Discussion: AMD graphics drivers, what's your experience with them?
Discussion: AMD graphics drivers, what's your experience with them?
Recently I decided to upgrade from an ancient gtx 1070 to an rx 7700 xt.
At first I was very excited about the upgrade... However I experienced something that is becoming a huge turn off for me. The drivers seem to just... Suck... To the point where I'm considering returning the gpu and going back to an nvidea gpu. And I don't want to be the guy to be a gpu brand shill.
I had done my research, I did hear the drivers used to suck. And people claimed it no longer sucked. Just within a day of having my new card I feel like I was lied to.
Granted yes, the hardware itself is amazing and I definitely experienced huge improvements already. But having to juggle around an older driver so I can have a stable encoder to stream VR games to my quest (which now that I'm thinking of, if the encoder crashes so easily then OBS must experience issues to), but then need to upgrade my driver version cause otherwise my switch emulator times out the driver and causes it to crash the PC, and even when upgrading the driver again I expirience artifacts in emulation (ok granted it's EMULATION so I can't really blame amd on that one). I feel like I made the wrong decision and I'm not excited to see what bugs feature drivers may come with.
Anyway malding post is over. I wanted to make a discussion on this thread to ask about your experience with AMD. Maybe I am overthinking this. Or maybe this is a more widespread issue that needs to be talked about more still.
AMD drivers have been way better than the proprietary Nvidia shit for almost a decade now. I guess Nvidia is finally giving up on their bullshit, but I still won't even bother considering Nvidia for my builds any time soon.
As someone who does not play VR or any very specific emulation I have had 0 issues. Thus said you maybe should have look into your very specific use cases and driver support on whatever card you purchased before getting it. I have the 7900xt and adrenaline is not bad it's got all the features I want because I don't really play any raytracing games or cases like you are describing.
Are you on Linux, or Windows? If you're on Linux, which driver are you using?
With an AMD GPU on Linux you shouldn't be using any driver, because it's in the kernel.
Part of it is in the kernel. The userspace portion of the driver is included in Mesa, which most distros have installed by default
Have you wiped your nvidia drivers completely with ddu and then installed amd drivers?
Crashing during installation. fans turning off during use. chunks of the screen randomly turning green after an update but it's fixed in the next. the fancy new upscaling feature breaking the very next update. opengl support disappears in another update. and comes back downgraded in the following. For the next update: it disabled the and control panel.
oh yea, the super resolution works too! But we got an update and... it's clipping off the screen rather than scaling down to fit :/
They're not competitive in price anyways, I'm sticking with Nvidia/intel
screen turning green isn't really a bug, they're just advertising nvidia.
That's interesting.
I will say, I've heard from parsec folks that the Nvidia video encoders are faster than the AMD encoders (I forget who has the better encoder AMD vs Intel).
I run AMD on Linux, for that, AMD all day everyday ... Nvidia is just historically an absolute mess under Linux. This is true both for gaming and general desktop use.
I used Nvidia for a while on Linux in laptops and in my desktop and regularly encountered issues with KDE being functional as a desktop (like the plasma panel just ... no longer updating after playing a game, so I'd think it's still 6:30 until it was obvious that it was much later and my clock was stuck). That part of the situation has definitely improved. Now that Nvidia has Wayland support in place, it's a fairly reasonable GPU for the desktop.
The games I played I never had issues with rendering, but my friend who's used my old 2080 under Linux with more games has seen a lot of weird stuff. In Monster Hunter World he gets crazy white triangles that just flash onto the screen during some fights(not sure if that's the right term?). In the recent Hunt Showdown if his post processing is set to medium he'll get fireflies rendering at the top of his screen and flying a million miles an hour like a bad trip. Turning on DLSS or FSR significantly LOWERS his frame rate (for me it's a significant uplift).
On Windows, I haven't used AMD in a long time. My brother has a 7000 series AMD card; he had some issues for the first few months he had it. He was getting game crashes with AAA titles like Battlefield more than anything else, but I think he resolved that when he stopped using MSI Afterburner (?) I vaguely recall he had some program that was messing with the fan curve in a bad way and the card was not happy about it. In terms of actual rendering though, I don't think he's had any problems with graphical glitches or performance issues. It was just some of his high end games crashing before he figured out what was messing with the card.
A friend of mine is also doing AMD under Windows with a much older Vega card and has never had any problems I've heard about; other than we played Hunt Showdown the other day and he's suffering from the "all shadows are black" thing which affects any card that doesn't support DirectX 12.1 (for some reason AMD stopped DirectX support for that card at like exactly 12.0 it seems). In any case, Crytek is going to try and fix that for folks like him (and to be fair to AMD, it also affects some Nvidia cards as well, it just seems more AMD users were attracted for some reason).
I'd say VR and emulation might be a little outside of the typical workload most people are expecting from an AMD card. A 7700 XT should definitely be rendering more stable frames in general than a 1070 and support some newer features like AV1 and such.
The VR stuff, I've never done anything with that... But in an ideal world nothing you run should actually be able to crash your system. So, it sounds like there is some kind of bug there assuming you're actually getting a blue screen or the system just hangs and stops painting new frames.
If things are outright just powering down ... that's more likely to be a PSU issue (though not having enough power can cause all sorts of weird things to happen so that might be something to verify as well/make sure you've got a big enough PSU).
Reporting the rendering artifacts to the developers/maintainers of the emulator is probably your best path forward on that part.
There are definitely some market forces at play here as well with AMD just getting fewer bug reports filed against software and against drivers so... Some of the bugs that other Nvidia users championed to be fixed on Windows, you might have to champion and reach out to people to get fixed on AMD (on Linux swap AMD and Nvidia).
I have had exactly two isolated issues with my AMD drivers using an RDNA-3 based 7900XTX.
(My use of an XTX card is notable as it is a special multichiplet architecture that is not replicated anywhere else in AMD's lineup, and typically had more driver issues)
One was in Space Engineers, where voxel textures would get scrambled and look super weird. That one eventually got fixed after a monthish (not sure if AMD or Keen fixed it).
The other is an ongoing one where the card will use 100W to 150W doing nothing on the desktop whenever HDR is enabled on one or more displays. That's more a fault of the XTX architecture not the drivers though, as it has to scale up the I/O memory die to high clocks for the number of bits required in HDR.
Outside of those I have literally never even noticed I was running an AMD card. Ive streamed to Twitch, recorded live gameplay to AV1, encoded videos, and played maybe 30 other games as well as heavy engineering CAD software. Shit just works when Windows plays nice. every bad crash ive had has been Windows doing retarded shit that never happens in Linux. And it works natively in Linux without nvidia's dumb fucking proprietary driver stack. It's chill. The internet horror stories of AMD drivers is vastly overblown.
My 7900xtx is also working flawlessly.
I've not had an Nvidia card since the 8800gts and have never really ever had issues with my AMD cards. Their drivers are generally very stable and the cards always seem to have more longevity.
I also never had the high wattage issue you experienced.
Works great for VR too.
I also never had the high wattage issue you experienced.
It's a weird bug that only happens with certain system setups. It typically only happens when you have 2 or more monitors, one of which is 1440p or higher and has HDR turned on. A setup I unfortunately have.
If you're on Windows, you should return it before it's too late. It isn't going to get better.
Haven't had issues at all on my end. I use Windows 10/11. I get crashes/weird shit happening from time to time, but I'm pretty sure that's more Windows's fault than anything
I’ve never been able to get them to work for me, but I also don’t have any AMD graphics cards. I’m beginning to think that might be the issue.
Never had an issue, but I also haven't used the encoder. As for emulation I only used bluestacks and some windows VMs and I think a glide to opengl wrapper once. No issues there...
They HAVE improved, I got my previous GPU RMAed because their latest driver version had a bug in it that turned off the fans and cooked it...
That was about the same time as games like overwatch just wouldn't work for months at a time.
Now, things mostly work (less greenscreen crashes than before), but are just not as good as Nvidia's seem to be.
I will be looking at team green for my next card though I think.