Just venting, please feel free to ignore. I run AMD in all 6 of my desktops and both laptops. Everyone always talks of AMD drivers and how bad they are. Granted I've had a few minor issues, but nothing that lasted long or really affected my use. Got a sweet 9980hk laptop with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 with 32gb of ram. Pretty sweet. First day it was running at the house I came back and it had rebooted. Didn't think much of it, maybe updates or something. Then today I'm sitting typing in visual studio (not running or compiling, just typing) and blue screen. Says nvlddmkm.sys failed. Jump on the old Google, apparently it's been a thing since at least March... of last year. The driver's installed (default load out from our IT department) are from 7/19. So not that recent, but still at least 4 months after this issue was noticed. The drivers are 26.21.14.3145 which are ISV certified drivers. I was so excited to get some GPU power in a laptop, but if it's going to randomly crash on me... Not as stoked. I've used Nvidia cards before with little issue and tend to go back and forth, but this one is very frustrating and makes me not want to purchase Nvidia, despite the recent issues with AMD drivers. Anyways, just venting and hoping this is resolved soon, but ISV drivers and my IT department don't update very often. Best part is, the laptop mostly uses the onboard graphics to reduce power, so not even sure why the Nvidia drivers are the ones causing issues with no load.
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Nvidia drivers
- Thread starter Ready4Dis
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kirbyrj
Fully [H]
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Honestly, I've found the bulk of people complaining about AMD drivers are people who have never used the cards and are parroting others (obviously there are people with real issues, fortunately, I haven't been one of them in 8 tries with Vega or Navi cards).
I would think that there are better drivers available at this point and your IT department should look into implementing them on your load out, especially since you are having documented issues with what they gave you. Are non-ISV drivers available? Is there are hardware issue causing the driver to crash (overheating)?
I would think that there are better drivers available at this point and your IT department should look into implementing them on your load out, especially since you are having documented issues with what they gave you. Are non-ISV drivers available? Is there are hardware issue causing the driver to crash (overheating)?
It shouldn't be overheating while my professors are not even hitting 5%. The laptop was barely warm to the touch (and I mean barely warmer than ambient). More like it was almost in idle state. I don't know if non ISV drivers are available, but in my business i doubt we would be allowed. I'm hoping some updates come along soon, right now IT is slammed with trying to get everyone they can working from home, so this isn't priority. Good news is it only happened once yesterday.
PS. I had my share of AMD bad driver experiences. I have an older AMD A6 laptop that I can't install the latest control center (or w/e they call it now) on because it causes the entire machine to stutter horribly. I have to unpack drivers and point windows to the drivers only. That being said, annoying, but didn't cause me to lose any work. It's normally obvious and I can revert back to older drivers for a time being while they fix things.
Armenius
Extremely [H]
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BSOD is usually fixed by doing a clean reinstall of the driver. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say that an image made for another laptop configuration was used on this one. People say you can just swap video cards without uninstalling the driver so long as it's from the same manufactuer, but I've always had nothing but problems doing it this way.
No, the image was made for this specific model. Also, we aren't given admin rights so reinstalling and clean install isn't possible. On a good note, after doing it about 3 times I haven't had it happen recently. Not really sure what or why and with limited access not much troubleshooting I can do. As I said, mostly just venting.
It's all anecdotal and emotional to a degree. 3 out of 4 AMD gpus I've run have left me pissing away time waiting on drivers where as on just over a dozen NVIDIA cards I had no notable problems with drivers. That being said I blame my self for jumping on a vega 64 mid driver issues I didnt even bother to research but I will be waiting again (like the last time I had major amd driver issues somewhere around 2013 I think) because I'm salty and looking to the thing that hasn't crapped on me is my emotional and rational solution. But luke I said it anecdotal. I haven't personally purchased and used enough of a sample size of either manufacture products to make a real statement about reliability. Its similar with vehicles. You can find a group wronged by every vehicle manufacturer it's not even hard. At the end of the day statics matter and millions of faulty problematic products and service are released everyday. There will always be an acceptable number of pissed off people and being part of that number sucks.
JMCB
Gawd
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- May 26, 2010
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- 650
I've used both for over a decade. Current main system displayed in signature below (Nvidia). Second system is an i7 8700K with an AMD 5700 XT. So many problems with the AMD system - black screens, freeze ups. I've tried many different versions of drivers, and some are better than others, but eventually I'll have a problem again. A couple of generations ago, I had R9 290x in quadfire setup. Drivers worked well on that system for several years (even with a quadfire setup) until an update in 2016, then nothing but problems after that. I will stay say AMD's drivers are garbage, and stand by it.
serial__thrilla
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2018
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- 171
Eh, I don't think AMD drivers are necessarily bad. They are, however, clunky as f**k, because they were designed by engineers, to be used by the same engineers. They lack the average-user-friendly finesse; it's like the people that designed them used Windows 95 as the prime design example to be followed.
Yeah, I've been back and forth and have had issues and/or no issues with both, just hit or miss really. That said right now I run pretty much all AMD due to cost/perf (at the time of purchase) and really haven't had any issues to note (Except with their damn interface on an old laptop. I have to install the drivers but can't install the control panel otherwise the laptop stutters and is unusable). My most recent GPU is an RX570, so can't really comment on Vega or any more recent stuff personally. Both of my daughters have RX 560's, my son is the one with the RX 570, I run a fury nano in my ITX box, my wife has a Fury X (HMB version) in her desktop. I have had zero issues with any of them. I used to run a few nvidia cards but when it was time to upgrade I just found better prices on the AMD stuff. Will I go back with nvidia? I am thinking about it mostly for some machine learning stuff, but other than that, I'm still not a huge fan after the whole GPP thing and I don't buy high end cards so I don't care if AMD can compete there or not. Due to having like 6 desktops + my server, I tend to look at the $100->$200 range depending, so plenty of competition in that area. I don't play to many games, I have dual 27" monitors with freesync, both are only 1080 and max at like 75Hz, so even if I did I don't need much. I do more development work these days, so the GPU isn't as important.