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  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I don't think it's a big loss. Applications that attempt to set game options for the end user aren't exactly value added. The person at the keyboard can just as easily adjust resolution and display options for herself to get the sort of experience she's seeking. Besides that, the GeForce Experience has the potential to be abused as a means of mining user data and monitoring activity. With so much of that already going on, the last thing the world needs is more of it.
  • Yuriman - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I'm with you on every point. However, I'm curious (concerned) about just why AMD has discontinued it. Was it very negatively received? Is this part of cost-cutting initiatives?
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Raptr integration began before AMD started RTG. My guess is that the Raptr contract has expired and they feel no need to partner again because they probably have a home-brewed alternative that will come out and be more tightly integrated like GFE.
  • IdBuRnS - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I installed it once when I had to temporarily use an old HD6870. It was an invasive and cludgy piece of garbage. Big shocker I guess.
  • akamateau - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Actually Cludgy is spelled Klugy.

    You never installed anything. Your just bullshyte.
  • akamateau - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Actually Klugy is spelled Kludgy like my keyboard is with sticking keys.
  • akamateau - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    ...and Anand is Bullshyte for not telling you the Gaming Evolved is a DX11 App. And DX11 is DEAD.

    If 2k Games knew that they would be selling the garbage Mafia 3.
  • Visual - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    I've seen autogenerated posts that were more relevant and made more sense than this one.
  • silverblue - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    What this guy does is repeat the same opinion throughout the comments section of a single article. Moreover, he likes to call out Anand on his bias even though Anand has been gone for over a year.
  • mateau - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    I do believe that AnandTech is the site. Does Anand still have editorial control?
  • 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
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    The "filthy casuals" that settings optimization programs cater to are the vast majority who just sit down and want to get into the game. The same people that run awfully old hardware and just want to play WoW or the new Bethesda blockbuster that launched. The same people that just bought the computer 2 or 3 years ago and honestly could _not_ tell you what the processor or graphics that the PC has, or even if it had integrated or dedicated graphics.

    For these people, the settings "just werks" and streamlines the gaming experience. This same kind of streamlined experience is what keeps people locked into their current ecosystem (Apple hardware, or Samsung Galaxy phones, for example), and they keep choosing a new iteration of the same thing they got, because it works for them and they don't really need something completely different.

    Considering how useful this is for the vast majority of PC gamers (and note: nobody posting on Anandtech even counts as a casual PC gamer, everyone here has the initiative and incentive to read technical articles of their own free will, and that demonstrates a distinct difference from the casual PC gamer userbase), I'm afraid that the lack of the Gaming Evolved App will alienate people already on an AMD GPU from getting another one, and might steer them to team green's GeForce Experience as the suitable alternative...

    It's a fairly discrete, but rather impactful, value-added software piece that optimizes settings for users that don't care to learn about what the settings mean. They just want the game to not be stuttery and to look reasonably good, so more apparent it is to the user that running games on their AMD card just works well, the more likely they are to stick to team red.
  • BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw "just werks" was "just twerks" and I was wondering how Miley Cyrus got dragged into this conversation for a moment. But anyway, I think computer proficiency is pervasive enough to justify moving the bar up a bit and accepting that Joe/Jane Average don't have problems fiddling with the options of a game to make it run smoothly. Among those that don't know or don't care, that choice is an actively made one and they tend to gravitate toward consoles where they get almost all of the AAA releases months before they're ported over to the PC anyway.
  • __Miguel_ - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    "I think computer proficiency is pervasive enough to justify moving the bar up a bit and accepting that Joe/Jane Average don't have problems fiddling with the options of a game to make it run smoothly."

    They might (though knowing the kind of people that buy PC around me, plus the vast majority of stories I've seen/experienced/read about, I wouldn't consider that to be a fact, but more of a wishful thinking), I seriously doubt the vast majority of them wouldn't, anyway. Unless the game already auto-configures itself at least to some degree, they'll just run with what they've got.

    Heck, when even technically-inclined people sometimes go "TIL I've spent the last 4 years playing on my iGPU instead of my *insert mid-to-high-end GPU here*", and this is not even a "once in a blue moon" thing either, you can't trust or expect people to go around and fiddle with settings. Some I'm sure will do it, even if the result doesn't come out perfect. But that "some" constitutes the majority of people, that I just can't believe...
  • barleyguy - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    If they are casual and running old hardware, they probably also don't update their video drivers. Which means they won't get the latest utilities either.

    My guess is that the number of people who used this utility successfully was very low, and that influenced the decision to get rid of it.
  • LostWander - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I don't think the target is casual gamers as much as the "tech unfriendly" or console gamers. If you're tech-savvy you're used to fiddling around with settings but for most even looking at those settings gives them a heart attack. With a similar story for console gamers who are used to getting the most out of their system with literally zero effort.

    Not to say GFE isn't mostly horrible (I shouldn't play overwatch above minimum settings on a gtx 960 for some reason and the tracking is ridiculous) but the base idea is sound.
  • Aerodrifting - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    At least the video recording was cool, I always have a grudge that there is no counterpart to Shadowplay for AMD cards, And all third party recording software can severely cripple your frame rate in more demanding games.
    Also I don't think "recommended settings" is so bad as most users dont want to spend time messing around with game settings etc, The majority just want something easy to use out of the box, Like consoles.
  • Jumangi - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    Completely disagree. The Geforce Experience is a great way to simplify PC gaming. Many people have no interest in screwing around with advanced graphics options and the default autoset options in most games is very poor IMO. I've found Nvidia's custom setups to usually be very well done. Even as a long time PC gamer I find myself just hitting the optimize button and just playing the game. Very happy with it.
  • brucek2 - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    Same here. I have the knowledge and interest to dial in settings, but I'm happy to have it done for me. I've also never found it to be a process that takes "just minutes" - if you're doing it properly you're probably looking at multiple zones / situations and of course if you're just starting a new game you have no idea which areas are the more demanding, they may not be unlocked, and you don't want to be spoiled. Additionally, while I can't prove this, I believe that for at least some games GFE adjusts settings that are not directly exposed in a game's setting box. To the user's claiming they just set max settings and move on, I think they must have a narrow view of what max settings really are - with superscaling, 1440p or 4K monitors, multiple levels of anti-aliasing, there is always a "max" that is beyond the capability of my gtx 1080, let alone the vast majority of cards that are less capable.
  • mateau - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    AMD discontinued Gaming Evolved becasue there was no need to evolve it further. Just like Windows stops supporting XP as it's obsolete, AMD stopped supporting Gaming Evolved as it too is obsolete. It was designed to improve game performance using DX11.

    We now live in a DX12 gaming environment. Hardware is now designed and optimised for DX12, Mantle and Vulkan NOT the obsolete API DX11.

    Do developers still code using DX11? Yep. And they ripping off the consumer. I for one am not going to waste my hard earned cash on poorly coded garbage games that are still using DX11.

    How much space did ANANDTECH use to tell you this fact that Gaming Evolved is just as obsolete as DX11?

    NONE.

    Did they know? Well they Anand wants us to believe that they are the end-all for tech truth.

    The question is WHY did the fail to provide the reader with the HUGE fact that Gaming Evolved is a DX11 based application and as such is no longer relevant or useful in today's world of advanced API's: DX12. Mantle and Vulkan.

    DX11 is dead. Long live DX12!!
  • CiccioB - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link

    You have some form of mental disease, boy.
    Save some money for a efficient cure.
    Then return blabbing about something that has a meaning, please.
  • piiman - Saturday, October 15, 2016 - link

    DX11 is going to be around for many years to come. Heck I still see game made on dx9
    The gaming evolved app doesn't give a shyt about what dx version you have it simply sets up game preferences. It is not a dx11 app its just an app.

    you seem to have an unhealthy obsession with dx12. lol
  • D. Lister - Saturday, October 15, 2016 - link

    "AMD discontinued Gaming Evolved becasue there was no need to evolve it further. Just like Windows stops supporting XP as it's obsolete..."

    Firstly, Microsoft stopped supporting XP long after Vista and Win7.

    Secondly, AMD never had direct control on the GE software's evolution - it was owned and controlled by the RAPTR people. AMD just wanted so bad to compete with Nvidia's GFE that they let RAPTR exploit the AMD customers (yeah, read the freakin' disclaimers) with that garbage GE app. It's good that they have finally come to their senses and got rid of that crap.

    Oh and btw, I wholeheartedly agree with the general consensus here that you are a complete moron. Now go right ahead and continue embarrassing yourself.
  • just4U - Thursday, October 20, 2016 - link

    I'd say most who build setups auto disabled it simply because it wasn't integrated and came up as a separate application. Pretty sure Amd started to realize that it wasn't being used enough to.. which is why they are actually discontinuing it.
  • qlum - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I for one always saw raptr / gaming evolved as unneeded bloatware. Sure optimized settings could be useful but the fact that it came with the rest of the raptr stuff made me not want to use it.
  • __Miguel_ - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    I used Raptr/Gaming Evolved for a while, even after I switched over to NVIDIA.

    And it wasn't too bad. I just had a huge issue with their supposed "free games", which would conveniently disappear like a week or so before you had enough points to claim them.

    The rest of it was rather "meh", so by the second free game I wanted they pulled out, with no replacement, I just say "f**k this noise", and uninstalled the thing. Can't really blame AMD for doing the same, to be honest.
  • ruthan - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Other fail to deliver from AMD, we need more- Zen and company will die.
    I hope that after that Intel would be forced by some anti monopoly authority to sell x86 license to some real competitor.
  • silverblue - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    You actually compared the EOL of a third-party-supported product with an as of yet unreleased first-party hardware product, both of which are unrelated. Good job.
  • K_Space - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    Lol... I was wondering when will the AMD death card come out... second page of comments, not bad!
  • garbagedisposal - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    They listened to the community - that's why they discontinued it. Nobody wants to use 3rd party bloatware. Now it's just time for them to build a 1st party game recording solution that just works.
  • nightbringer57 - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    The number one reason for me to install the gaming evolved map was to install plays.tv, which was a pretty decent alternative to Shadowplay.

    I hope this gave the plays.tv guys enough of a headstart for them to keep going. I'd hate to see the app disappear.

    But yeah, the rest was pretty useless garbage.
  • beginner99 - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    this. i kind of liked the recording and upload feature without need to tinker around. It just worked without much overhead.
  • nightbringer57 - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Well, it's still possible to use plays.tv without much tinkering (except you have to download and install the app yourself). You can even use it with any GPU brand.

    What I fear is the possible end of plays.tv. But it hasn't been announced as far as I know.
  • Valantar - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I used the app from time to time, but a few months ago a bug appeared that caused it to crash on launch - with some cryptic error message about some Windows service failing. Only way to remove the pop-up (it kept reappearing) was to force-close both Gaming Evolved and the Plays.tv capture client. Never really looked back.
  • Space Captain Warlock - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    It wasn't a particularly well designed app. The game setting optimizer often didn't work out well for me and I had to fine tune the settings anyway. Even the updater was clunky -- forcing you to close the app and restart it manually just to update. There was also no meaningful evolution and the app just seemed to be floundering. Kind of glad to see it go.
  • wiak - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    meybe its because of this "A few game titles may fail to launch or crash if the AMD Gaming Evolved overlay is enabled. A temporary workaround is to disable the AMD Gaming Evolved "In Game Overlay"."
  • jabber - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I never installed it. Never bother with the Nvidia equivalent either. If I don't have need for it, it doesn't get installed.
  • Taldren - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    The fact that it was always forcing me to resolutions that where not my native 3440x1440 and did not support Windowed Borderless mode ... yeah, I really don't know why anyone didn't like it.
  • FriendlyUser - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I kinda liked it, but did not use it often. Maybe they are planning something else to replace it.
  • 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.
  • JoeMonco - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Why do YOU need to post the same thing three times?
  • beck2050 - Friday, October 14, 2016 - link

    Cause he is a pitiful troll. 90% of all sales are Dx11 so saying it's dead is retarded.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Probably because it's an inane argument. It'll be at least another year or two before the number of new DX11 titles tapers off, and the need for an easy button for settings won't be going away with a single graphics API. Its backend should be extended to support configuring DX12/Vulcan games while maintaining support for DX9/10/11/"Classic" OpenGL/Mantle titles.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    AMD IS DOOMED.

    (Yes, go out and play Doom on your 8 core FX and Radeon card.)

    lol
  • YukaKun - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    I actually had big big hopes for the GE client, just because the fella behind RadeonPro went to AMD and hinted about his hands would be in this project (which he didn't name, IIRC).

    When I sacrificed my last compatible drivers (Cata 13.12) + RadeonPro 1.1.1.1 for the newer ones (can't remember, but 15.xx) it was utter crap. I reverted back to the 13.12 + RadeonPro combo until now that I got a RX480. Some stupid problems that RadeonPro made right for me, I have them again.

    It's so STUPIDLY easy for AMD to make things right (in my simple mind), I don't even anymore (intended). Give the RadeonPro dev you already hired some budget, make an AMD branded RadeonPro utility and rake in the praises. You don't even need to pay me anything for giving you this idea.

    Cheers!
  • TesseractOrion - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Agreed about RadeonPro & the sole dev behind it. Give him some resources to improve it, such an easy win!
  • blppt - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Yeah, GE was a very, very poor replacement for RadeonPro---it didnt have a tenth of the deep tweaking options that RP had. Still miss it to this day.
  • andjohn2000 - Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - link

    Gaming Evolved was launched when the clown from Lenovo (ex CEO Rory Read) was trying to make a mess there. Now this troublemaker had left and went to EMC Dell. So AMD doesn't need this kind of app anymore. It just needs solid products designed by hardcore engineers like Jim Keller or Raja Koduri.
  • Stuka87 - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    I am actually happy. It caused World of Tanks to lock up on a regular basis, so I always had to uncheck it from the installer. And it was not AMD's software, it was Raptr's, and Raptr's support was a joke.
  • BurnItDwn - Thursday, October 13, 2016 - link

    It is about time they finally dump that bloatware garbage.

    DEATH TO ALL BLOATWARE!
  • tamalero - Sunday, October 16, 2016 - link

    I didnt had any complain until they started to push that useless recording software when I didnt wanted it.
    very intrusive and activated itself.
  • Azurael - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 - link

    I noticed it was missing the last couple of times I updated mine - I assumed that was just because they were hotfix drivers. Either way it was nice not to have to remember to deselect it from the installer.

    Unfortunately, I switched my 7870 for a 970 a few days back - if only Nvidia would ditch their corresponding shovelware and put update functionality into the driver. (Actually going back to Nvidia has been a baptism of fire for all those who ignorantly swear the green team's drivers are better. Especially under Linux, since Nouveau doesn't work at all on 970 [or at least mine] at the moment so even getting the proprietary drivers installed is a nightmare...)
  • Azurael - Wednesday, October 19, 2016 - link

    Because the supposedly excellent Nvidia proprietary drivers have no framebuffer support and don't get along with efifb = no display output until X is running. Better hope it keeps working then, and that I remember to rebuild the interface module every kernel update. What a joke. I've left sshd running now. Not making that mistake again.
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