State of AMD Drivers in 2016?

E

exlink

Supreme [H]ardness
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Dec 16, 2006
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No, this is not a troll thread - it is a legitimate question to those who own AMD cards on what their experience has been with AMD drivers recently. I'm aware that AMD has basically revamped their driver software package under the "Crimson" name. How have drivers been in regards to gaming mostly on a single screen with a single card?

I'm asking because I'm about to build a new PC and the R9 390 is looking very enticing and I'm strongly considering getting it over the GTX 970. I've mostly had Nvidia cards in the past (with the exception of the Radeon 9800 and a pair of HD 5870s), so I'm not very familiar with their driver support as of late - all I know is that when I had their cards I didn't run into many issues while others complained of AMD's "dreaded drivers".
 
I'm running Win10 and a single R9 390 right now.

The drivers are just fine. The only problem I even ran into when I first got the 390 was the screen going to sleep and the card not waking it up unless I unplugged and replugged the DP cable. that has since been remedied.
 
AMD's drivers have always been fine as long as you're running a single card in Windows. Add a second card in windows, and it will function, just don't expect crossfire fixes as fast as nv.

If you're planning to run anything other than windows or do VGA passthrough in linux into a Windows VM (which was my case), do your research first.
 
Everything has been good for me the last few generations I have bought.
 
I have not had a problem with AMD drivers. Only a few times I've had to roll back due to performance issues. Overall the new Crimson 16.1 series drivers have been the best released in some time with great performance and stability.
 
I havent updated to the latest drivers, so take this for what it's worth. I havent had any problems except for the well-known black screen when coming out of sleep mode. I solved that by simply disabling sleep mode. Aside from that my experience with my 290 has been awesome.
 
People have complained a lot more in the last six months about cards that would not clock up to full speed:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1888515

Seems it's caused by more power states added to the 300-series cards. There's workarounds, but that's not what you should expect from top-quality drivers in 2016!
 
Drivers work well enough for my R9 290. Other than slow support for Fallout 4, it's be going good.
 
I get displaylink failures on unreal 4 games with my mg279q monitor (screen goes black), and on some other games like the division beta.
The r9 380 has a crashing problem with unreal 4 engine games when shadows are turned on.

I have a r9 fury btw.
 
Curl said:
AMD's drivers have always been fine as long as you're running a single card in Windows. Add a second card in windows, and it will function, just don't expect crossfire fixes as fast as nv.

If you're planning to run anything other than windows or do VGA passthrough in linux into a Windows VM (which was my case), do your research first.
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I had dual 7970s before this and Crossfire in general worked just fine.

The only games that I played that didn't work well with Crossfire were ones that were older AND had no need for Crossfire in the first place.

Sure, some of the games didn't load up both cards to 100% with v-sync disabled but big whoop. At 1200p, I could max out pretty much anything and still maintain 60fps.

For those few games that had inherent issues with input lag with v-sync enabled, I just disabled v-sync.

A few games that wouldn't run at 60fps with everything turned up and didn't have a problem with v-sync input lag, I would just enable triple buffering.

People make a lot more stink about minor-ish problems then needs to be.

And a lot of the problems with dual card support lays at the feet of the programmers who don't hold to standards. Then when it doesn't work right, people blame crappy drivers when it really isn't usually the case.

This is on both AMD an Nvidia.

Crap programming leads to crap performance. AMD and Nvidia work to try to make stuff run as well as possible, but when the studio who released the game in the first place is incompetent and/or refuses to fix stuff, there is only so much AMD or Nvidia can do to make it work as intended.
 
Windows:
No issues at all with single card. Only real concern is comparative performance.

Linux:
Open source drivers work well on Linux, but performance is a lacking. Closed source have best performance, but limitations and some issues.

Bottom line is AMD users are waiting for DX12/Vulkan to roll out. That's what the cards were designed to do. At this point a 390 should be a much better choice than a 970.
 
Dual 280x cards for years now. Save a small issue, which as has been fixed, with the second card not going into ULPS for a couple revisions, is been smooth going.

I am excluding nvidia sponsored games which I wouldn't expect to work properly to begin with.

Let's see if Polaris will give me reason to upgrade!
 
I *think* clockblocker has helped mitigate the issues with downclocking using an R9 Fury. Randomly, in the middle of a game, my monitor would lose input and the sounds kind of loop. Not all games, but I noticed it happened in the same spots in Tomb Raider (reboot) as well as a couple of times in Dragon's Dogma. Also would run into some issues with DA:I. As an aside, I've also gotten a lot of blue-screens with Windows 10 that I never got with Windows 7 -- ever.

It's a bit annoying I have to go into the registry to disable ULPS and use clockblocker just to save myself the hassle of needing to do a hard reset in the middle of a game. But compared to the driver crashes with my 670s in Windows 10 (they were pretty flawless in Windows 7) it's a wash as far as I am concerned.

I think Crimson is quite okay overall, despite the downclocking.
 
I was running 2x 295x2's for a long time. I sold one and went back to an R9-290x with my 295x2. Running flawlessly, and I love the new Crimson drivers.
 
I have a 290X and a 970 at home in separate systems. I've had the 290X longer than the 970 but I don't really run into driver issues with either. I've had some issues a few weeks ago with Firefox and the 970 system for some reason when just doing 2d desktop stuff. The other system is hooked up to a dual monitor setup and once in a great while I get a few glitches doing heavy multi tasking stuff. Never a problem with 1 monitor though.
 
Drivers have been great ever since the 1800XT days... never had major issues that were not addressed in a timely manner.
 
I don't think the drivers are up to par. I recently (last week) went from an R9 Fury to a GTX 970, the Fury should be faster in just about everything but the GTX 970 is showing 50% frame rate lead in many of my games. Note that I don't play a lot of big AAA titles except FO4, and AMD only really focuses on the biggest new releases.

In the last 6 months I've had R9 Fury (multiple), 290X (x3), 390X (x2), 380/X and an R9 280. All of them had some form of issues with the games I want to play. None of them offered a good experience. I was always fucking around with AMD drivers, programs like clockblocker, afterburner, etc. either trying to get the performance I know the hardware is capable of, or trying to keep the clock speeds from dropping for no reason. Even the R9 280 (7950) had issues with any driver past 14.4 and getting stuck at its 827mhz base clock even when overclocked to 1050mhz.

The 970 has been such a breath of fresh air, I haven't even bothered to install AB or overclock it because it works out of the damn box. If AMD even gets on top of this stuff I'll go back to them but I think Pascal is in my future. I've spent more money on AMD cards in the last 6 months trying to get one that runs great than most people spend on a full rig every 2-3 years. I'm done with it.
 
I get annoyed when my Crimson menu turns clear lol
Capture_zps8fqtcoun.png

Dam it!:D
 
Thanks for the replies everyone - ended up getting a 970 after being offered one at a price I couldn't resist. It'll be just a place holder until Polaris or Pascal anyway. Good to know that the drivers don't seem to be as some people make them out to be. Makes me more excited to see what Polaris could offer! :D
 
exlink said:
Thanks for the replies everyone - ended up getting a 970 after being offered one at a price I couldn't resist. It'll be just a place holder until Polaris or Pascal anyway. Good to know that the drivers don't seem to be as some people make them out to be. Makes me more excited to see what Polaris could offer! :D
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Congrats on your new card!
 
cyclone3d said:
I had dual 7970s before this and Crossfire in general worked just fine.

The only games that I played that didn't work well with Crossfire were ones that were older AND had no need for Crossfire in the first place.

Sure, some of the games didn't load up both cards to 100% with v-sync disabled but big whoop. At 1200p, I could max out pretty much anything and still maintain 60fps.

For those few games that had inherent issues with input lag with v-sync enabled, I just disabled v-sync.

A few games that wouldn't run at 60fps with everything turned up and didn't have a problem with v-sync input lag, I would just enable triple buffering.

People make a lot more stink about minor-ish problems then needs to be.

And a lot of the problems with dual card support lays at the feet of the programmers who don't hold to standards. Then when it doesn't work right, people blame crappy drivers when it really isn't usually the case.

This is on both AMD an Nvidia.

Crap programming leads to crap performance. AMD and Nvidia work to try to make stuff run as well as possible, but when the studio who released the game in the first place is incompetent and/or refuses to fix stuff, there is only so much AMD or Nvidia can do to make it work as intended.
Click to expand...

100% agree.

I've had dual card setups from both camps. It sounds good on paper, but the perception doesn't always pan out with reality.
 
LigTasm said:
I don't think the drivers are up to par. I recently (last week) went from an R9 Fury to a GTX 970, the Fury should be faster in just about everything but the GTX 970 is showing 50% frame rate lead in many of my games. Note that I don't play a lot of big AAA titles except FO4, and AMD only really focuses on the biggest new releases.

In the last 6 months I've had R9 Fury (multiple), 290X (x3), 390X (x2), 380/X and an R9 280. All of them had some form of issues with the games I want to play. None of them offered a good experience. I was always fucking around with AMD drivers, programs like clockblocker, afterburner, etc. either trying to get the performance I know the hardware is capable of, or trying to keep the clock speeds from dropping for no reason. Even the R9 280 (7950) had issues with any driver past 14.4 and getting stuck at its 827mhz base clock even when overclocked to 1050mhz.

The 970 has been such a breath of fresh air, I haven't even bothered to install AB or overclock it because it works out of the damn box. If AMD even gets on top of this stuff I'll go back to them but I think Pascal is in my future. I've spent more money on AMD cards in the last 6 months trying to get one that runs great than most people spend on a full rig every 2-3 years. I'm done with it.
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It would have been nice if you mentioned these games you play. Helps loads with those that are curious what the problem could be.
 
Well, the GTX 970 deal fell through. Ended up taking that as a sign and bought a Sapphire Nitro R9 390 after all! :cool:

JustReason said:
It would have been nice if you mentioned these games you play. Helps loads with those that are curious what the problem could be.
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Would also like to know because I'm having a hard time believing a GTX 970 having a 50% frame rate lead in "many" games. Almost every benchmark I've seen puts the GTX 970 and R9 390 within 10% of each other. I can't see a GTX 970 having a 50% lead in "many" games especially over a R9 Fury.
 
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exlink said:
Well, the GTX 970 deal fell through. Ended up taking that as a sign and bought a Sapphire Nitro R9 390 after all! :cool:



Would also like to know because I'm having a hard time believing a GTX 970 having a 50% frame rate lead in "many" games. Almost every benchmark I've seen puts the GTX 970 and R9 390 within 10% of each other. I can't see a GTX 970 having a 50% lead in "many" games especially over a R9 Fury.
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I play a lot of old games, I mean dosbox kinda stuff too. I have never had an issue getting 60fps and if unlocked/uncapped most old games can hit 100s to 1000s in fps.
 
JustReason said:
I play a lot of old games, I mean dosbox kinda stuff too. I have never had an issue getting 60fps and if unlocked/uncapped most old games can hit 100s to 1000s in fps.
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I used to play a lot of train simulator dual 290x got me 20fps average 10fps in some situations. Same game single 980Ti 50fps average, with 30 at the worst places. It has to be a driver issue. I agree with the assumption that AMD focuses only on the major AAA titles, but if you play anything else you'll suffer.
 
I don't game nearly as much as I would like to anymore... I probably get in five hours a week or so now.

With that said... lately I've just been playing Battlefront and Sniper Elite 2. I run both at 4k with my crossfired 290x setup. 60fps... no issues. I usually install the latest AMD driver releases within a day or two of them coming out. AMD Uninstaller, reboot, DDU, reboot, then I install the new drivers... seems to work well for me.
 
JustReason said:
It would have been nice if you mentioned these games you play. Helps loads with those that are curious what the problem could be.
Click to expand...

These days I play a lot of Armored Warfare and WoT, some WoWS. Not big titles by any means but popular in their own rights. For example, I submitted a bug report for AW where the ammo counter and health bar break in a manner similar to what happened with the compass in FO4 with 290-290X cards month ago, but it continues to persist after several driver revisions while Nvidia already has a GFE and SLI profile for the game.

With the Fury or the 390X, I was struggling to hit 60 fps with many of the settings turned to low (Cryengine) and averaging closer to 45, the cards struggled with foliage in particular. This was not a tesselation problem, I tested by turning it off in the CCC. With the 970 I've left it at ultra on everything and I can add MSAA on top of it an still maintain 100fps on most maps. I know the AMD hardware can do better on this engine, we see it in the benchmarks for other games using it, but they simply don't care about titles that aren't big headliners because they don't have the resources. Nvidia had the same performance problems early on but managed to address them almost 6 months ago now.

Now, in a game like Dragon Age Inquisition that I also play, the AMD cards show a clear advantage that I expect to see comparing the hardware. Its disappointing to me, I really want to support AMD but I'm at the point where I just won't spend any more money on them if I can't get performance int he games I play most.

BTW, for all you who think I'm an Nivida fanboy these are the cards I've had in the last 6 months that I even bothered to get a picture of to sell on the forums (I'm missing 3 more R9 Fury - 2 Sapphire and one XFX, an R9 290 Vapor-X and a pair of R9 380's). The only Nvidia card I've had otherwise is a GTX 950:

IMAG0304.jpg

IMAG0285.jpg

IMAG0163.jpg

IMAG0106.jpg

IMAG0089.jpg

IMAG0083.jpg
 
I'm still on non-crimson 15.11.1 drivers. When I tested the crimson drivers they would crash in BO3 and SW:BF. I don't know if these new versions fixed that, but I'm not willing to try since my games run fine as it is.
 
FWIW I bought LigTasm's Fury Nitro that he was having issues with. Im not seeing any of the down clocking issues he was having so I think its another problem specific to his rig. Down clocking IS a real issue and Im not sure AMD knows whats causing it, but its not an issue for everyone or every game. My issue with AMD's driver is the slow support. It always takes a while to get an optimized driver for new releases.
 
JustinCorrigible said:
That's a whole lot of untrue, and a dangerously generalized statement.
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Yes, because occasionally they fucked up with AAA titles as well. But I admit, not all indie, or niche games will have problems. But the chance is greater with AMD, and don't even dream of CF to work. Thankfully most indie games will run just fine on a single card, unless you play at 4K, what I was doing at the time.

The difference between AMD and NVIDIA is, that with AMD I was always actively waiting for new drivers, to see if they addressed outstanding issues. With NVIDIA there are usually 3 or 4 intermediate drivers released that I skip entirely because I didn't even bother to check for new drivers.

NVIDIA not just releases more drivers, they tend to have less issues as well.
 
HybridHB said:
FWIW I bought LigTasm's Fury Nitro that he was having issues with. Im not seeing any of the down clocking issues he was having so I think its another problem specific to his rig. Down clocking IS a real issue and Im not sure AMD knows whats causing it, but its not an issue for everyone or every game. My issue with AMD's driver is the slow support. It always takes a while to get an optimized driver for new releases.
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I had no issue with downclocking prior to crimson. I stayed on the 15.7.1 because it didn't have that effect on it, which is how I knew it was definitely the drivers and didn't RMA the card. I only got downclocking in non-AAA titles as well, like in DA:I or Witcher 3 there was no issue.
 
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LigTasm said:
I had no issue with downclocking prior to crimson. I stayed on the 15.7.1 because it didn't have that effect on it, which is how I knew it was definitely the drivers and didn't RMA the card.
Click to expand...

Im not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying I'm not seeing the down clocking using crimson on the exact same card so its not an issue for everyone.
 
M76 said:
NVIDIA not just releases more drivers, they tend to have less issues as well.
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Well yes, that can happen when one company (AMD) gives open access to their software to everybody while the other company (Nvidia) deliberately locks their software to make it difficult for others to optimize for.
 
Creig said:
Well yes, that can happen when one company (AMD) gives open access to their software to everybody while the other company (Nvidia) deliberately locks their software to make it difficult for others to optimize for.
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I don't care if drivers are open or not, if NVIDIA goes the extra mile to optimize their drivers themselves. Game developers can't be bothered to optimize for AMD it seems, regardless of being open.

In fact AMD's attitude seems to me like walking into a service station, and instead of they fixing the car, they give me the tools to do it myself.
 
M76 said:
I don't care if drivers are open or not, if NVIDIA goes the extra mile to optimize their drivers themselves. Game developers can't be bothered to optimize for AMD it seems, regardless of being open.

In fact AMD's attitude seems to me like walking into a service station, and instead of they fixing the car, they give me the tools to do it myself.
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And you are sidestepping the issue here, he is not talking about drivers he is talking about Nvidia features in games which use a blackbox approach which can not be optimized for because Nvidia blackbox decides what function call to use in the AMD drivers...

If you want attitude check out Batman:AK .. They gave up .....
 
M76 said:
I don't care if drivers are open or not, if NVIDIA goes the extra mile to optimize their drivers themselves. Game developers can't be bothered to optimize for AMD it seems, regardless of being open.

In fact AMD's attitude seems to me like walking into a service station, and instead of they fixing the car, they give me the tools to do it myself.
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It's more like you walked into a Ford dealership with a brand new Dodge and complain that the Ford dealership's computer can't read all the error codes. Eventually they will hack around the issues and figure it out. But it is nothing like just going to the Dodge in the first place. Then what happens when the new series of Dodge cars come out? The Ford dealership has to start over from scratch and figure it out again.

If PhysX and Nvidia effects are your thing then you should always purchase an Nvidia card. Don't even glance at the AMD section as it's not what you need. I don't see what the big deal is personally. Buy the right tool for the job the first time and be happy with your purchase. In the end it's all about gaming and NOT about what's the name of your gear inside your PC.
 
The biggest thing everyone seems to forget is that IHVs should almost never have to release a driver update. That whole mess never should have been allowed to happen in the first place. That may be one of the biggest benefits of DX12/Vulkan and something at least personally I hope goes away. I'd imagine that's a large part of why devs were looking for something different there as well. No more need for SLI/Crossfire drivers. Re-ordering calls for better multithreading, memory management, etc.

The whole blackbox features issue is something else entirely. The ONLY reason it's there it to hurt gamers for a competitive advantage. If it wasn't there would be no reason to keep it closed.
 
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