AMD Radeon drivers reliable enough to warrant buying one

[cosmogenesis]

Are their drivers now very solid and reliable ?

 

[welshrat]

Yes

EDIT - to expand on this they have been brilliant as far as I am concerned for at least the last 3 years, I have never had any issue with them personally however since RDNA 2 they have been very solid

 

[rare]

They have been for a long time IMO.

 

[cosmogenesis]

Cheers - noted

 

[Andy__C]

Never had a problem with AMD drivers here either.

Unpopular but I don't mind some of the other software recently either.

 

[Mhursteth]

Not had any issues.

 

[OCUK_]

I bought a 7900 XT last year, it's the first AMD (ATI) GPU i've purchased since 2003.

It's been an excellent card. I honestly believe the whole Radeon drivers as bad nonsense was Nvidia propaganda to bad mouth the competition.

From my experience with Nvidia cards over the past 15+ years, their drivers are far from perfect.

 

[nomadd]

I honestly believe the whole Radeon drivers as bad nonsense was Nvidia propaganda to bad mouth the competition.

Nah, you don't - you're not that daft. No one is.

 

[PaulM]

I disagree that it was propaganda, the 5700XT drivers were a mess on release and continued to be for at least 6-12 months but that was 5 years ago. I had my 5700XT replaced multiple times, tested in different computers, etc and it still crashed often with the early drivers (along with numerous other issues). I still have that card in a spare PC and it's perfectly stable now with the mature drivers so it wasn't a hardware issue, just a driver one. I haven't owned a newer AMD card since then but haven't seen any kind of backlash for the 6000/7000 that the 5000 got so presumably they were significantly more stable even on release.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

AMD drivers are not perfect even now. I've had issues with pretty much every AMD card I've had (but I keep buying them). My issue with the 7900XT did get resolved but it took the best part of a year.
That said Nvidia drivers aren't perfect either so it'll be pot luck if you get an issue or not whichever option you pick. Unless there's a known issue that will affect you I wouldn't let that be the deciding factor.

 

[gpuerrilla]

The stain was far before the 5700XT however its equally unfair to sample the mentioned card as the reason all their drivers are terrible. Having owned loads of generations of ATi/Radeon spanning 20+ years what I can say is the issues as @OCUK_ highlighted above is both vendors constantly battle ironing them out.

The stereotype unfortunately for AMD has not vanished because of the old wives tail circling often mentioned by people who have never owned one. You are far better seeking feedback from present owners of the model you are interested in over people that are using the competitor.

 

[willhub]

The most recent experience I've had with AMD is on the ROG Ally, and, they've been less reliable than Nvidia, I've had driver issues, as opposed to none with Nvidia. Also, there seems to be re occouring issues with Windows updates knackering the display drivers, which doesn't seem to happen with Nvidia.

So from my experience, they're certainly not as reliable.

 

[JediFragger]

AMD are their own worst enemy when it comes to drivers, they don't need any help from Nvidia

They can be fine for 2/3 years and then completely spaz out for a while esp on new releases like the 5700XT disaster, just an odd odd company sometimes when it comes to such a crucial component of a successful launch/continuation.

 

[Dg834man]

I disagree that it was propaganda, the 5700XT drivers were a mess on release and continued to be for at least 6-12 months but that was 5 years ago. I had my 5700XT replaced multiple times, tested in different computers, etc and it still crashed often with the early drivers (along with numerous other issues). I still have that card in a spare PC and it's perfectly stable now with the mature drivers so it wasn't a hardware issue

If you release something with hardware issues mitigating the problem in software is your only option, rx 480 was my previous card drivers were fine through out the life of the card minus one beta driver that caused video tdr bsod, nvidia drivers on my 3070 have been worse in my opinion far more crash to desktop in games on certain drivers, even had one set that would bsod if i looked at the inventory page on steam.

 

[sx_turbo]

My 6800xt been fine with everything I've chucked at it for the past year

 

[Andy__C]

6750 drivers have been rock.

Drivers were always fine many years ago with a HD5850 and then crossfire 5850s.

Those stories with the 5700xt are shame though. Guess it can happen.

 

[mattyfez]

I went from an rx480 to a 6800xt... so over a period of about 8years... not had any bother with either other than the auto-undervolt feature being a bit hit and miss as to whether it decides to work or not.

 

[AthlonXP1800]

Are their drivers now very solid and reliable ?

Never! Not since my friend owned Radeon 9700 Pro in 2002, he was so sick and very fedup of drivers bugs and reinstall drivers back and forward every month after broken many games he played, he told me Radeon drivers are absolutely massive pain in ass. I bought Radeon HD 4870 in 2008 because Radeon owners on NvNews forum persuaded me to gave ATi a chance for first time, they claimed drivers was massive improved since 2002 but oh my god not in my experience, the drivers are the worst nightmare hell with tons of useless settings more than very simplify Nvidia driver with very few settings, none of games ran properly after cleaned installed Vista and tried XP SP3 then RMAed Radeon HD 4870 and bought Geforce GTX 260, I was amazed games ran properly with GTX 260 after installed Nvidia driver, it just worked with default setttings. My sister bought Lenovo laptop at Currys around 2014 for work at college, laptop used AMD Llano APU, she texted me told me she bought new laptop, had problems ran games on it then I showed her my desktop PC with Nvidia GPU and my laptop with Intel iGPU, told her the whole truth about Radeon worst drivers then she returned laptop to Currys exchanged for other Lenovo laptop with Intel iGPU and she was happy every games ran worked fine on Intel iGPU.

Tiny Corp. Pauses Development of AMD Radeon GPU-based Tinybox AI Cluster

George Hotz and his Tiny Corporation colleagues were pinning their hopes on AMD delivering some good news earlier this month. The development of a "TinyBox" AI compute cluster project hit some major roadblocks a couple of weeks ago—at the time, Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware was not gelling...

www.techpowerup.com

George Hotz and his Tiny Corporation colleagues were pinning their hopes on AMD delivering some good news earlier this month. The development of a "TinyBox" AI compute cluster project hit some major roadblocks a couple of weeks ago—at the time, Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware was not gelling with Tiny Corp.'s setup. Hotz expressed "70% confidence" in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware. At the time of writing this has not transpired—this week the Tiny Corp. social media account has, once again, switched to an "all guns blazing" mode. Hotz and Co. have publicly disclosed that they were dabbling with Intel Arc graphics cards, as of a few weeks ago. NVIDIA hardware is another possible route, according to freshly posted open thoughts.

Yesterday, it was confirmed that the young startup organization had paused its utilization of XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards: "the driver is still very unstable, and when it crashes or hangs we have no way of debugging it. We have no way of dumping the state of a GPU. Apparently it isn't just the MES causing these issues, it's also the Command Processor (CP). After seeing how open Tenstorrent is, it's hard to deal with this. With Tenstorrent, I feel confident that if there's an issue, I can debug and fix it. With AMD, I don't." The $15,000 TinyBox system relies on "cheaper" gaming-oriented GPUs, rather than traditional enterprise solutions—this oddball approach has attracted a number of customers, but the latest announcements likely signal another delay. Yesterday's tweet continued to state: "we are exploring Intel, working on adding Level Zero support to tinygrad. We also added a $400 bounty for XMX support. We are also (sadly) exploring a 6x GeForce RTX 4090 GPU box. At least we know the software is good there. We will revisit AMD once we have an open and reproducible build process for the driver and firmware. We are willing to dive really deep into hardware to make it amazing. But without access, we can't."

Another post provided a behind-the-scenes look at Hotz's diplomatic approach: "I have spoken with AMD on multiple occasions, we have gotten through to top people, and they have been quite nice to us. I believe they want to be more open, and obviously they don't want their driver to have bugs. Unfortunately, this access and responses prolonged this decision, part of me wishes they just said it's a consumer card, you get what you pay for and we could have switched earlier. We probably tried too hard to make it work. We have an amazing team at tinygrad. Someday, we are going to make our own chips, and I figure if we can make our own chips, we better be able to make the 7900XTX software great. But we can't if we don't have access. The firmware is complex, undocumented, closed source, and signed, all struggles we wouldn't have with our own hardware. If and when the firmware is open and installable, if we aren't too far along with a different chip, we are down to put resources into writing fuzzers and rewriting whatever needs to be rewritten. The 7900XTX hardware seems great, but we aren't going to put resources into fixing a black box."

After 22 years my friend had Radeon 9700 Pro, today he read it and told me Nvidia driver are still the best rock solid for 22 years but he not really surprised AMD driver still suck rubbish very unstable nightmare hell POS. Sadly AMD Radeon driver never changed after 22 years!

 

[loftie]

Had issues with both tbh. I think I prefer AMDs software currently, but not tried the new beta thing nvidia have released yet.

 

[Kirby Wurm]

No issues here in the 3 years since I bought my 6800 XT, had far more issues with my Nvidia cards that I ran from 2011-2021, but then none that serious and all were resolved. I'd say both are good, especially now Nvidia have finally updated their software.