AMD Discontinues Gaming Evolved App
by Ryan Smith on October 12, 2016 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- AMD Gaming Evolved Client
With the recent launch of AMD’s Radeon 400 series parts and consequent focus on hardware, it’s been some time now since we’ve heard from AMD about their Gaming Evolved application. As it turns out, there’s a reason for this. Thanks to some digging by the crew over at WCCFtech, it turns out that AMD discontinued the application last month and will no longer be distributing or supporting it.
The Gaming Evolved App was back in 2013 as part of the Radeon 200 series launch. The utility launched as a settings optimization service, which in a departure from other efforts, relied on crowdsourced data to generate settings recommendations rather than AMD running centralized testing. Though never explicitly called so by AMD, the client was clearly their answer to NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience, offering an AMD take on settings optimizations, video recording, and the like. Though branded as an AMD application, the utility was in practice a second-party initiative of sorts, and at its core it was a customized version of the Raptr’s eponymous gaming utility. The most recent major update to the Gaming Evolved App was in March of this year, when AMD & Raptr added additional video recording and editing functionality.
But after 3 years, it would seem that AMD has decided to discontinue the client for reasons unknown. After noticing that the client was no longer being bundled with the latest drivers, WCCFtech reached out to AMD, who provided the following statement.
Starting September 12th 2016, AMD is no longer bundling the “AMD Gaming Evolved App” by Raptr with builds of Radeon Software. The application will still work. AMD will cease to undertake any compatibility testing, install support or general technical support for this application, nor will it be available through Radeon Software or its installer. Previous builds of Radeon Software that include the “AMD Gaming Evolved App” dated before September 12th 2016 will remain intact and will not be affected.
At this point AMD is not bundling a similar application with their drivers, nor do their drivers contain equivalent settings/recording functionality. So at least for the time being it’s fair to say that AMD no longer has a counterpart to GeForce Experience. That said, the Gaming Evolved App wasn’t a 1st party effort and its continued existence was never assured, but it is admittedly rare to see a software feature/package dropped in this manner.
Source: WCCFtech
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
64 Comments
View All Comments
phillock - Saturday, January 20, 2018 - link
i don't agree !https://jumjex.bandcamp.com/releases
Daniel Egger - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
I fully agree with your assessment. May it rest in pieces...akamateau - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
Why did you fail to mention that Gaming Evolved is a DX11 support App and that DX12 makes it completely obsolete.
Why should AMD spend money to continue to improve an APP for obsolete API DirectX 11?
In case you don't know, DX11 IS DEAD.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
Are you kidding? Windows 7 still has more than double the market share than Windows 10. DX12 doesn't run on Windows 7. Nobody is relying exclusively on DX12. DX11 is nowhere near dead just yet.DanNeely - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link
W7 still leads W10 by a large margin in the mass market, but W10 has overtaken it among gamers by a large amount. 51 vs 36% in the steam survey. The same survey shows W10 and DX12 GPUs at 36%; but that number (unlike the OS share one) bounces around so much from month to month that I suspect something's off with how its calculated.http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=p...
Klimax - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link
Just little reminder for everybody: DirectX 11 is NOT obsolete or depreciated and is still primary API for graphics. DirectX 12 is parallel API for those who want (to waste time and money for virtual and temporary boost - if any) and as such NEVER replaced DX 11 and never was intended to replace it. Vast majority of new stuff is in both and most of those "exclusives" to DX12 could be provided in DX 11 to if Microsoft wanted.mateau - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link
DX11 maybe the primary API for Angry Birds and Mafia 3. But if you want to write a games with 100,000 draw calls or more, thousands of AI objects and light sources then you need something with more power: DX12. By this time next year all games will run on DX12. At least the really good games will. The clunky, kludgy poorly written games will still try to run on DX11.Windows could release DX12 for Windows 7 but they do not want to slow the adoption rate of Windows 10. Will Microsoft quietly release DX12 for Windows 7? NOPE. If they did then the adoption rate of DX12 with developers would skyrocket.
Most serious gamers have up-graded to Windows 10. You also have to consider that most gamers have discretionary income to spend on luxuries such as Gaming Add in boards. Most of the world still can not afford expensive gaming hardware that still struggles with the falws of DX11 and Gameworks.
Most of the world earns far less than most Americans or Europeans and can not afford high end graphics.
The whole point of DX12, Mantle and Vulkan is to give to the consumer an advanced API to allow even the latest Graphics intensive gaming experience to run on relatively inexpensive and scalable hardware. The whole point behind AMD's RX 480. If you need more power then buy 2. With 2 you get performance that equals or betters that of GTX 1080. And that is a fact. But you ONLY get that scalability with DX12 because Intrinsic Multi Adaptor is a very basic part of DX12. All GPU resources are utilized to give you 1:1 performance increases simply by adding new GPU cards. Do you want 3x the performance of RX 480? The bung in 3 cards. For less than $700 you will CRUSH GTX 1080. But ONLY with DX12 NOT the obsolete API DX11.
DX12 supports intrinsic multi adaptor that uses ALL graphics resources regardless of the mix. You can run AMD and nVidia cards together for increased performance. 2 GPU cards just about doubles your performance using DX12. DX12 also supports Asynchronous Compute and Asynchronous Shader Pipelines. Coders do have to be competent though.
DX11 is a legacy API much ike DX 9 and DX 10. ARe they still used? Yes. In fact I just downloaded the latest DX9 to allow Pharoah to run on my Windows 7 laptop. Am I going to run out and purchase a new game that runs on DX9. Absolutely not. Are new games running DX 9 and DX10 NO. For a reason. THEY ARE OBSOLETE.
So is DX11, BY DEFINITION. OBSOLETE defined is "of a kind or style no longer current ." DX11 is certainly no longer current. It is obsolete technology. It is technology that has been surpassed by DX12, Mantle and Vulkan.
If you are so in love with obsolete technology then why bother to waste money upgrading to new GPU's or CPU's?
lmcd - Tuesday, October 18, 2016 - link
I remember when Anandtech's comment section was good too.You're kidding though right? Indie games on custom engines will be DX11 or replacement-level API, forever.
DanNeely - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
I disagree with your general argument. If you don't have enough GPU power for your display that you can always just set your game options to Max Everything having something to set reasonable out of the box defaults is very helpful even if you end up tweaking them slightly in either direction afterwards. This is especially true for more casual gamers - who're more likely to need to pick settings in the middle of the settings sliders and least likely to know which ones are mos likely to have major impacts on performance from reading their names - or for games with significant variations in the total GPU load from one area to the next. (Obsessively tuning settings in the first area of the game only to discover a few hours later that your settings kill performance somewhere with more stuff going on onscreen requiring a redo of all the tweaking really sucks.)Power users might not need it, but for a company trying to expand its share of more casual gamers - which AMD is currently focusing on with the 4xx series cards - being able to tell customers that they don't need to worry about fiddling around with a bunch of settings is a nice value add. One that appears to be, again, an nVidia exclusive.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link
As a casual gamer (at absolute best...more of a non-gamer really), I don't think the implication that those of us who don't become infatuated with playing video games would find it overly difficult to spend a few minutes moving sliders and poking buttons around and that we'd need a bloated data mining tool to espouse its value to us by picking graphics settings for us.Beyond that, the GeForce Experience selected nonsense settings for a variety of common games. For instance about 5 months ago, in Fallout 3, the GFE wanted me to use low to medium settings on my GT 730 on a 1366x768 resolution monitor and then run AA at 8. That's not a good baseline to start with when the game runs fine with all the settings set to their maximums and AA + AF at 4 on that particular GPU (in fact, it ran fine maxed out on the much older and much slower 8800 GTS it replaced). Those weren't the only seemingly clueless settings choices that GFE offered on the few games it recognized on my system (with quite a few of them unsupported), but its the one I remember in the greatest detail. It didn't have any idea what to do with Mabinogi, HKO, or a number of other MMOs.
If that's the kind of "help" I'd get from added software like this, I'll pass and then be _horribly tormented_ by spending the couple of minutes it takes for my filthy casual self to adjust my own sliders. :3