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.
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).