Gamers are ditching Radeon graphics cards over driver issues

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erek

erek

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Opinion? Hope for a more than competitive offering soon, i.e R300

"AMD acknowledging the issues is a positive. But working to fix them on a 7 month old product is not. The hardware itself is good and as you know we love the pressure it puts on the graphics card market, so we end up paying less for more capable GPUs. Hopefully at this point they’re throwing every possible resource at this problem and shortly we’ll have a proper fix. Until then, it’s going to be hard to recommend Radeon graphics cards when competing with Nvidia at a similar price to performance ratio."

https://www.techspot.com/news/84005-gamers-ditching-radeon-graphics-cards-over-driver-issues.html
 
Is the hardware actually good or really just broken that they can't figure it out with just software?
 
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Go on r/amd or r/nvidia and you will see a lot of threads where people are ditching Navi because of poor drivers which AMD has failed to address. Big Navi will probably have even more issues. The AMD faithful will keep making excuses while the avg customer will get soured on AMD for years (or forever) and will become NVIDIA customers in the long run. NVIDIA couldn't have asked for better luck here. Gamers Nexus has covered the failure of Navi drivers in a few videos as well, it's about time this issue gets more traction. I advise everyone I know to avoid Navi whenever they ask me about which video card to buy.

It's getting traction on other subs now:
 
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The worst kept secret is finally out of the bag, eh?

That's what happens when reviewers lie through their teeth, because they are really nothing more than "influencers" riding the wave of free stuff and popularity.

Pretty easy to figure out when countless YouTube videos and websites recommend the 5700/5600 line, but every site that sells them are full of angry people returning them.
 
"Gamers are ditching Radeon graphics cards over driver issues"

them's fightin' words!

Reminds me of the early days of the Rage cards, Ragin over their shitty drivers. It wasn't till the R200 that things finally started settling down. I dumped nV for the R8500 and didn't come back till the 6800GT.
 
Funny how none of these articles and posters who don't own/use one of those cards look at or post threads like this;

According to many people my Vega uses many hundreds of watts and has broken drivers too. When in reality it uses under 190W and hasn't had a single driver issue.
 
5150Joker said:
Go on r/amd or r/nvidia and you will see a lot of threads where people are ditching Navi because of poor drivers which AMD has failed to address. Big Navi will probably have even more issues. The AMD faithful will keep making excuses while the avg customer will get soured on AMD for years (or forever) and will become NVIDIA customers in the long run. NVIDIA couldn't have asked for better luck here. Gamers Nexus has covered the failure of Navi drivers in a few videos as well, it's about time this issue gets more traction. I advise everyone I know to avoid Navi whenever they ask me about which video card to buy.

It's getting traction on other subs now:
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At this point, I bet the problem is at the silicon or firmware level.
 
I'm on a Radeon VII and haven't had any issues other than the already known thermal runaway issue, which I fixed. But I was referring to driver stuff.
I guess this is an issue with Navi versus Polaris. I also like note #3.
 
Rvenger said:
At this point, I bet the problem is at the silicon or firmware level.
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Seeing as so many aren't having issues, I doubt it's silicon. They need to get their team together and start finding the big things. Their are incompatibilities somewhere that multiple people are having, it shouldn't be that hard to reproduce for troubleshooting.and fixing. That said, I'm in th camp of very few issues from AMD since they bought out ATI, but have seen enough complaints to know there are some issues. They are probably a bit overblown sometimes, but they are real and they need fixing.
 
Rvenger said:
At this point, I bet the problem is at the silicon or firmware level.
Click to expand...

Possibly, it's hard to know without AMD issuing a statement. I suspect they would never tell us it's a hardware fault because then they'd open themselves up to a class action lawsuit.
 
N4CR said:
Funny how none of these articles and posters who don't own/use one of those cards look at or post threads like this;

According to many people my Vega uses many hundreds of watts and has broken drivers too. When in reality it uses under 190W and hasn't had a single driver issue.
Click to expand...

Even in that small sample size, there's still people experiencing problems and they tried all kinds of whimsical "solutions". But sure, go ahead and bury your head in the sand like AMD.
 
Ready4Dis said:
Seeing as so many aren't having issues, I doubt it's silicon. They need to get their team together and start finding the big things. Their are incompatibilities somewhere that multiple people are having, it shouldn't be that hard to reproduce for troubleshooting.and fixing. That said, I'm in th camp of very few issues from AMD since they bought out ATI, but have seen enough complaints to know there are some issues. They are probably a bit overblown sometimes, but they are real and they need fixing.
Click to expand...


They released 2020 software, now all the models are black screening. Perhaps not everyone, but unique configurations. (highly likely memory voltage, GPU voltage, power states and/or vdroop come into play) Power states are different from card to card and it sounds like the dummies over on the software team just copied pasted the same value across all GCN and RDNA cards. Who knows, they need to call Nvidia and pay them to fix their shit because RTG can't even properly validate their own drivers.


You have a multimonitor problem? Sure, lets just force the profile to maximum memory clocks in the driver.
Fan curve issue? Oh, we do the stairway to hell method until your ears burn, then we very slowly reduce the fan speed to remind you of the lovely harmonic noise of our anemic blower coolers with poorly mounted thermal solution.
Black screen while gaming? Maybe its time to take a break?
Overheating GPU and throttling? We like to keep you warm in the winter
Issues with RDNA downclocking? nah, your looking at it wrong
 
N4CR said:
Funny how none of these articles and posters who don't own/use one of those cards look at or post threads like this;

According to many people my Vega uses many hundreds of watts and has broken drivers too. When in reality it uses under 190W and hasn't had a single driver issue.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this heads up, I went over and posted all 3 of my computers builds. Hopefully, that will help in some small way.
 
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5150Joker said:
Go on r/amd or r/nvidia and you will see a lot of threads where people are ditching Navi because of poor drivers which AMD has failed to address. Big Navi will probably have even more issues. The AMD faithful will keep making excuses while the avg customer will get soured on AMD for years (or forever) and will become NVIDIA customers in the long run. NVIDIA couldn't have asked for better luck here. Gamers Nexus has covered the failure of Navi drivers in a few videos as well, it's about time this issue gets more traction. I advise everyone I know to avoid Navi whenever they ask me about which video card to buy.

It's getting traction on other subs now:
Click to expand...

The Nvidia faithful will keep bashing away without owning AMD but hey, better to bash them actually help resolve issues. N4CR actually posted something that I found useful and shared all 3 of my systems in that thread. Issues occur but bashing those who own AMD hardware is not the way to go about resolving them, regardless.
 
Wow, about time this was acknowledged. I enjoyed my card for a while, then suddenly keep getting errors, specially wattman, black screen, since then I returned to the original driver I had, still had the issues but much less to infrequent.
Still annoying.

I would have went back to my Nvidia cards (Nvidia fan) but small case and those being packed up...eh.
 
Silvers24 said:
Wow, about time this was acknowledged. I enjoyed my card for a while, then suddenly keep getting errors, specially wattman, black screen, since then I returned to the original driver I had, still had the issues but much less to infrequent.
Still annoying.
Click to expand...

So, you had no issues, updated your drivers, had issues, went back to the other drivers but now, you have issues that you did not before? Did you share you system setup on the reddit link that N4CR shared yet?
 
Ready4Dis said:
Seeing as so many aren't having issues, I doubt it's silicon. They need to get their team together and start finding the big things. Their are incompatibilities somewhere that multiple people are having, it shouldn't be that hard to reproduce for troubleshooting.and fixing. That said, I'm in th camp of very few issues from AMD since they bought out ATI, but have seen enough complaints to know there are some issues. They are probably a bit overblown sometimes, but they are real and they need fixing.
Click to expand...
I think you skipped over #3. People using 5700XT's having problems in Windows and then are using the same cards in macOS and not having problems. It would also be interesting to see the level of inconsistency at the driver level on Linux.

EDIT: I apologize. I misread what you wrote. Seems like we agree.
 
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I have not, when I did research the issue, I noticed people had issues for a while now. Plus mine is the RX 580, so I couldn't find to much besides people having issues with other cards.
But yes, that is true. It crashed on me about 3 days ago, but it went a while before it did. Plus I haven't been gaming.
ManofGod said:
So, you had no issues, updated your drivers, had issues, went back to the other drivers but now, you have issues that you did not before? Did you share you system setup on the reddit link that N4CR shared yet?
Click to expand...
 
A buddy of mine just bought a 5700XT and has odd issues where he has to hard reset his system. Basically the signal coming out of the video card crashes or something and isn't able to recover. He has notifications in event viewer about drivers crashing.
 
Tengis said:
A buddy of mine just bought a 5700XT and has odd issues where he has to hard reset his system. Basically the signal coming out of the video card crashes or something and isn't able to recover. He has notifications in event viewer about drivers crashing.
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I recommend that he connects two separate PCIe power connectors instead of just using one cable from his power supply.
 
Tengis said:
A buddy of mine just bought a 5700XT and has odd issues where he has to hard reset his system. Basically the signal coming out of the video card crashes or something and isn't able to recover. He has notifications in event viewer about drivers crashing.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I would return it. No joke. AMD had 221 days to fix these issues and all they did was make bloatware for 2020 and stripped out the known issues list for people to only complain about it all over again. Its aggravating!

Owned a reference 5700XT, Alt+tab crashed games, 2nd monitor black screen.
Powercolor red devil 5700 (1st one) Black screen forcing to restart every day. Returned it and got another, worked OK then it did the same thing as the reference card.
XFX RX 5700 DD Ultra got this for like $150 after gift cards and ebay bucks, ran great, no issues?! Different levels of silicon? Not sure. But I had an Nvidia card so I just resold it.
 
I had this issue over a year ago with my RX 480 when I upgraded from a FX 8350 to a Ryzen 7 1700. At first the display driver would crash and recovery but eventually it would just turn black and never came back unless I reboot the PC. This could happen once a week or a month or even 3 times a day. Because the issue was inconsistent that it took me a year to figure out the cause of my problem. I had replaced the motherboard, the CPU, the graphics card, the Power Supply, and even the SSD. None of the old hardware went to waste as it ended up in my HTPC as you can see from my sig. Eventually the problem was the ram as I took my Corsair Vengeance memory out and put it into my sisters 6600K machine, which locked up within a week later.

The crazy thing was the ram was tested for days with both memtest86 and HCI Memtest, and nothing was wrong. I repeated these tests in hope to try and find a problem with the memory, but nothing. Eventually I found a thing called Ryzen Kill Script which did show an error when I ran it, but considering I had replaced the CPU it had to be the ram. That's when I tried swapping the memory and no problems since. I used a RX 470 that I took from my HTPC in exchange for my RX 480 to see if the problem moved with the GPU, which it didn't.

Since then I upgraded to a R9 Fury and a Vega 56, which is what both my main rigs run. The HTPC runs 24/7 using Linux Mint on the R9 Fury with no problems. The Vega 56 on my Windows 10 machine hasn't been rebooted in weeks, especially because I disabled Windows Update. The bad corsair memory was RMA'd for a replacement so nothing has been an issue since. My hypothesis is that people's PC's aren't as stable as they think, and that AMD's Windows 10 drivers are sensitive to anything unstable in the machine, while Nvidia's drivers are more forgiving. Either that or AMD's board partners are deviating too much from their reference design to the point where it made the GPU's unstable. The Vega 56 I own is a reference design and has the hated blower cooler.

The best solution to determine if it's a driver or hardware issue is run Linux. The open source drivers are fantastic on Linux for AMD, and is a great way to determine if AMD is being really shit about their drivers on Windows. Clearly AMD has terrible drivers on Windows because one of the reasons why I run Linux is for the superior OpenGL performance compared to AMD's Windows OpenGL driver. If anything buy a cheap HDD and install Linux on it and run it for a while to see if any black screens occur.
 
I gave AMD a go twice and both times the drivers were terrible.
Since NVidia pushed prices to stupid levels I have been waiting to see how well AMD perform and how good their drivers are.
Unfortunately they failed at both, and prices are not worth a look either.
I will keep an eye on new products but I dont expect they can pull it off.
 
N4CR said:
Funny how none of these articles and posters who don't own/use one of those cards look at or post threads like this;

According to many people my Vega uses many hundreds of watts and has broken drivers too. When in reality it uses under 190W and hasn't had a single driver issue.
Click to expand...
the internet told me you were wrong even though i have no first hand experience with it. /s
 
Bought a MSI Evoke 5700 XT 3 weeks ago. Been nothing but solid so far. Drivers have been good.... I doubt I got lucky. Sounds like a whole lot of crap to me.

Am I fan of the overlay stuff... ehhh take it or leave it. It really doesn't bother me, perhaps I would feel different if my PC wasn't up to the task. I don't really mind the overlay idea though. It is nice to use to tune things like RIS... there are a few games I find it looks great in but you have to play with it a bit to get it where enhances the image without going overboard.

Anyway... no issues for me, no crashes no black screens nothing out of the ordinary. Lots of hours in AC Odyssey and Origins... played Xcom2 for a day some gunning in a couple wolf games and borderlands games. Witcher 3, some middle earth... STO and GW2 my guilty pleasures.

Everything runs just fine.

Card does run pretty hot... but what upper middle class and up GPU doesn't. If people are running into issues I wonder if they are heat related more then driver related. My CPU is on a AIO so the air flow over my GPU and out the top via 2 140mm fans keeps the temps pretty reasonable. Still ya junction temps get up into the mid 90s in a game like Odyssey. (in other games, 80s junction is pretty standard... in a lot of games I can use frame limiting and the card doesn't work all that hard) I imagine if people are running 5700 xts in enclosed cases with one exhaust fan or something it might not take much to push temps into odd issue territory.

All I know is I paid $500 Canadian (and have a $30 mail in on the way) for a card that is maxing my monitors refresh at ultra wide resolution with everything cranked to Ultra and I haven't had one issue in pretty heavy use the last 3 week. Still have lots of head room no doubt next monitor I can easily go up a notch in resolution or refresh and not need to sweat the GPU. Anecdotally I have had way more issues with NV cards the last number of years then I have AMD... but my experience is just that of one user. I would hardly say NV is crap cause I had 1 card die on me... and had plenty of NV driver issues with less popular games like STO. NV does a great job of ensuring their drivers have max performance on the big benchmark games... but have always been less then quick to fix issues with smaller titles. I have had to force software cursors and turn crap off in some games... as NV took their time fixing issues. (I know they where issues cause NV did eventually fix them... just took a year+. At one point I had to turn shadows off completely in STO to keep it from crashing on a 750ti for instance.)
 
Anyone with a Radeon VII should really be using The Pro Enterprise Software drivers. Im on 19Q4 version and it plays all the games without any problems or "thermal runaway"
The strange thing about Navi drivers is that not everyone has issues. ;)
 
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Creazy how those that know the least run their mouth the most. Stick to console boys. Pc's are for adults...:D
 
Derangel said:
That doesn’t matter unless the PSU has multiple rails for the PCI-E connectors. Those cables can more than handle the wattage of two 8 pins going through them.
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Then why does my 1KW Seasonic, which has a single rail, recommend using 4 x 8 pin PCIe cables when using two cards. (4 Separate cables, and Seasonic is a top end brand.)
 
My suspicion is that those with problems in some games. Run the memory too aggressively even if it passes 12 hours of AIDA it will cause problems especially on quad channel machines.
Cycle Tme tRAS set too low will cause stutters. I can replicate it on all of my machines. Quad , dual and the old DDR3 as well. :)
 
Imhotep said:
My suspicion is that those with problems in some games. Run the memory too aggressively even if it passes 12 hours of AIDA it will cause problems especially on quad channel machines.
Cycle Tme tRAS set too low will cause stutters. I can replicate it on all of my machines. Quad , dual and the old DDR3 as well. :)
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It is possible, at least in some cases. I do not overclock my ram or tweak it and I have not had the problems others are experiencing.
 
ManofGod said:
It is possible, at least in some cases. I do not overclock my ram or tweak it and I have not had the problems others are experiencing.
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A lot of the issues Ive seen when googling are from people that barely know what overclocking is.
 
I have plenty of beefs with nvidia, but their drivers work. I tried a Radeon 4850, 5870, and r9 290 (ref cooler as nothing else was on market at launch) and all suffered big driver issues. Amd sounds like it hasn't improved, and so I pay the nvidia tax for a smoother ride.
 
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