AMD GPUs

[Excalibur.]

I keep hearing that there are driver issues and such with AMD cards, obviously there are many people who do not have issues with AMD GPUs as well, So i wanted to ask here, Those who have AMD GPUs, what has your experiences been like, and if you had any issues, if so what issues did you have? 

[RONOTHAN##]

I've daily'd a 6900 XT for almost two years at this point, and it's not really that much different than when I was running a Nvidia card. The in-driver update tool has the tendency to break on me, and there was a span of a few driver updates where hardware encoding was broken (that was back when I first got the card, it's been fixed now). 

 

Just be warned that there's two driver tracks, Optional and Recommended. They really should be called Beta and Release, so as long as you stick to the Recommended driver versions you're usually fine. 

[venomtail]

In a nutshell, unless you're an outlier in how you use your GPU or rely on specific drivers to run specific software to achieve a specific goal built on per needs software and messing with drivers costs money because time is money then NVIDIA might be a safer option. If you're a normal consumer, the 99th percentile then for everyday use AMD will do just fine.

[Tanaz]

13 minutes ago, Excalibur. said:

I keep hearing that there are driver issues and such with AMD cards, obviously there are many people who do not have issues with AMD GPUs as well, So i wanted to ask here, Those who have AMD GPUs, what has your experiences been like, and if you had any issues, if so what issues did you have? 

My GPU (6950XT) was by all means unusable for the first 3 months I owned it. There were multiple driver versions that were unstable and had massive bugs. Afterwords things stabilized a bit but there are still some issues. If you're running multiple monitors with multiple resolutions or refresh rates you might get some issues and instability, video playback is kinda buggy on RDNA 2 idk if it's fixed on RDNA 3 ( I think it is). The Adobe Suite is simply slower and laggier especially in more complex projects (even in photoshop). Blender is slower and objectively worse for now at least, perhaps it'll get better with rocM but only time will tell.

 

On the bright side games do run fine, there's low latency and everything feels snappy. The software itself is better than GeForce experience when it works. Because AMD uses a hardware scheduler there's less CPU overhead and higher FPS on lower resolutions.

 

My single biggest issue is the bug reporting system (or lack there of). There is zero and I mean ZERO communication with the driver team. You don't know when you report bugs in Wattman if anyone's getting them and if anyone's working on them. The product stack just feels overlooked and not particularly cared for.

 

TLDR: Is it better than even a year ago? Yes. Is it as good as  Nvidia? No.

 

edit: @RONOTHAN## talked about sticking to the recommended version of drivers but often times that's a bad option because you don't get optimizations for new games and if you want to play them you get SEVERE performance penalties (sometimes 20-30% lower FPS than you should). So it's a balancing act between installing sometimes simply BAD drivers that are buggy just so you get proper performance in your games. Lately tho credit where credit's due almost all versions have been whql certified so it's been much less of a problem.

[freeagent]

Thanks for your honesty fellas 

[191x7]

I use Radeons since the 9000pro 64MB in 2003. Not a fanboy, I had nVidia cards too. I can't complain about the drivers, no more than with any other hardware. I stick with what I know, and I like my Radeons.

[Coaxialgamer]

I'm currently running an RX 6800. Before that I had a 2080, and before that dual 290Xs.

 

Honestly the whole issue is overblown by far. The only problems I have encountered are mostly confined to a select few VR titles (mainly texture rendering bugs and sub-par performance in Elite)...but the experience for me has overall been pretty much exactly the same as it has been on my older RTX2080. I don't play the latest released though, so plausibly Nvidia cards *might* get fixes and driver releases faster, but YMMV. I similarly had no problems with my 290Xs when I was running those in my system.

Honestly the whole thing is incredibly plug and play.

 

From what I've gathered a lot of the FUD about AMD driver releases comes from the old ATI days, or in some cases for the latest hardware releases...but 99% of the time, on hardware that's not a few weeks old...you're not going to notice a difference.

[SorryBella]

9 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

They really should be called Beta and Release, so as long as you stick to the Recommended driver versions you're usually fine. 

same applies with Nvidia too anyway. But yeah, for just gaming and workload with openCL bias? AMD is practically in parity. Its only when you get really fucking weird and fringe or using VR where you start to encounter feature breaking bugs, or if you dare do anything with h264. VCN can go die in hell with how its configured.

[Paul17]

19 hours ago, Excalibur. said:

I keep hearing that there are driver issues and such with AMD cards, obviously there are many people who do not have issues with AMD GPUs as well, So i wanted to ask here, Those who have AMD GPUs, what has your experiences been like, and if you had any issues, if so what issues did you have? 

They're good for gaming, not much else.... the newer ones are overrated heaters which often have coil whine.   

[Paul17]

17 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

I'm currently running an RX 6800. Before that I had a 2080, and before that dual 290Xs.

 

Honestly the whole issue is overblown by far. The only problems I have encountered are mostly confined to a select few VR titles (mainly texture rendering bugs and sub-par performance in Elite)...but the experience for me has overall been pretty much exactly the same as it has been on my older RTX2080. I don't play the latest released though, so plausibly Nvidia cards *might* get fixes and driver releases faster, but YMMV. I similarly had no problems with my 290Xs when I was running those in my system.

Honestly the whole thing is incredibly plug and play.

 

From what I've gathered a lot of the FUD about AMD driver releases comes from the old ATI days, or in some cases for the latest hardware releases...but 99% of the time, on hardware that's not a few weeks old...you're not going to notice a difference.

That's why there's tons of posts on the AMD forums of the driver problems - often crashes and stutters.  Some ppl are fed up and say they won't buy another AMD card again.   

[BuzzingBee]

Currently owned 6800 XT, brother with 6700 XT and sis with 6800. I also have 3060 Ti on HTPC so I'm not all AMD . 

 

We have no major issues with AMD GPUs that are game-breaker. We don't have crashes or driver timeouts and the only time I experienced them is when I OC or undervolt too hard, or when at few times I pushed hotspot temp too high (oops).

 

I'm more neutral with brands but the main reason I went with AMD is niche features I use at times. AMD has better triple-monitor support with mixed resolutions and orientations, whereas for Nvidia it would require three identical resolutions. To me RT still felt too early as I rather have more performance, and DLSS vs FSR is not my consideration when choosing GPU. Also, when deciding back in late 2020, 6800 XT has 6G vram more than 3080 which I also considered as I planned to hold on for at least 4 years (now at 2.5 years). 

 

My siblings moved from Nvidia to AMD GPU because G-sync would break when playing DX11 game on borderless window and viewing video on second monitor, such as Discord video chat, Twitch and YouTube. AMD GPU has the same cause but different effect: video playback would heavily stutter when GPU usage reach 99%. To remedy the problem they need to cap FPS so that usage wouldn't hit 99%, then they can enjoy game with freesync while viewing video.

 

In the end everyone have different setups and GPUs can't support every individual use cases, but after reading several thoughts it looks like Nvidia is "safer" option for more complex setups. Just that for our situation AMD is more preferable and we're mostly fine with second monitor so far. There are times when people still experience crashes on AMD GPUs for seemingly no reason, could be poor QC or faulty, but part of me is hoping they would give AMD GPUs another chance instead of posting they suck and moving back to Nvidia. 

[Bagzie]

8 hours ago, Paul17 said:

They're good for gaming, not much else.... the newer ones are overrated heaters which often have coil 

Imagine a GPU aimed at gamers being good for gaming.

 

What madness...

 

With regards to my coil whine , My 2060 used to howl like a banshee under load and my 7900XT does not.

 

Back on point to the OP who was asking people who owned the cards and not just folk wanting to start a flamewar.

 

I've had no major issues with my 7900XT driver wise , It runs the games i want it to run flawlessly.

[Dedayog]

On 7/30/2023 at 2:13 PM, Excalibur. said:

I keep hearing that there are driver issues and such with AMD cards, obviously there are many people who do not have issues with AMD GPUs as well, So i wanted to ask here, Those who have AMD GPUs, what has your experiences been like, and if you had any issues, if so what issues did you have? 

Just like with the cpu, no issues with the gpu.

 

Motherboard is fine too, Incase you were asking about that next

[Excalibur.]

27 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

Just like with the cpu, no issues with the gpu.

 

Motherboard is fine too, Incase you were asking about that next

Nothing wrong with asking questions, Everyone has their own experiences and knowledge level on certain topics. How else would someone gather information and learn?  Everyone wins when we help each other out.