Higher idle temps, power consumption in the long run? Why cause this if can be avoided?
Nvidia's fix for multi monitor(where AMD have most issues) is to force full 3d clocks all the time, yes, its a complete "fix" but requires, I assume fiddling with clocks in the exact same way you'd want to for AMD to get decent 2d and 3d clock settings, so the end user situation for the "ultimate" setup is identical fixes for both AMD and Nvidia, yet some people will have you believe Nvidia can do no wrong and AMD fixes are impossible to find.
Of course, fixing the memory clock, has been known, and possible from DAY ONE of the 5xxx series release, in 6 months knowing all of AMD's issues Nvidia surely managed to fix the timing/memory issues that cause flickering in multimonitor situations to give proper idle clocks that don't flicker........ nope, they didn't get it working perfectly either, perfectly would be idle power clocks, fixed memory speed, and low heat/power output, they don't have that, so its certainly not perfect.
ATi cards have 3 basic clock profiles:
Idle - self explanatory; ~157MHz GPU, 300MHz Memory
Bluray/AVIVO - For when playing dvds, H/W accelerated videos and flash; ~400MHz Gpu, 900MHz Memory (hence the mem clock drops to 900MHz on youtube videos)
3D - Games; max clocks
It works as its supposed to, dont see what the complaint is about
This is where people forget the issues, firstly MS in Jan or so(when the grey screen issue appeared) changed power profiles and some situations in which they appear or not, grey screen bug happened when windows stopped sending out the right power state and AMD cards were trying to do something that required higher clocks, but not being told to clock up, clocking up the cards yourself meant you would NEVER see the grey screen, this started happening after a MS update and never happened before.
There are several power states required for various things, the problem is, after MS made a change, newer cards have a different bios to older cards to sort the situation in hardware, drivers now have to play with TWO sets of cards that have two sets of power state settings, and Nvidia only don't have this problem because their cards were so late that they learnt from AMD and the MS changes happened way before their release, it made it easier, and Nvidia as I said didn't "fix" the situation, they simply had a workaround to use much higher clocks and significantly higher power in certain situations, its a work around, a fix would enable low idle clocks in multimonitor situations.
ITs all a bit of a mess, power states, clocking up and down, people forget turning off parts of a core, clocking down, making a chip stable at several clock speeds and voltages requires extra transistors and core logic.
Its also a pain as the UVD type clock settings really screw things up, theres little point offloading workload from cpu to gpu, if it doesn't save power, if you have to power up your 5870/480 to full power to get a small youtube video in play, you're not saving power at all. On systems with decent cpu's windows should give you the option of not offloading the decoding of basic stuff to gpu's AT ALL, Nvidia or AMD, because its a waste of power to be honest. Yet play a 40gb bluray video and you might well want your gpu to be used.
Neither company has powerplay/(Nvidia's name for powerplay?) working right, both have loads of work arounds for many things, will be 2-3 generations before its all working perfectly, seemlessly and only uses the gpu when it actually saves power or when the cpu is incapable of doing the work alone.
As for the drivers, I have zero issues on 10.7 with xfire, bar setting my own clocks, which I prefer to do anyway and always have, Nvidia/AMD, because you can usually use lower voltage/clocks in just about all idle/2d load situations and higher voltage/clocks in 3d situations on every card I've ever bought, seems a waste not to set your own clocks/voltages for every setting.
