AMD accused of (and implicitly admits) preventing sponsored Games from supporting DLSS

[LAwLz]

10 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I would myself say Nvidia drivers, especially at new product/architecture release are better and more stable and I haven't seen that situation changing much.

 

For compute I actually find AMD more stable but performance is really bad, like for F@H and BOINC an 6800XT is only as good or or even sometimes worse than 3060 TI. On the Linux side I just in general find it annoying to get Nvidia GPUs working properly in ESXi passthrough, drivers installed and actually working but it's a lot better the last 2 years than ever before. That's with GPUs like the P4, T4, A40 etc.

 

Anyway my take on it is that AMD drivers aren't as bad as typically made out and when there are problems it's mostly isolated to a problem product which is why every goes "What? But I've not had problems", however Nvidia is better, 100%.

This is my impression as well. 

 

I also feel like AMD used to have awful drivers back in the ATI Radeon DAYS (and partially into the AMD branding days) . Some of the "AMD has bad drivers" might be attributed to that living on (it's hard to shake off a bad reputation). And I mean awful. Two big examples I remember were:

1) AMD had a bug in their driver for several years where if you had two monitors, your mouse cursor would get corrupted every one and again. This was just a fact of life. Your mouse cursor would look like missingno like 10% of the time. 

2) AMD graphics cards constantly stuttered in games. It wasn't until PCper started doing more advanced frame analysis that AMD took notice and fixed the issue. It was especially true in dual GPU systems. If someone on a forum said they had good fps but games didn't feel smooth, they probably had an AMD GPU and that was the issue. 

 

But those things haven't really been issues 10 years or so at this point. But once something gets generalized and parroted enough that's all people know, even if the original cause got fixed ages ago. 

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

1) AMD had a bug in their driver for several years where if you had two monitors, your mouse cursor would get corrupted every one and again. This was just a fact of life. Your mouse cursor would look like missingno like 10% of the time. 

I had that, was really annoying.

 

Also sometimes HDMI audio output just stops and completely disappears from audio devices but the device is still in device manager, reboot fixes it. Way less common now but I still get it, so I just move the HDMI cable to one of my Nvidia GPUs if I don't want to reboot since the HDMI is only used for audio anyway.

[TheVaultboy]

12 hours ago, leadeater said:

Whatever AMD is or is not doing Nvidia sponsored games that are DLSS first do actually have a genuine reason to implement something other than DLSS also. DLSS only works on Nvidia and if you want to offer the same feature and capability to all your customers there is actually a reason to also do FSR for example.

 

Whether or not it's contractual requirements doing FSR first enables the laziness factor, why also do DLSS when FSR works on "everything". I'm not actually saying game developers are always lazy or always think like this but it's good to remember that DLSS is not the same as FSR and corporate level discussions on where to spend time and resources are going to be different in respect to that.

 

This FSR vs DLSS trend is not new, not even slightly and for no game developer to have ever said anything about it if it were being blocked by AMD I personally find odd. Such things always leak out and developers have directly or anonymously complained about Nvidia for similar or lesser problems yet none have for this?

You are sort of missing or maybe are skirting the point here... nVidia sponsors the game, nVidia pays to put their technology in the game, nVidia DOES NOT stop the developer adding any other technology but they certainly should NOT have to pay to add FSR or XeSS to a game, sponsoring the game ends at integrating their technology and that is where is should end or are you expecting them to pay for the devs coffee parking tickets, house hold rent, kids dentistry .... the list goes on.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, TheVaultboy said:

You are sort of missing or maybe are skirting the point here... nVidia sponsors the game, nVidia pays to put their technology in the game, nVidia DOES NOT stop the developer adding any other technology but they certainly should NOT have to pay to add FSR or XeSS to a game, sponsoring the game ends at integrating their technology and that is where is should end or are you expecting them to pay for the devs coffee parking tickets, house hold rent, kids dentistry .... the list goes on.

That doesn't mean AMD are actually doing this. The point is if you do DLSS first, sponsored or not you have a reason to do FSR as well. This does not apply the other way round, you don't have a reason to do DLSS because FSR also works so you can skip it and all customers have a usable upscaling technology to use.

 

Hence the reason why there are differences between games being sponsored by AMD or Nvidia could be resulting in different outcomes without any contract blocks in place.

 

There is no confirmation of anything, only observations and observations also need context and mitigating factors and the difference between FSR and DLSS is one of those.

[leadeater]

Also would like to point out that while the ability to use DLSS or FSR in something like Unreal Engine is as simple as installing the plugin then enabling it you actually have to implement it which while does not appear to be difficult at all you still have to put it in to the game settings menus and validate each setting outcome as you can actually customize each setting level, they are not actually fixed and the same across games.

 

So if you put in either you have to actually do fine tuning and QA testing and also make sure that one isn't significantly worse or problematic than the other. It's not going to look all that good for your game if only you have problems with FSR or DLSS because you spent all your time on the other then slapped in the other and you cannot use any sponsored funding for any of this particular  QA.

 

It's really easy to oversimplify this, I do it. But I do also know there is more to things than just ticking a box and enable something and "hey presto, it's working" even if on the basic level it is actually "that simple".

 

Edit:

Also AMD does need to provide a better follow up response. It's getting a little too long at this point.

[starsmine]

2 hours ago, TheVaultboy said:

You are sort of missing or maybe are skirting the point here... nVidia sponsors the game, nVidia pays to put their technology in the game, nVidia DOES NOT stop the developer adding any other technology but they certainly should NOT have to pay to add FSR or XeSS to a game, sponsoring the game ends at integrating their technology and that is where is should end or are you expecting them to pay for the devs coffee parking tickets, house hold rent, kids dentistry .... the list goes on.

That claim that nividia does not do that needs just as much evidence as the claim that AMD is doing it. I imagine there are not a ton of Nvidia-sponsered games that go out of their way to include AMD-specific technologies that run only on AMD, but rather most of them are running Nvidia-specific tech stacks that only work on Nvidia at the time. 

This is not a knock on nividia but a plea that you check your own logic. This isnt even a good guy/bad guy discussion. 

[Dreckssackblase]

7 hours ago, LAwLz said:

But those things haven't really been issues 10 years or so at this point. But once something gets generalized and parroted enough that's all people know, even if the original cause got fixed ages ago. 

Obviously this is just anecdotal too but when i used to have an AMD GPUs (HD 7770 / R9 290) In my main rigs, I used to have a lot of driver trouble.

I needed to downgrade them 3 times after an update broke something and even needed a full DDU uninstall once.

Also AMD ReLive used to be so damn bad back then. Maybe its great now, but back then on my 290 it corrupted the video file at like a 20% rate. Either there was no audio at all, the audio was delayed by like 30 seconds, the whole thing was just one freeze-frame or the file was just completely uplayably corrupted.

Honestly it's impressive in how many ways it managed to break.

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, Dreckssackblase said:

Obviously this is just anecdotal too but when i used to have an AMD GPUs (HD 7770 / R9 290) In my main rigs, I used to have a lot of driver trouble.

I needed to downgrade them 3 times after an update broke something and even needed a full DDU uninstall once.

Also AMD ReLive used to be so damn bad back then. Maybe its great now, but back then on my 290 it corrupted the video file at like a 20% rate. Either there was no audio at all, the audio was delayed by like 30 seconds, the whole thing was just one freeze-frame or the file was just completely uplayably corrupted.

Honestly it's impressive in how many ways it managed to break.

Works flawlessly today for desktop GPUs. H264 encode quality has taken a backseat to H265 and AV1 encode quality though.

 

Laptop AMD GPUs haven't regained this feature in the software since they lost it in Adrenaline Edition's transition.

[RejZoR]

23 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This is my impression as well. 

 

I also feel like AMD used to have awful drivers back in the ATI Radeon DAYS (and partially into the AMD branding days) . Some of the "AMD has bad drivers" might be attributed to that living on (it's hard to shake off a bad reputation). And I mean awful. Two big examples I remember were:

1) AMD had a bug in their driver for several years where if you had two monitors, your mouse cursor would get corrupted every one and again. This was just a fact of life. Your mouse cursor would look like missingno like 10% of the time. 

2) AMD graphics cards constantly stuttered in games. It wasn't until PCper started doing more advanced frame analysis that AMD took notice and fixed the issue. It was especially true in dual GPU systems. If someone on a forum said they had good fps but games didn't feel smooth, they probably had an AMD GPU and that was the issue. 

 

But those things haven't really been issues 10 years or so at this point. But once something gets generalized and parroted enough that's all people know, even if the original cause got fixed ages ago. 

I don't think even that was the case. After GeForce 7600GT, I had Radeon cards pretty much exclusively. Radeon 9600 Pro, Radeon X1950 Pro, HD4850, HD5850, HD6870, HD6950, HD7950 (after this I bought GTX 980) and I never had any issues with any of them driver wise. There was just 1 memorable instance with Skyrim and HD7950 where all textures were garbled with one driver, but got fixed in like 2 days with beta driver. And that's about only thing I can even remember having issues with on Radeon in all the generations I had. So, I wouldn't say it was really bad. Don't know how it was after that as that was the period when AMD struggled with graphic cards a lot (Fury, Polaris and Vega era). Can't say how drivers were during that time...