AMD Just Made Another Radeon Mistake

[ScottSoapbox]

AMD should release a "beta" FSR 4 for older cards with disclaimers on the download page and installer pop-ups warning that the performance won't be as good on older cards, limited testing, etc.

This would (mostly) protect them from (reasonable people's) criticism that it's not a fully polished product with no downsides, while supporting their previous gen products.

FSR 4 mostly caught up to Nvidia - don't undermine that by making everyone believe FSR 5 is going to be feature locked.

 

[Lawdog]

If you were not around, you wouldnt remember, but this is not new from AMD.

Evergreen support was atrociously bad. Games broken, crossfire broken, ece. Then GCN came out. 3 years after GCN released, Evergreen was dropped. Not just optimization, but EVERYTHING was dropped. The drivers were left broken, and they still are broken. The Fermi cards, OTOH, received driver updates for 2 years after evergreen was abandoned, and even back in 2016, Evergreen was unusable in games like Fortnite and had substantial issues in games like GTA V, whereas the fermi worked across the board.

They also have a long history of ignoring problems and the community. Frame pacing was a chronic issue on AMD, with people complaining in forums about "smoothness". AMD insisted it was user error. Then nVidia released the FCAT tool for tracking frame time pacing, and it showed that AMD single cards had worse frame time pacing then nvidia SLI setups, let alone single nvidia cards. Within 12 hours AMD released social media posts acknowledging there were "long standing issues" with the drivers. Womp womp.

They broke 16 bit OpenGL in catalyst 13.7, meaning that retro gaming became an impossibility. They fixed it by accident in 16.4. Which didnt release for Evergreen, so if you had old cards, get bent. Never acknowledged that they broke it either. This was when I abandoned AMD laptops, after my Asus K53TA-BBR6 was left unable to play games like Dark Forces, or Doom.

Just...the entire history of the Radeon VII card.

The fury X, the "overclockers dream" was discontinued after only 6 years.

rDNA1 was abandoned after 7 years, shifted to "maintenance mode" for only critical bug fixes and security updates. rDNA2 was moved as well, despite being only 5 year sold at the time and being sold up to 3 years ago.

AMD has had to fight hard to overcome that incredible negative reputation, only to torpedo it int he last few months.

DLSS4 has been implemented in over 100 new titles. It has also been backported to the RTX 4000, 3000, and 2000 series. They average 10 years of support. The nVidia app allows you to inject DLSS4 into older games and use older DLSS in newer games when needed.

FSR4: 10. 10 games. Not backported to anything. AMD seems to think 4 years of driver updates is sufficient now. Reliant on third party open source tools for FSR injection.

That is why people sped hundreds more on the nvidia experience.

That’s very interesting. It reminds me of Sony, which is terrible when it comes to listening to users. My TV handles Dolby Digital extremely poorly, and many of us asked for a button to disable it and use HDR10 instead. Sony never did it, I think because they didn’t want to admit their mistake. I will never buy Sony again.

It’s strange that AMD would play this game when they aren’t even the market leader.

 

[acrossthestars]

This is not a defense of AMD's bad business decisions, but do we know for a fact that AMD hired more engineers and software developers, as they gained more market share? Because my guess is, AMD is somehow still without a wide pool of talent―even as their companies creates and moves more inventory―and they may simply not have the manpower to do better driver implementations.

You may be inclined to ask, "why would AMD go with such an obviously short-sighted business decision?", and I'd respond with "my guess is, they are still operating a just-in-time model, where they have just enough resources to deploy their SKUs, but not enough to do at-scale active maintenance of their portfolio." I mean, it worked for car manufacturers...until it didn't.

 

[Donased]

I really don't get it. Hardware wise AMD is a great company. But their software keeps letting them down. You would think for such a large company they would be able to throw some serious resources at their software.

 

[cfenton]

This is not a defense of AMD's bad business decisions, but do we know for a fact that AMD hired more engineers and software developers, as they gained more market share? Because my guess is, AMD is somehow still without a wide pool of talent―even as their companies creates and moves more inventory―and they may simply not have the manpower to do better driver implementations.

You may be inclined to ask, "why would AMD go with such an obviously short-sighted business decision?", and I'd respond with "my guess is, they are still operating a just-in-time model, where they have just enough resources to deploy their SKUs, but not enough to do at-scale active maintenance of their portfolio." I mean, it worked for car manufacturers...until it didn't.

That's still a problem of their own making. If they are short-staffed, they should hire more people. As a customer, it doesn't really matter why the support is lacking, only that it is.

 

[cfenton]

Isn't it funny that shortly after TS posted an article about how FSR4 is worse than DLSS they posted about how AMD is software locking FSR.

Bruh, you've been able to unlock DLSS 4 on older hardware using third part tools for A LONG ****ING TIME now.

What makes the new tensor cores so ****ing special that the old ones cant run new DLSS models.

That's a serious ****ing question and I expect it to be answered

Either criticize the practice that both companies are using right now equally or just shut the **** up.

As it says in the article, you don't need 3rd party tools to use DLSS 4 or 4.5 on older hardware. It works on anything that ever supported DLSS.

 

[yRaz]

As it says in the article, you don't need 3rd party tools to use DLSS 4 or 4.5 on older hardware. It works on anything that ever supported DLSS.

Try running a 3070 on DLSS 4 and tell me what happens

 

[cfenton]

Try running a 3070 on DLSS 4 and tell me what happens

It will work fine? I don't have a 3070, but it supports DLSS 4.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Try running a 3070 on DLSS 4 and tell me what happens

It runs perfectly, because DLSS 4 and 4.5 run on every RTX GPU.

Maybe you should have a coffee and a snickers? You've been taking Ls this whole thread. Crashing out over easy to verify information.

That’s very interesting. It reminds me of Sony, which is terrible when it comes to listening to users. My TV handles Dolby Digital extremely poorly, and many of us asked for a button to disable it and use HDR10 instead. Sony never did it, I think because they didn’t want to admit their mistake. I will never buy Sony again.

It’s strange that AMD would play this game when they aren’t even the market leader.

This is not a defense of AMD's bad business decisions, but do we know for a fact that AMD hired more engineers and software developers, as they gained more market share? Because my guess is, AMD is somehow still without a wide pool of talent―even as their companies creates and moves more inventory―and they may simply not have the manpower to do better driver implementations.

You may be inclined to ask, "why would AMD go with such an obviously short-sighted business decision?", and I'd respond with "my guess is, they are still operating a just-in-time model, where they have just enough resources to deploy their SKUs, but not enough to do at-scale active maintenance of their portfolio." I mean, it worked for car manufacturers...until it didn't.

AMD made a terrible mistake, which is that they never purged out ATi's management and marketing team, and it's a mistake that has followed them for over 20 years. Their corporate culture pushes this short term thinking hard and never seems to learn from their consequences.

I have no doubt they are still approaching decisions the same way they did a decade ago, and it is starting to hurt them.

 

[acrossthestars]

which is that they never purged out ATi's management and marketing team

You make it sound like ATi was failing as a company, which would mean that the AMD acquisition was less of a fortuitous merger and more of a bailout.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

You make it sound like ATi was failing as a company, which would mean that the AMD acquisition was less of a fortuitous merger and more of a bailout.

No. Context.

ATi's driver support was HORRENDOUS. Worse then AMD's. We're talking system breaking bugs that persisted for years and required community work arounds, maintaining multiple drivers depending on what game you were playing, ece. It was the single biggest thing preventing ATi from taking more of nVidia's marketshare with the 9000 series (the original ones) and it severely undermined the performance of the X100 and x1000 series.

The very first thing AMD should have done was purge both the management and marketing departments of ATi and just keep the engineers and tech. Instead they kept them, and the horrors of AMD marketing and support have haunted them for 20 years now.

 

[acrossthestars]

No. Context.

ATi's driver support was HORRENDOUS. Worse then AMD's. We're talking system breaking bugs that persisted for years and required community work arounds, maintaining multiple drivers depending on what game you were playing, ece. It was the single biggest thing preventing ATi from taking more of nVidia's marketshare with the 9000 series (the original ones) and it severely undermined the performance of the X100 and x1000 series.

The very first thing AMD should have done was purge both the management and marketing departments of ATi and just keep the engineers and tech. Instead they kept them, and the horrors of AMD marketing and support have haunted them for 20 years now.

I would ask how a company can manage to bungle product deliveries on an ongoing basis, but then I'd have to ask how Microsoft continues to have customers even though Windows is getting worse with every update.

Since AMD is a publicly-shared company, how haven't the offending members of the company been fired yet? Maybe I'm just an economic plebian, but if it can be proven that their incompetence materially damaged AMD's market share, wouldn't that be grounds for termination of employment?

 

[Lew Zealand]

Try running a 3070 on DLSS 4 and tell me what happens

DLSS4 works fine on a 3070, I used it on mine the day it released. It gave all the image quality improvements like improved AA (and the regressions like disocclusion artifacts) along with a performance boost over native. Less of an FPS boost than DLSS3? Yes. Overall image improvement over DLSS3? Also Yes. Can I choose which model to use? Also Yes.

This is good support.

I've also used DLSS4.5 on a 2060 Super and even if you take the lazy route and stick to Nvidia's one click "Use Recommended" then DLSS also works great. It chooses DLSS4 for Quality and Balanced, DLSS4.5 M for Performance and DLSS4.5 L for Ultra Performance. Automatically. IMO these are good choices except maybe for Ultra Performance but I'm not interested in that choice and I haven't investigated the L vs. M tradeoffs at UP for myself.

AMD needs to provide this kind of support to make any advances in market share, good pricing is simply not enough any more. In the GTX 1060 vs RX 4/580 days, the featureset was pretty similar. No longer.

And lest you think I'm a Nvidia shill because of course I have to be to post the above, I've been using an RX 580 for the last week, a FirePro W7100 the week before and a R9 270X the week before that. Though my daily driver for a while has been a 16GB 9060 XT. Yes I do have a 5070 in my "main" PC which hasn't been on since last year, as well as the aforementioned Nvidia GPUs and an Arc B580 because each is the best at certain things and all are fun to use.

 

[opckieran]

What a time we are living in where nVidia provides the more consumer-friendly solution by allowing older cards to run their latest upscaler!

 

[Moores Ghost]

AMD's outright refusal to support FSR4 on older hardware absolutely gave me pause on grabbing a 9070xt. When uDNA5 comes out with FSR5, there's a very good chance that rDNA4 will be left high and dry. AMD abandoning rDNA2 sealed the deal. Placing hardware that is only 3 years old on maintenance mode is absolutely insane.

Especially when they hit record revenue last year and nVidia is supporting hardware older then rDNA1 (rtx 2000 series) with DLSS 4.5.

If AMD chooses to not support its customer base with previous generation hardware because of some mean comments, then they deserve to have 6% marketshare.

The work has already been done. FSR4 works on INT8. It works on linux. There are tools to make it work on Windows. AMD's continued refusal to officially port the tools back only continues to hurt their reputation, especially when nVidia supports the RTX 2000 series to this day. Instead AMD tried (and mostly succeeded) in abandoning rDNA1/2 users (both of which are newer then the RTX 2000s) with maintenance mode drivers and left rDNA2/3 users high and dry with new software, focusing everything on rDNA4. Their redstone release had INT8 code in it showing they were fully aware it could run on older GPUs and chose to ignore them on purpose.


Yes, a multi billion dollar corpo should ensure their software works properly. Poor Poor AMD...

nVidia gets **** on too when they screw up software releases. The community was savage on them for screwing up blackwell's drivers. You going to complain about them too, or is this only an AMD thing?

Oh yeah, and the community has already gotten FSR4 working on rDNA3. It works fine. So drop the strawman arguments. AMD has no excuse for not porting this, aside from malice or incompetence.

Thank you. I came to say something like this. I appreciate the time saved. With that said and having extra time, I took the time to hit Lisa Su up on X and ask her to politely allow RTG to give RDNA 2 and 3 official FSR4 support. If enough people do it, it will happen. It's how AMD works these days. Public outrage needs to reach a fever pitch.

 

[Moores Ghost]

The bean counters decided it would cost more to implement correctly than they would recoup and that was that. It seems honor, integrity and customer satisfaction has taken a back seat to pure profit once again.
But then, they make their money on console. Is there an implementation of FSR4 for console that people are unaware of ?

 

[Liranan]

I can only go on prices domestically here in England and maybe it's not the same elsewhere, but the cost people are paying for "more features" is around £300-400 to get like for like performance. The 9070 XT is around £600 while RTX 5070 Ti has much wider swing with a handful sitting around £900 and most being actually above £1000 now.

The only feature missing if you buy Radeon is largely DLSS and it's bas***d child fake frame gen. DLSS may have the edge over FSR4 but it's absolutely not a £300-£400 value - or a 50% additional spend - to gain at best 5% extra performance and that feature set.

I wanted to try the 5070Ti but bought a 9070XT instead due to it being half the price of the 5070Ti.

NVIDIA care even less about consumers than AMD. LJM created this AI bubble nonsense, not to mention that he's Lisa's cousin, thus, no matter who wins their family will never lose.

 

[dingusbot8000]

Well, the forgot the U in Quick for starters

 

[Melkor Unlimited]

The bean counters decided it would cost more to implement correctly than they would recoup and that was that. It seems honor, integrity and customer satisfaction has taken a back seat to pure profit once again.

Check the financial report. It shows where the moneys are.
Lower revenue and even lower margins in gaming.

But then, they make their money on console. Is there an implementation of FSR4 for console that people are unaware of ?

PSSSR ... Sony written ML upscaler working on PS. Which is modified RDNA2.

 

[TooQik]

Maybe it's a ploy by AMD to get people to buy newer cards.
Maybe there are issues relating to the use of INT8 instructions that AMD are aware of.
Maybe AMD are not happy with the performance regression.
Maybe AMD don't have enough software engineers to work on the drivers.
Maybe AMD are actually planning on releasing it at a future date.

The problem is, only AMD can answer any of these points, and they are not talking right now.

 

[themastergoose]

So your argument is that is acceptable for AMD to provide bad (short) product support to its customers because some tech sites are "biased" towards Nvidia? Amusingly the bias in this case pointing out that AMD is providing bad (short) support relative to Nvidia.

I mean your red herring argument is self defeating. Maybe take a moment and decide what you are even mad about.

I never said it was acceptable, and in the opening sentence I even stated they have no business holding FSR4 back if it works in some capacity on older cards.

My view is I don't blame AMD for not putting further time/money into it for now given how negatively perceived their last two flagship cards were by most of the media. We already know the cards don't sell well, and the constant negative media coverage is a part of that. The facts are that for the 7900 XTX and 9070 XT almost everyone said at the time (and still says today) it is worth the extra spend to get RTX 4080/Super and RTX 5070 Ti respectively even tho there was no actual performance uplift - You just spend hundreds more for DLSS basically.

Funny thing is with this thread and everyone complaining that AMD isn't doing enough to support older cards... There sure is a lot of you in here complaining about it who mention you have never had, currently use, or intend to buy a Radeon GPU. The least impacted shouting the loudest?

 

[torvuswalds]

Eh, I don't really care. The games I play at the moment are fine without FSR 4. So cool, when it does come to work with my GPU I will use it if I need to.

 

[Lawdog]

I never said it was acceptable, and in the opening sentence I even stated they have no business holding FSR4 back if it works in some capacity on older cards.

My view is I don't blame AMD for not putting further time/money into it for now given how negatively perceived their last two flagship cards were by most of the media. We already know the cards don't sell well, and the constant negative media coverage is a part of that. The facts are that for the 7900 XTX and 9070 XT almost everyone said at the time (and still says today) it is worth the extra spend to get RTX 4080/Super and RTX 5070 Ti respectively even tho there was no actual performance uplift - You just spend hundreds more for DLSS basically.

Funny thing is with this thread and everyone complaining that AMD isn't doing enough to support older cards... There sure is a lot of you in here complaining about it who mention you have never had, currently use, or intend to buy a Radeon GPU. The least impacted shouting the loudest?

This means that AMD's most loyal customers (who trust the brand even though the cards are poorly perceived) are penalized. I personally have a 6800 XT.

Next time, I'll buy the best-selling card to get longer support, and AMD won't be the winner.

I blame AMD for this situation, because we know they can do it!

 

[Crazyman0665]

This means that AMD's most loyal customers (who trust the brand even though the cards are poorly perceived) are penalized. I personally have a 6800 XT.

Next time, I'll buy the best-selling card to get longer support, and AMD won't be the winner.

I blame AMD for this situation, because we know they can do it!

Crazy I have a 6750 xt and have zero issues with games even running rDNA soooooo.... What exactly is the issue besides you not wanting to expect that yes you have to buy the newer tech to get the newer tech. This is like a car company coming out with a better engine for your car but making it a separate model (like they do) and you complaining it's not free. Y'all complain about litterly everything. This doesn't make the 6 series bad

 

[torvuswalds]

Crazy I have a 6750 xt and have zero issues with games even running rDNA soooooo.... What exactly is the issue besides you not wanting to expect that yes you have to buy the newer tech to get the newer tech. This is like a car company coming out with a better engine for your car but making it a separate model (like they do) and you complaining it's not free. Y'all complain about litterly everything. This doesn't make the 6 series bad

Which version? I got the ASRock Phantom Gaming D.