Are AMD drivers really still terrible?

Serious Sam 4, 6900XT using Vulkan has stutter and pauses, DX 12 is fine, Variable Rate Shading is pixelated on the 6900 XT but is not on the 3080 Ti plus the 3080 Ti flies using Vulkan. Is that developer or drivers? Both need to work together if possible, Does AMD driver team have open doors for developers, help or issues? That is the only notable issue with using the 6900 XT I can think of. Nvidia GF Experience is just a ghastly program, the new performance tuning section of it is a joke, the overlay for in game performance monitor looks almost the same as AMDs. AMD UI is superior to Nvidia's, profiles for each game, OCing, monitor settings etc. I just conclude there is no right general answer to AMD or Nvidia drivers, depends on what you are doing and program being used as well as Windows updates can throw some snags in there.
 
I replaced a GTX 780 (low memory) with a RX 570 in the family room. That system sees just about every game you could imagine. From cyberpunk 2077 to some really obscure shit. Not a single driver problem except in games that are known to have issues with Steam's Cloud Save feature.

Especially with COVID and everyone locked inside the amount of games we burned through I would say something like 3 or 4 games per month. No issues. And this was my first AMD card ever.
 
kac77 said:
I replaced a GTX 780 (low memory) with a RX 570 in the family room. That system sees just about every game you could imagine. From cyberpunk 2077 to some really obscure shit. Not a single driver problem except in games that are known to have issues with Steam's Cloud Save feature.

Especially with COVID and everyone locked inside the amount of games we burned through I would say something like 3 or 4 games per month. No issues. And this was my first AMD card ever.
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Polaris is the new Tahiti.
 
Had no driver issues, but have had two dead 6800XTs (different systems; one DOA - crashed instantly with any 3D load, the other lasted 6 months and now all but one DisplayPort are dead. And the hdmi port is flaky). Drivers have been perfect. Just got the first back from RMA (Asus was really easy for once!). Second goes back tomorrow (ASRock)
 
lopoetve said:
Had no driver issues, but have had two dead 6800XTs (different systems; one DOA - crashed instantly with any 3D load, the other lasted 6 months and now all but one DisplayPort are dead. And the hdmi port is flaky). Drivers have been perfect. Just got the first back from RMA (Asus was really easy for once!). Second goes back tomorrow (ASRock)
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Might check out that PSU there, buddy.
 
FrgMstr said:
Might check out that PSU there, buddy.
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Two totally different systems. One is an x299 with a be quiet 1200, the other TRX40 with an ASUS Thor 1600. No parts swapped between them ever. :(.

Both are also on separate CyberPower 1500VA UPS too.
 
I've got a 6900xt in my office box and a Radeon VII in my bedroom box and compared to the 3090 in my gaming box, I would say that AMD drivers are much slower to update. Good or bad that's up to you.

Compared to older AMD drivers, the UI has been much improved from my recollection. Especially if you are using it in an otherwise all AMD system. Nice integration there.

While benchmark racing may be in Green Teams favor, for practical purposes I don't really notice much difference.

To your point - the drivers are much improved from AMD's past drivers IMO.
 
dvsman said:
I've got a 6900xt in my office box and a Radeon VII in my bedroom box and compared to the 3090 in my gaming box, I would say that AMD drivers are much slower to update. Good or bad that's up to you.

Compared to older AMD drivers, the UI has been much improved from my recollection. Especially if you are using it in an otherwise all AMD system. Nice integration there.

While benchmark racing may be in Green Teams favor, for practical purposes I don't really notice much difference.

To your point - the drivers are much improved from AMD's past drivers IMO.
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Honestly, it depends entirely on the game. If I'm playing metro exodus enhanced or control, my rtx 3080 destroys my rx 6800. If it's something like godfall, then, yea.


Overall, when it comes to driver quality, I haven't had many issues with the rx 6800 or 3080.
 
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Yep, everyone really needs to look at their specific games / apps and see what will work best for that use-case. Or buy both :-D

I'm not a competitive FPS player so getting frames in the hundreds isn't a priority for me. My two current monitors only go up to 120hz (34") and 144hz (49") so anything beyond those caps becomes overkill. Heck, if I can get 60+ frames with everything on ULTRA I'm happy. Right now 3090 or 6900xt both get the job done.

But to stay on point for the OP's question, in my recent experience, no the AMD drivers are not as terrible as they used to be.
 
If you go by what the internet says I must be the luckiest SOB on the planet. I have had no definitive "it's the drivers!" moment with either brand. That being said I can tell you GTA5 actually ran better on my Vega 64 than it does on my 3080. On my 3080 if I turn off vsync it stutters like a bastard.
 
BTW, I found a post on reddit where the poster suggested changing the window size from 2 to 1 in the .ini file. Seemed to fix the crashing issue (so far)
 
Does anyone else remember the days when AMD (then ATi) had superior 2D display drivers?
 
I've had a few crashes but nothing that can lead back to it being an AMD GPU driver specific issue. Granted I bought a 5700XT months after the drivers supposedly "stabilized". Honestly though, I think a lot of the issues AMD had early on weren't just driver specific, but due to cheaply made cards. Not saying the card was cheap to buy, but cheaply made. A lot of the people I've spoken to about the issues they had all had either MSI, Asrock, XFX, AMD, on the other hand those with ASUS, PowerColor, and Sapphire models didn't have many, if any issues.

In a nutshell, my opinion, drivers are fine. No better and no worse than Nvidia's offerings.
 
Does anybody have issues with games that are powered by CryEngine? So far Crysis 3, Homefront Revolution and Ryse: Son Of Rome are experiencing inconsistent framerates and in some areas the card doesn't fully utilize and results in low framerates. I game at 4K by the way.
 
I've used both AMD and nVidia for many years now. My first AMD card was actually an ATI 9800 Pro. I HAVE had more issues in the past with AMD/ATI ranging from odd quirks when running multi-monitors to buggy drivers when a game is first launched. The most frustrating issue I had was they'd fix an issue with an update only to have it reintroduced in the next update and not readdressed again for several more revisions. Their drivers are quite a bit better today. My preference is still nVidia though. I would consider AMD if they had a notably superior product. If it's merely comparable, I go nVidia.
 
I think AMD drivers have gotten better over the years.

I still prefer nVidia drivers without geforce experience just because its lightweight and simple compared to AMD's AIO package, but the drivers themselves were stable.
 
I think a big advantage is Nvidia plays dirty. They work with game developers before release and often have specialized drivers optimizing/hacking performance ready to go on launch day. Meanwhile AMD has to wait till release, inspect, then put out a driver update. This was particularly bad during the days of Crossfire/SLI.

It was one of the reasons I switched 5 years ago honestly. Things just work better on Nvidia.
 
Direkt said:
Does anyone else remember the days when AMD (then ATi) had superior 2D display drivers?
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They had plain superior hardware. It wasn't the drivers that made them good. I had two systems back in the day, a tnt2, and Radeon LE. It was an ewww 16 bit, every time I used the tnt2.
 
Put it this way. I'm trading out my 3090 for a 6900XT just to play around, so I don't feel like AMD drivers are hindering that much.
 
AMD drivers are actually pretty good. I think a lot of the time people spread bogus info without any first-hand experience.

I mean, the driver interface alone, and all you can do in there, blows Nvidia out the water. And the changes are instant, not like Nvidia where their Windows 2000 theme UI freezes for 10 seconds every time you click a button.

And you can record video without signing up for an account and having to do a captcha on your local machine. That is worth something.

I've been running both Nvidia and AMD for a while (on separate machines) and the only notable issue I had was when the 5700 card came out, the drivers were rough. I did see the black screens, had issues with overlays, etc. but there were work-arounds. Eventually it was fixed.

So I am not going to say there were no issues whatsoever, because that wouldn't be true, but I've also had serious issues with Nvidia as well and people seem keen on forgetting about that. Honestly I would say overall AMD is better.
 
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From a strictly gaming perspective, AMD drivers are pretty solid and performance is right there with the nvidia counterpart. That all said... the only grip(s) I have with AMD is their encoding crap, and recording with Relive. I guess I was spoiled with Nvidia's Nvenc, because I've had nothing but issues using my 6800 with both Relive and OBS. Actually OBS gave me so many headaches I just started using Relive, but with Relive I get weird colour issues on text. Nvidia and OBS is heaven.

In terms of AMD's UI, well... yeah *sigh* it IS better than Nvidia's, but they've shoved so much crap in there, most of which is useless to the average person and/or never gets used. It's way to busy looking. I feel like AMD thinks in order to compete with Nvidia they need to keep coming up with weekly new features to jam into their UI with some new Radeon[Insert Name] feature and associated toggle switch.

But yeah... in terms of dropping in any recent AMD card for gaming, the drivers are very solid.
 
Strange. I've had no problems with Relive. Do you mean text in Windows or text in games?

I recorded all of these in Relive with a Radeon VII.

 
cybereality said:
Strange. I've had no problems with Relive. Do you mean text in Windows or text in games?
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Text in Windows. Is has this stupid red/green, looks like this when recorded with Relive.

amdtext.png
 
This system has a cheap on sale Evga 600 watt power supply = $44.99 , MSI 5700 Mech OC single 8 pin with 5600x in 1080p High .. My 18 year old daughter is way better then my 54 year azz


with data

 
dave343 said:
From a strictly gaming perspective, AMD drivers are pretty solid and performance is right there with the nvidia counterpart. That all said... the only grip(s) I have with AMD is their encoding crap, and recording with Relive. I guess I was spoiled with Nvidia's Nvenc, because I've had nothing but issues using my 6800 with both Relive and OBS. Actually OBS gave me so many headaches I just started using Relive, but with Relive I get weird colour issues on text. Nvidia and OBS is heaven.

In terms of AMD's UI, well... yeah *sigh* it IS better than Nvidia's, but they've shoved so much crap in there, most of which is useless to the average person and/or never gets used. It's way to busy looking. I feel like AMD thinks in order to compete with Nvidia they need to keep coming up with weekly new features to jam into their UI with some new Radeon[Insert Name] feature and associated toggle switch.

But yeah... in terms of dropping in any recent AMD card for gaming, the drivers are very solid.
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With an AMD card, you still need to run OBS as an administrator. you used to have to do that with all videocards. But OBS fixed it for Nvidia, but not AMD, for some reason....

And then...AMD's encoder just isn't nearly as good as NVENC on Turing and Ampere. However, you can get pretty darn decent results-----if you stream at 720p and then utilize all of the options. The most important one is whatever the setting was which helps re-allocate bitrate to the "flat" areas of the screen. I would post the exact settings I used....but I had to send my 6700xt in for RMA. I cant remember how many b-frames they allow but you should use at least 4. If AMD allows 6, then use 6. Also activate the high quality motion feature.

For some reason, their encoder is utter crap for 1080p. But it works pretty well for 720p. Particularly for "noisy" stuff like grass. Its actually really good at that. Their color saturation isn't quite as good. But at 720p, I'd say their encorder quality is comparable to X.264 fast or Medium.

Here's a little clip I made with Dark Souls 3, before I sent the card back RMA.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9sfc6r7p1n1dtuh/DS3AMD.mkv?dl=0

*make sure to download the source file
 
chameleoneel said:
With an AMD card, you still need to run OBS as an administrator. you used to have to do that with all videocards. But OBS fixed it for Nvidia, but not AMD, for some reason....

And then...AMD's encoder just isn't nearly as good as NVENC on Turing and Ampere. However, you can get pretty darn decent results-----if you stream at 720p and then utilize all of the options. The most important one is whatever the setting was which helps re-allocate bitrate to the "flat" areas of the screen. I would post the exact settings I used....but I had to send my 6700xt in for RMA. I cant remember how many b-frames they allow but you should use at least 4. If AMD allows 6, then use 6. Also activate the high quality motion feature.

For some reason, their encoder is utter crap for 1080p. But it works pretty well for 720p. Particularly for "noisy" stuff like grass. Its actually really good at that. Their color saturation isn't quite as good. But at 720p, I'd say their encorder quality is comparable to X.264 fast or Medium.

Here's a little clip I made with Dark Souls 3, before I sent the card back RMA.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9sfc6r7p1n1dtuh/DS3AMD.mkv?dl=0
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I just record never stream and usually at 1080p/1440p. With Nvenc I was using CQP 14-15, and while the files sizes are large I don't mind because the recordings were pretty awesome. With AMD Relive, I am using AVC with 30Mbs and overall, it looks okaaay... As for AMD and OBS, I'm pretty sure I always run it under admin, I just kept having issues with it crashing after trying to stop the recording. Eventually after fighting to get OBS functioning like it was with Nvidia, I just switched over to Relive. Ideally I prefer h265 with AMD, but then Davinci hates h265 and I can't be bothered to waste time running each 5GB clip through handbrake to get x264 so AVC it is.
 
dave343 said:
I just record never stream and usually at 1080p/1440p. With Nvenc I was using CQP 14-15, and while the files sizes are large I don't mind because the recordings were pretty awesome. With AMD Relive, I am using AVC with 30Mbs and overall, it looks okaaay... As for AMD and OBS, I'm pretty sure I always run it under admin, I just kept having issues with it crashing after trying to stop the recording. Eventually after fighting to get OBS functioning like it was with Nvidia, I just switched over to Relive. Ideally I prefer h265 with AMD, but then Davinci hates h265 and I can't be bothered to waste time running each 5GB clip through handbrake to get x264 so AVC it is.
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Ah, ok. Yeah that video I posted is for streaming settings. 6,000kbps ;)
 
AMDs encoder is not great for h264 period. NVENC rocks for that because they have used it for a long time now in their enterprise VDI products. That being said, their H265 encoder is excellent, minus the issues you noted.
Both VMware Blast and Citrix HCX will use real time 264 for desktop streaming. That’s nvidia specialty
 
HockeyJon said:
As someone who uses both Nvidia and AMD cards, I honestly haven’t seen a major difference between the two since the catalyst was released by ATI back in the day. Both have issues with their drivers, and I haven’t had a markedly better or worse driver experience with either. Most people parrot the “AMD drivers suck” line because it’s what the cool kids, who haven’t owned an AMD card since the ATI RAGE 128 they had in the 90s, like to say.
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It's just Nvidia can afford more shills :rolleyes: to post
 
travm said:
They had plain superior hardware. It wasn't the drivers that made them good. I had two systems back in the day, a tnt2, and Radeon LE. It was an ewww 16 bit, every time I used the tnt2.
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This exactly. If memory serves it was the RAMDAC which made the difference for 2D. Matrox typically had the best because that was their main focus but ATI was typically very close if not equal much of the time and required 3rd party card builders to use the same quality RAMDACs. nVidia didn't have the same requirements for 3rd party builders so they typically went with the shittiest and cheapest RAMDACs they could get away with. Not all of the 3rd party nVidia builders used shitty RAMDACs and some would use better RAMDACs on higher priced cards. This caused a lot of variance with nVidia cards and the rule was nVidia cards had inferior 2D with a few exceptions.
 
Just to add a few more points about the AMD driver debacle over the years...

Personally, as mentioned I've never had an issue and find the AMD drivers rock solid for a drop in gaming experiencing, but that said most friends and family prefer Geforce and with good reason. For example; I gave my father a X1950 back in the day to run his golf sims and he had hated the loud noise, and various issues we had trying to get the drivers installed. IIRC I believe it was because AMD had stopped supported the card and we were trying to hack the inf files to get the card installed. It worked, but that soured his experience, and coupled with the loud fan and heat, he switched over to a GTX 750, and then I upgraded him to a GTX 1050ti which he still runs. My son had a RX 570 8GB in his rig, but certain Roblox games which he loved kept causing black screens at random and very often. I fought with his PC but in the end switched him over to a RTX 2060 and he's never had another issue. My father in law also had a RX 580 4GB and many of the games he was trying to play -- Obduction, Event[0] -- were causing random black screens as well. Actually, now that I think of it I also had this annoying issue with my 5700 XT where when the monitor went to sleep, when I woke it the screen would be in a super low res like 800x600 and stretched so I couldn't even read the text. Only resolution was to reboot the system. AMD did eventually fix this issue but it was around for a good 6 months.

People remember the 1 bad experience, they'll never remember the 10 good ones. Out of 20 people I ask if they prefer AMD or Nvidia, 19 will say Nvidia because AMD runs hot, loud and have terrible drivers. And while most of those people are uninformed and shouldn't be within 6 feet of a computer, I bet some of them also did have a bad experience with AMD. As other's have pointed out, this mostly has lingered around from the Rage128 days when ATI had horrid drivers, and various other cards that ran at oven temps. 2900xt... Nvidia too has always had it's own issues though, "Driver stopped responding" lol, the 400 series of cards that ran hot as hell, or the 8800Gt that ran at 110c, but by that point Nvidia had already established itself in the gaming area that most issues blew over very quickly.

At the end of the day, AMD makes some rock solid cards and their drivers are very mature and robust. But it is those one off issues, be in in a certain game someone plays, or the said black screen issue, it's enough to sour someone's opinion of AMD. Nvidia with their larger Driver team, more RD, and their reach into both smaller and the larger game dev's has "most" of those one off issues already ironed out. And with Nvidia by and large the more superior brand in peoples minds, any Nvidia issue gets looked over where as any AMD issue is ammo for AMD drivers suck argument.
 
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dave343 said:
[ ... ]

People remember the 1 bad experience, they'll never remember the 10 good ones. [ ..]

At the end of the day, AMD makes some rock solid cards and their drivers are very mature and robust. But it is those one off issues, be in in a certain game someone plays, or the said black screen issue, it's enough to sour someone's opinion of AMD. Nvidia with their larger Driver team, more RD, and their reach into both smaller and the larger game dev's has "most" of those one off issues already ironed out. And with Nvidia by and large the more superior brand in peoples minds, any Nvidia issue gets looked over where as any AMD issue is ammo for AMD drivers suck argument.
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Same story for Apple vs. the other phone manufacturers. Apply is the "glossy" brand, so they get to charge more and get less attention to their problems.
 
dave343 said:
Actually, now that I think of it I also had this annoying issue with my 5700 XT where when the monitor went to sleep, when I woke it the screen would be in a super low res like 800x600 and stretched so I couldn't even read the text. Only resolution was to reboot the system. AMD did eventually fix this issue but it was around for a good 6 months.
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I've had sleep restore issues on an older AM3+/FX8350 system for years with AMD cards, namely Polaris RX480 8gb and the current RX570 4gb. Though in my experience I'd say it was a combo of a cranky older non-uefi mobo, buggy vid cards and amd drivers. I'm convinced that the early Polaris cards ( rx 400s) with the power draw problems on the pci-e bus and just bugs overall were the main problem. An R9 290 didn't run too well in that same system either. The RX 570 4gb has been in that system now for 2.5 years and been 98% stable. The sapphire 7870 2gb card I had in there from 2014-2016 was rock solid hardware and driver wise.


The biggest issue for me this last year has been Rockstar's horrible patches since July 2020 for RDR2 with the rx 570. I'm sure if it had 8gb ram would be more stable but the game ran fine for 8 months on the Dec 2019 drivers. I usually just rolled over driver installs on the rx 480 and then the 570. It became a 2-3 year test of AMD's drivers. I had no problems other than the RX480's blue screens 2-3 a month ( most likely power draw as it 90% happened on demanding games). The 570 has only had a blue screen and shut down 2-3 times, usually on GTA online (rockstar again) in two years.

Last year with the RDR2 patch requiring the newer 2020 AMD drivers, that game became unstable in the online game. Just random crashes anywhere from 15mins to 2 hours into a session. All during the time when they'd shut out most of the hackers. In about 4 months I probably ran DDU 10-12 times installing drivers to try to fix it. It likely was a Rockstar issue that finally got fixed in November 2020 after a bug that killed online completely for many for 4-5 weeks.

The new 2020 driver system is pretty good overall, far better than in the past. Hopefully they don't redo it all over again as they have in the past. I've lost track of the various names they've used over 7-8 years. These days though given my experience with the polaris cards and older machines, unless I'm getting a good price/perf deal I wait and see where the hardware and driver support ends up in the first 4-6 months of a new chip. I wasn't too surprised with the Navi 1 teething issues and thus skipped it. I'm not paying Nvidia level prices for beta testing AMD hardware.
 
cybereality said:
Strange. I've had no problems with Relive. Do you mean text in Windows or text in games?
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I just took these snaps from recordings I made with AMD Relive. Top part is from a recording in Metro although any game produces the same effect. You can see the Afterburner FPS counter has distorted text colors. Bottom part is taken from my desktop, also recorded with AMD Relive. You can see on both the Icons and the folder text, it's all color distorted. I don't know what the heck this is, so if anyone has any ideas. But this is pretty much the only headache I have right now with the AMD drivers, otherwise stable.

Screenshot 2021-06-24 001304.png
 
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It looks like chroma subsampling to me.

Not sure if it's just the recording, or it's global on your system.

Usually you want to select RGB full for the color settings (in AMD driver interface). You can also try 4:4:4, which should solve this issue if your system can handle it.

You might also need to change it on the video recording, but I haven't seen options for that, my guess is that it uses whatever is set on the desktop.
 
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