AMD Owners - how is your experience?

[LePhuronn]

Dropped a Red Dragon RX 570 into the other half's system last Christmas. Drivers were a bit twitchy in some weird places, but when actually playing games it's been golden. Needs a serious tune up because it's a bit loud and warm (Joey and Gunnar stare at the back of her case when the fans ramp up though, wondering if the noisy thing is coming to eat them or not), but she uses headphones and the rats love the warmth so I've just left her to it

That's the only thing I'll say about AMD: they benefit more from tuning voltages and fan curves than Nvidia do. I guess it's a throwback to when AMD literally had pennies to work with so slapped out all the silicon they could produce to get operating capital, and as a result the baseline power requirements were a lot higher than they needed to be. Nothing some tweaks can't solve (and you can get a chunky performance uplift too), but arguably if you're not technically minded and just want to play some damn games you shouldn't need to mess with voltages and fan profiles.

 

[Terminal_Boy]

That said, do users have genuine driver issues with AMD cards? yes they do, just like they do with NV. But you only ever hear about AMD issues, just like you only ever hear about AMD, noise, heat and power consumption. The whole GPU environment is heavily Nvidia biased and they have huge mind-share.

Yes.

The AMD driver / Radeon Control Suite auto-update software never works as advertised on my old Windows 7 64 bit system. I always have to uninstall the older driver manually and then install the new version. I’ve had several successive versions around the 19.20-19.30 mark that failed to install and I had to re-install a much earlier version to get the system running.

I’ve also had compatibility issues between AMD drivers and MSI Afterburner, but I can’t blame AMD for issues with 3rd party software.

 

[Shiari]

I’ve also had compatibility issues between AMD drivers and MSI Afterburner

Really? Not had an issue, though I only use it for monitoring (not for fan control etc).

 

[Terminal_Boy]

Really? Not had an issue, though I only use it for monitoring (not for fan control etc).

I was using Afterburner for controlling GPU fans as since my PC isn’t very quiet, I wanted the GPU fans spinning harder and earlier than the stock profile.

Afterburner quit systematically when this particular version of AMD driver fired up (non-WHQL version from Jan-Feb of this year) and I just binned Afterburner as I didn’t have time to debug it back then.

Current versions of AMD and Afterburner are playing nicely together alongside my Vega 56.

 

[Mechorpheus]

Been running a Radeon VII for a while, overall really pleased with it. I ditched the stock-cooler infavour of a Rajintek Morpheus II, which fits OOTB, and I'm able to get up to 2030MHz/1200MHz frequencies (I could push it further but the JT gets a bit high, think I need to look at mounting pressure but not too fussed). Having direct control over core voltage via software is so good for tweaking enthusiasts, unlike on Nvidia where you have to cope with whatever they've decided is a suitable voltage. Otherwise the software is good and you get decent OC tooling in the driver (dispite how much AMD try and kill OC on the VII you can still use the driver tools to dial in clocks and voltages), my only major issue is I have a lot of trouble getting high-refresh rates to work in games. I have a 4K display which supports 120Hz at 1440p, but for some reason often I can't get the game to run at 120Hz. Some games work fine (most of the ones which let you specify the refresh rate in the options i.e. DiRT Rally 2.0 or HZD) but others just refuse (DOOM Eternal is a particualr bug-bear). It's possible that these issues are unique to Radeon VII but I have no way to test really.

 

[Mr Evil]

I feel like any further replies at this point won't add anything, but still... I've been using AMD cards for >10 years now, and they've always worked well. The drivers have generally been of good quality, especially since the big changes they made for the Crimson drivers in 2015. I currently have a Radeon VII, and I can say it's the best card I've ever used.

Totally agree about the AMD/Radeon drivers - unless you need version XX.XX to run a new game, leave what works alone.

I don't upgrade drivers often, but I still do it sometimes if only because performance tends to improve with newer drivers. You can always roll back if the new ones don't work, though it's been a few years since I had to do that.

 

[ThunderLicker]

I've not used amd for a few years now, but was exclusively using ati/amd all the way back to the 9800 pro days, last card I had of their's was a r9 290.

I've been hearing about how bad their drivers are for years, and have never experienced it. I've had little niggles like the mouse cursor bug but nothing major.

Since the 290 I've had a 980ti and a 1080ti. The 980ti was the worst driver experience I've ever had, that thing was a pain for months with black screen crashes usually while trying watch media and game crashes. Eventually it got ironed out and it was a great card.

Would happily go back to amd if they produce something that interests me.

 

[Blackjack Davy]

Totally agree about the AMD/Radeon drivers - unless you need version XX.XX to run a new game, leave what works alone.

Thats true of any drivers for any product I'm pretty sure I'm running an out of date driver right now. I've had some driver issues with AMD cards but I've had them with Nvidia too a Gsync windowed black screen bug that drove me crazy for an age before they fixed it, there isn't one vendor thats better or worse than the other in my experience

 

[Stanners]

Lets keep the chat to the Pro's and con's of AMD as per the thread title. We dont need childish comments for AMD v Nvidia either way.

 

[Nexus18]

Have owned many AMD cards: 4850, 6870, 7850, 290 and now vega 56. Aside from some 290 related issues (although think it was more related to my old i5 750 setup), never had a problem with AMD.

Any issues that were there, were always down to the games i.e. also affecting nvidia.

The control panel is so clean, quick and modern + simple to use, the recording and streaming stuff is fantastic too, along with many great features.

Freesync has been flawless for me too and HDR on my oled also works perfectly unless the game is crap for it i.e. rdr 2

So imo, all these people who still report issues with every amd update and their games.... it is down to "user error", that or they have something very wrong with their setup somewhere.

 

[Aretak]

I do like Geforce Experience because I can't be bothered figuring out settings for my games anymore. Does AMD have something like that? I'm tempted by the new AMD cards after the RTX 3080 launch. Otherwise just getting a PS5 and keeping my RTX 2060.

Not in the sense of adjusting settings for you, no. Their software does have some nice features of its own though, like the ability to set an overclocking profile on a per-game basis. So if you really need some extra performance in a certain title you can set it up so that an overclock will be applied automatically when the game's running, before returning to the global setting when you stop playing. Or if it's an easy to run title that you have more than enough power for, an underclock/volt instead to reduce power draw and noise. You can of course manage such things manually using Afterburner or similar and profiles there, but it's nice to have it all integrated and automated. It also keeps track of your average framerate, play time, session time, etc. Not sure if GFE does that as I never install it, personally. Nvidia's control panel does everything I need. I don't really have any use for things like streaming features or screen recording and don't use them in AMD's software either. Plus I love fiddling with game settings, so that doesn't appeal.