Trash Drivers Leaked, Are They Legit?

M

mbd2884

New member
Hello,

Know some beta testers or some who have closer relationship than most with AMD hang out here.

I'm just making an inquiry about these junk drivers that are being posted on Guru and then mirrored on HardOCP and few other random sites now. But the source is the same, from some random marthand who supposedly is leaking drivers.

Problems I see.
- They are never new. They are just mishmash of pieces from WHQL and the Preview Drivers OFFICIALLY released by AMD. But these junk drivers often cause issues for anyone who tries them.
- For many uninstalling them corrupted their Windows installation, (reformat/reinstall). Others figured out some inane method of uninstalling them which shouldn't be necessary if they are really from AMD.
- There are never any notes or any information about them.
- marthand takes no responsibility for them at all. And of course no mention/statement from AMD about drivers being leaked, personally I'd think this would be a liability for them, considering the problems they cause. AMD would not want to be associated with these drivers which seem to be guess mixing of other drivers. If they are officially from AMD, gives AMD a bad image I think, as I think AMD is working hard to build a good reputation for making drivers, I see a lot of improvements and changes, relationship with developers, and the Gaming Evolve program. So to me, image and reputation is important to AMD, yet these "junk" drivers aren't doing any of that. So a liability to me if they are "reliably" from AMD.
- Previously, sometimes when drivers are leaked early like from rflair are usually confirmed real as AMD just releases the same drivers a week later as a Preview Driver or such. But with these Marthand, nothing at all and they don't seem legit to me as they are just trash to me.
- Beta drivers from Nvidia aren't this bad. So I don't see these as beta. And beta usually offer something new. These are just mish mash of junk. If there are beta drivers, AMD releases them officially as hotfix or preview anyway.

Can anyone delve deeper into this and figure out what these are. And if they are legit, why is AMD allowing crud to be leaked? Plug the leak then IMO.

If I'm wrong about all this, it's fine by me. I just want some information about this because as I said, marthand takes no responsibility for them and provides no information about them at all.
 
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Sometimes they cant do nothing to prevent it, as its leaked from game developer that get newer internal beta driver from AMD (for example to improve performance on their game).
Driver should also have some kind of digital signature, so if it get leaked, they will know who did it and make needed actions against him.
 
AMD aren't associated with any driver leaks, ever. Even when they release a set that turns out to be the same as a leaked set from a few days previously, it's not confirmation of anything.

RE Marthand drivers, AMD can't control the guy and what he does. If he's part of a game dev team and leaking drivers he's given to test performance issues with then he's likely in violation of his companies agreements. Given the anonymous nature of the internets there is not a lot AMD can do about that, except go back to all their partners and ask them to ensure drivers don't leak.

I'm not sure what you want to happen, really. A witch hunt accross all the AIB partners and game/app developers with relationships with AMD is just going to create bad blood and likely increase the rate of leaks, human nature being what it is.

If you want drivers that AMD are responsible for and stand behind, only download the WHQL driver sets published on their website.
 
mbd2884 said:
- Beta drivers from Nvidia aren't this bad. So I don't see these as beta. And beta usually offer something new. These are just mish mash of junk. If there are beta drivers, AMD releases them officially as hotfix or preview anyway.
Click to expand...

Because NVIDIA's beta drivers are not really 'beta', they just have not completed the full WHQL test and many references have been made to forceware being the 'gold standard'

You will rarely find any severe issues with these drivers. A few times they have forgot support for older cards such as agp bridged cards and hese might bluescreen or yello bang but such regressions are always fixed quickly.

Sometimes if these drivers are OK and pass WHQL they will reissue the build as a signed release.

Perfomance issues are more an optimisation issue than bug or flaws.

The drivers that get leaked by tech site/file mirrors can and do have problems such as missing device IDs and blue screens.

Adding a device ID to a INF file will not help if the devs have broken some code regarding a particular GPU and removed a bunch of devices from the INF deliberately as they are targeting a particular family with a particular build.

Browser development can be thought of in a similar way, at any one time there is trunk and several branches being worked on.

If you have one of AMD's 2011 Fusion chipsets, they actually do not have the full complement of drivers on their website for customer download. The user has to get these drivers from their OEM or product support CD, or 'leaks' which are OEM releases anyway.

What they do have for download is the full set of drivers for their older and current enthusiast platforms

AMD claimed that this was deliberately done as they did not want to post preview or beta drivers for such platforms to their site which does make sense and comes back to what has been said in this thread about leaks.
I was annoyed that AMD do not provide

Platform drivers such as USB, SATA, Chipset typically take longer to release and validate because of the vast test regimes and sometimes certain OEMs may need patches or fixes if they have a customised solution.

Having said that, Intel has been very regular and agreessive with official public updates to their SATA drivers (RST). It is fortunate they realsied this - they have to be agrresive as storage/raid/SSD drivers are very critical piece of software which affect ones data integrity, system behaviour and performance.

Real leaks are typically unfinished preview software with issues and often not suitable for any formal consideraton. Eg there have been some Intel storage drivers marked alpha floating around for X79 launch.
 
caveman-jim said:
AMD aren't associated with any driver leaks, ever. Even when they release a set that turns out to be the same as a leaked set from a few days previously, it's not confirmation of anything.

RE Marthand drivers, AMD can't control the guy and what he does. If he's part of a game dev team and leaking drivers he's given to test performance issues with then he's likely in violation of his companies agreements. Given the anonymous nature of the internets there is not a lot AMD can do about that, except go back to all their partners and ask them to ensure drivers don't leak.

I'm not sure what you want to happen, really. A witch hunt accross all the AIB partners and game/app developers with relationships with AMD is just going to create bad blood and likely increase the rate of leaks, human nature being what it is.

If you want drivers that AMD are responsible for and stand behind, only download the WHQL driver sets published on their website.
Click to expand...

Understandable. Any idea what these mishmash of other drivers are then? Are they from AMD dev team, or AIB, are they test drivers, are they beta? What are these? And considering how problematic they are, makes me suspicious of what they could be.
 
mbd2884 said:
Understandable. Any idea what these mishmash of other drivers are then? Are they from AMD dev team, or AIB, are they test drivers, are they beta? What are these? And considering how problematic they are, makes me suspicious of what they could be.
Click to expand...

The only reason the "leaked drivers" appellation is used to describe the various mix&match driver sets that people concoct is to lend them an air of credibility they do not deserve. "Leaked" connotes that the drivers are "real," as in, "These are official drivers," and "secret," as in, "You aren't supposed to have these yet," etc. Such drivers are definitely not "leaked" in either of those senses...;)

Over the years there have been many individuals who routinely experiment with various sets of IHV drivers and mix and match files between them to supposedly "improve them" somehow over the official driver sets the IHVs release. The individuals often put their names to such "custom" driver sets and distribute them on a regular basis, and in the process achieve a degree of notoriety for themselves that is completely undeserved, because many people downloading and installing these driver sets simply (and unfortunately) assume that the creators are "writing their own custom drivers" instead of what they are actually doing, which is to just mix and match driver files from various official releases, make minor changes to the driver install .infs, and other superficial things not even *remotely* related to actually sitting down and writing driver code...;)

So, of course you should be concerned, and I would strongly advise you to do what I have done for years--stay away from "leaked" or "custom" driver sets like they are the plague...!...;) As to why such people deviously use the term "leaked," again--which inspires more confidence in the target?--to call the drivers "Todd Foo's custom drivers," or to call them "Leaked but official [substitute nVidia or ATi here] drivers"...?

And there you have your answer: few people are going to be interested in trying a custom mix & match driver set from somebody they've never heard of; while many people might give an official "leaked" driver set a whirl because they trust the source. So...they distribute them and call them "leaked" so that they'll reach as wide an audience as possible.

But that's the beauty of making up yarns about drivers and other software that has been "leaked," isn't it? With "leaked" software you don't know where it came from, and that is entirely acceptable--because that is the nature of "leaked"...;) Heh...;) How convenient.

Bottom line: if a custom driver set originates from an IHV, a developer, or an AIB partner, ad infinitum, those drivers will be *identified* as coming from those sources! There won't be any "leaked" about it...;) People are really gullible when it comes to almost anything with the label of "leaked," aren't they? But the fact is that if a responsible, qualified party does not identify a set of drivers as having originated with him, then we have absolutely no reason to believe it, whether we are told by 3rd parties that the drivers are "leaked" or not.
 
if you look at the dlls & find new game profiles or version #s, where could they have come from?

also his leaks were full of intel switchable gfx drivers, so... probably came from a laptop company testing their stuff

that said, i'm lazy so i just take out the dlls & use them on specific games instead of fully installing

also rflair has said they were legit
 
KngtRider said:
Because NVIDIA's beta drivers are not really 'beta', they just have not completed the full WHQL test and many references have been made to forceware being the 'gold standard'

. . . .
Click to expand...

Agree there, their beta drivers are crapola, made for specific purposes, may it be a particular game or games, reviews, etc. Science projects in optimizations, IQ disregard. As for the 'gold standard', golden for the toilet ;).
 
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