AMD’s Enduro 5.5 Public Beta Driver Available
by Jarred Walton on September 26, 2012 2:24 PM ESTAbout three weeks ago, I met with AMD to go over some concerns with their Enduro graphics switching technology. At the time, AMD gave me a preview release of their Mobility Catalyst driver and promised a public beta by the end of October. We’re over a month ahead of that schedule, and today I received an email from AMD indicating the Catalyst 12.9 Beta for laptops is officially available.
I’m still working on the final review of the Clevo P170EM with 7970M from AVADirect, but in the meantime I’ve updated to the 12.9 Beta and everything appears to have gone smoothly. One thing to be aware of is that the current beta may not fix the GPU underutilization issue, particularly with HD 7970M, but AMD is working on a hotfix. They expect that to be released to the public in the next week or two, and they’re offering us a chance to do some early testing of the driver so we’ll be putting it through some tests over the next couple of days.
For all of you that have Enduro/PowerXpress 4.0 or later laptops and have been waiting for a driver update, head on over to AMD’s site and grab the latest beta. If you give it a shot and have a minute, post your comments on how the new drivers work (or don’t?) on your laptop. We’d love to get a collection of testing results from a wider variety of hardware than what we currently have on hand.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - link
Note that AMD's driver info page backs up what AMD has told Jarred. The 7000M is listed as supported on that page.http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCata...
Duwelon - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
Maybe they should just send you an engraved letter on gold encrusted paper?TrantaLocked - Saturday, September 29, 2012 - link
The 7970m was released in April with no decent driver support and it STILL isn't supported as an AMD GPU should. AMD should care more about its customers, and all I asked was for AMD to let us know whether or not our products are supported!geokilla - Wednesday, September 26, 2012 - link
Trying to get a hybrid/switchable driver for the Intel HD graphics + ATI 5470M, but I haven't found any updated ones that seem to work. Would this work?I have no clue if it's PowerXpress 4.0 or not.
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
If you have the older style switchable graphics where there are actual muxes on the motherboard, then no, this will not work. Sony VAIO SE is one laptop that uses the physical switch to select GPU. In fact, I'd estimate that there are probably a lot more AMD GPU solutions with muxes than there are Enduro offerings, so you're probably out of luck.nbelote - Monday, October 1, 2012 - link
Try Leshcat's modded drivers. They seem to work with my hybrid Intel/6770m laptop. Everything functions, and I dare say my gaming performance has been boosted slightly (thanks to current drivers):http://www.leshcatlabs.net/
KyleH334 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
The new driver installed fine for me and seems to be working! I will update if I run into any problems :)Yorgos - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
I feel like a pimp spit on my face right now.many people have problems with 1.13 x org(even if they solve it, new x org is coming in March, i won't even mention Wayland),
my 565v(mobility radeon 4670, RV730) card got wiped from the proprietary driver.
many other features like fan control does not exist in Linux, or they are buggy.
nVidia, on the other hand has their own issues.
what's left to do? buy another product for 200-300 $ and spend my time waiting for a proper driver, and when the proper driver comes out they will decide that the HW is obsolete, but still capable of playing every new game at 70% settings?(that counts also for my 4870 card)
Bob Todd - Friday, September 28, 2012 - link
I picked up a 2nd gen Envy 15 (i7-2670QM/HD 7690M 1GB GDDR5) with a free Xbox 360. The hardware for the money was good, and I had a baseless assumption that AMD would have to get reference drivers working for laptops with dynamic switchable graphics in Q4. Otherwise they'd risk early adopters swearing off AMD in the future when some OEMs took forever to release Windows 8 drivers or never released them at all. Not to mention they had to get them fixed in order to not lose another round of design wins to Nvidia when the Haswell refreshes came around.As it stands now I'm not even positive I should look forward to Enduro support. This laptop has dynamic switchable graphics and what I assume is PowerXpress 4.0 (it came out in December of last year). The 12.9 beta will install on top of the official drivers from HP, but the card gets misidentified as a 6600M/6700M. The global switchable settings also don't have anything visible populated in the drop downs. Other than that things seem to work fine including gaming. The drivers will also install successfully after removing the official HP drivers, but Windows disables the card ("Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems"). CCC doesn't really show any info in this case because the card is disabled.
I'll hold out a glimmer of hope that it's only an issue with the first beta and things will improve later this year, unless Jarred knows I'm boned.
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 29, 2012 - link
I have the same issue with a Sony VAIO C (PowerXpress 4.0) and the 12.9 Beta drivers will install but the global settings don't have populated lists. This beta appears to have targeted 7970M primarily, but it sort of works on other laptops. AMD is aware of the issue and I presume they'll be working to fix things. Will they fix them with the next release, or the one after that? I don't know, but they do know that I'm going to discuss the current state of Enduro and I hope they give me some good news beyond just working to improve 7970M Enduro setups.