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.
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.
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.