of course.

i'm noticing significant FPS increases.

I'd struggle to get a solid 30 in GTAV before the driver update, now it's still unstable being GTA but it fluctuates between 50 and 80fps @4k in very high settings.

 
Very cool. Can you tell what AMD Catalyst driver version they correspond to? (Also, if you've got Alien Isolation, does it fix the crashing when Depth-of-Field is enabled?)

I probably won't be able to check them out until late tonight or tomorrow, so I'm very curious. Thanks!
 
I've got to be honest I didn't have the depth of field issue, it worked fine for me before.

I get about 40fps on that now with Max everything.

Stunning game too!
 
Cool, thanks. I had to turn off DoF with the December bootcamp drivers, or else the game crashed whenever I died or tried to use the motion detector. Will keep my fingers crossed.
 
Dixie Flatline said:
Very cool. Can you tell what AMD Catalyst driver version they correspond to? (Also, if you've got Alien Isolation, does it fix the crashing when Depth-of-Field is enabled?)

I probably won't be able to check them out until late tonight or tomorrow, so I'm very curious. Thanks!
Click to expand...


I think it is 15.20
 
Thanks. I'd assume that the new bootcamp drivers are based on the Catalyst 15.7 drivers (judging by the date if nothing else, since Catalyst packages are numbered by the year and month of their release.) So they should be newer than your June beta drivers.

I'm still on Windows 8.1 (not in any hurry to upgrade), but I'm assuming the new drivers will work there as well.
 
aliensporebomb said:
Did these show up in software update or? When?
Click to expand...

Nah you'll have to download the bootcamp drivers to a usb stick whilst in bootcamp assistant on OS X. That is until ati make them downloadable on their website, shouldn't be long i don't reckon.
 
Anybody else had scary problems while trying to update the AMD display driver to the new Boot Camp version (on the Retina iMac w/M295X)? I did it on my 8.1 Boot Camp install last night, and the install seemed to run OK, but then after reboot, Windows hung on a dead screen at startup (not just black, but with the display completely turned off). I went through a bunch of reboots, some of which took me to the Win8.1 recovery tools menu (but couldn't find anything to fix), and some of which went back to the dead screen. Then the fan started ramping up to max, and when I rebooted into OSX, I found that iStatMenus wasn't getting a reading for the GPU Diode temperature sensor. I wound up shutting down altogether and doing SMC and PRAM resets, which eventually got my temperature readings back in OSX, but after that Windows failed to boot altogether, coming up with a screen about BCD and EFI errors and wanting me to repair it from installation media.

Since I'm very leery of letting Windows mess with the Mac boot environment, I eventually decided to just remove the partition with Boot Camp Assistant. Then I created a brand new USB installer from ISO with the BC drivers and recreated the Windows partition (all using BCA), and did a fresh install of Win 8.1. Everything went in smoothly this time (there was a message that the Boot Camp installer had stopped working, but everything seems to have gotten installed OK), and now I'm up and running on the current BC drivers, display and all.

Alien Isolation's prettier than ever now that Depth of Field is working, and seems like it's running as smoothly now at 2160p as it did before at 3200x1800, so I guess I can't complain. A thoroughly alarming process, though.
 
It's because the drivers weren't removed first. It's adviseble to remove all drivers before updating. Use ddu.
 
Yeah, that's what I usually do, but I figured upgrading from one Apple-approved WHQL release to the next should be safe. More fool I.
 
Dixie Flatline said:
Anybody else had scary problems while trying to update the AMD display driver to the new Boot Camp version (on the Retina iMac w/M295X)? I did it on my 8.1 Boot Camp install last night, and the install seemed to run OK, but then after reboot, Windows hung on a dead screen at startup (not just black, but with the display completely turned off). I went through a bunch of reboots, some of which took me to the Win8.1 recovery tools menu (but couldn't find anything to fix), and some of which went back to the dead screen. Then the fan started ramping up to max, and when I rebooted into OSX, I found that iStatMenus wasn't getting a reading for the GPU Diode temperature sensor. I wound up shutting down altogether and doing SMC and PRAM resets, which eventually got my temperature readings back in OSX, but after that Windows failed to boot altogether, coming up with a screen about BCD and EFI errors and wanting me to repair it from installation media.

Since I'm very leery of letting Windows mess with the Mac boot environment, I eventually decided to just remove the partition with Boot Camp Assistant. Then I created a brand new USB installer from ISO with the BC drivers and recreated the Windows partition (all using BCA), and did a fresh install of Win 8.1. Everything went in smoothly this time (there was a message that the Boot Camp installer had stopped working, but everything seems to have gotten installed OK), and now I'm up and running on the current BC drivers, display and all.

Alien Isolation's prettier than ever now that Depth of Field is working, and seems like it's running as smoothly now at 2160p as it did before at 3200x1800, so I guess I can't complain. A thoroughly alarming process, though.
Click to expand...

For me, it was pretty seamless. I did install the Windows 8.1 beta drivers via Device Manager previously, as the drivers got messed up when I upgraded from Windows 8.1 ===>10.

I got a couple of black screens during the update process (which I did via Apple Software Update in Windows) but it otherwise was fine, and the vid drivers were successfully updated along with installation of the drivers my Windows OS was lacking.

I'm happy with the result, and so far, the vid drivers seem to optimize the card in Windows 10 better than the old ones. I've only played Dark Souls really so far, but it's smoother. It was unplayable with the basic vid drivers that I was stuck with when I initially upgraded, and the beta 8.1 drivers worked fine, but these new ones are better
 
I've reinstalled Windows 8.1 with the new Bootcamp 6, but game performance hasn't changed at all?
I'm using driver version 15.200.1060.0 (m295x) played a couple games but its acting the same as the older stock driver.

Have I missed anything?
 
Last edited:
Edan said:
I've reinstalled Windows 8.1 with the new Bootcamp 6, but game performance hasn't changed at all?
I'm using driver version 15.200.1060.0 (m295x) played a couple games but its acting the same as the older stock driver.

Have I missed anything?
Click to expand...
Some games will get a minor boost, some won't. YMMV
 
theSeb said:
Some games will get a minor boost, some won't. YMMV
Click to expand...

Minor boost is an understatement.
30fps vs 80fps?

Sorry forgot to mention, I'm using the same setting on GTA V as Lee.
+ I've installed Windows 10 to see if that was the cause, but it hasn't changed.
 
Yup, new AMD driver works beautifully on 8.1 (but see my story above, and be careful to uninstall the old AMD driver completely before installing the new one.)

Regarding performance boost in games between the old and the new -- the newer the game, the likelier it is to see better performance with the new Boot Camp driver. They seem to be based on Catalyst 15.7.1, which included (among other things) optimizations for GTA V, and fixes for at least one issue (depth-of-field) in Alien Isolation. So recent games which had specific issues with the older drivers will see the biggest improvements. Older games have probably already benefited as much as they're going to from past fixes, so they're unlikely to see a major performance improvement.
 
Dixie Flatline said:
Yup, new AMD driver works beautifully on 8.1 (but see my story above, and be careful to uninstall the old AMD driver completely before installing the new one.)

Regarding performance boost in games between the old and the new -- the newer the game, the likelier it is to see better performance with the new Boot Camp driver. They seem to be based on Catalyst 15.7.1, which included (among other things) optimizations for GTA V, and fixes for at least one issue (depth-of-field) in Alien Isolation. .
Click to expand...

I've been having no performance improvement with GTA V compared to the previous drive. Running m295x, Windows 10 with 15.200 driver and with the same settings as shown in the first post, I'm getting sub 30fps. As well as other games I'm playing, I haven't seen a difference in frames. Any ideas?
 
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