Terry Makedon, the brain behind ATI and AMD's Catalyst ... now Crimson ... driver software, has reoriented his team to make stability a priority. However, AMD is struggling with a legacy of driver stability issues and that still hurts users.
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Makedon, director of engineering and software strategy for AMD, started at ATI in 2000 and was responsible for developing the Catalyst controller software in 2001, which ran the GPUs of the Red team until last year, when it became Crimson. But it has not been easy to navigate the software side of the company's graphics team.
AMD has seen its GPU shipments increase by nearly 35% this year, thanks to its well-priced Polaris graphics cards. But that has not translated into an increase in market share - according to the latest survey of steam hardware actually goes in the opposite direction. Since last November AMD's market share on Steam has dropped from 26.3% to 23.5%. That paints a rather lugubrious image for their GPUs and part of that is up to AMD's legacy of software.
"Why do you care about software? The number one reason is performance," explained Makedon in the recent Crimson ReLive presentation. "Stability is the unwritten rule, a decade ago we had problems with our stability and we would have gambling accidents and we lost a lot of customers for that, so that's why we focus on stability as one job."
Those old editions of decades still remain in the minds of PC gamers. When I started working with our Crimson ReLive software update tests, for example, we received feedback through social networks, which continues to reflect a general mistrust towards AMD controllers.
"Stability is something we need to nail, we need to control," Makedon continued. "And by stability I mean when a game comes out we are not only optimized for it in terms of performance but we have tried the shit out of it and we know that there is no stability problem."
"The performance has always been a bit there, but over the last two years I've seen our stability increase drastically, and the main point of that is user satisfaction ratings. So I go on forums all the time and I constantly see feedback from "AMD drivers suck!" And the truth of the matter is that it's an Nvidia user who has not touched our stuff for five to ten years.
People who actually use the AMD driver software now seem to be thrilled. They give you a chance to get your opinion on the Radeon Settings app, and the software behind it, and it has an unprecedented 4.5-in-5 user approval rating of about 85 million downloads. That's good for a company whose drivers are seemingly so crap.
"I've never given any company a five because if you give a company a five that means you've done everything you can, you do not care about it, you do not need to improve," Makedon said. "It really comes through our users a 4.5 out of 5. I'm impressed."
And when there are problems with controller support for new games, the AMD software team is on it in no time. "We can get a hotfix in a day or two," Makedon said. "If it's catastrophic, if it's a bluescreen in a popular game, we'll have a solution in a few hours."
Since 57% of all players, PC and console combined, are using Radeon silicon graphics - and therefore, their stacks of controllers - must be doing something right. But what are your experiences with AMD driver software, do you get a score of 4.5 out of 5
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