Gamers are ditching Radeon graphics cards over driver issues

[dragosmp]

User of ATI graphics since early 2000s

A few things were always making me go to ATI:
*better performance at the same price, especially after a few months from release (initially drivers were holdng them back)
*driver updates tended to brick the system. Using DDU or whatever equivalent it was back then sometimes worked and allowed to update without introducing random issues
*best thing if a driver update was a must though, which in allhonesty was at best every other year, was to reimage the OS and clean install the new driver

Nothing said now is surprising. ATI/AMD driver update was always broken. TS is probably fine as they clean install, as you should. If the expectation is TO update often, maybe even encouraged by AMD, then they have a bad product.

FYI AMD cards are still cheaper in the EU than Nvidia equivalents for the most part

 

[Bojan Davidovic]

User of ATI graphics since early 2000s

A few things were always making me go to ATI:
*better performance at the same price, especially after a few months from release (initially drivers were holdng them back)
*driver updates tended to brick the system. Using DDU or whatever equivalent it was back then sometimes worked and allowed to update without introducing random issues
*best thing if a driver update was a must though, which in allhonesty was at best every other year, was to reimage the OS and clean install the new driver

Nothing said now is surprising. ATI/AMD driver update was always broken. TS is probably fine as they clean install, as you should. If the expectation is TO update often, maybe even encouraged by AMD, then they have a bad product.

FYI AMD cards are still cheaper in the EU than Nvidia equivalents for the most part

Ive bought rx 5700 xt nitro+ se for 380 euros. Gl finding rtx 270 super reference for 480.

 

[Ravey]

I feel like a community driven effort to fault find the issues with the drivers would be extremely useful at this point. (if that's possible).

 

[Shadowboxer]

I feel like a community driven effort to fault find the issues with the drivers would be extremely useful at this point. (if that's possible).

You mean do AMDs job for them?

I think a mass boycott of AMD GPUs would have the same effect. If reviewers made it clear in their reviews that right now you should not buy AMD because they have broken drivers then maybe AMD would find the problems themselves?

I don’t think it’s too out there to expect not to have to beta test and troubleshoot a finished product.

 

[TheGoatNemesis]

I am brand agnostic and our media creation studio (VR/AR/3D contents) we have 60% green and 40% red GPU ( 16vs11 total of 27GPU) and I can say after years of real world stats that the AMD maintenance is costing us allot of money mainly cause the driver issue.
AMD HW is fantastic but the SW side is very very very weak compared to Nvidia.

 

[Ravey]

You mean do AMDs job for them?

I think a mass boycott of AMD GPUs would have the same effect. If reviewers made it clear in their reviews that right now you should not buy AMD because they have broken drivers then maybe AMD would find the problems themselves?

I don’t think it’s too out there to expect not to have to beta test and troubleshoot a finished product.

Well that's pretty much what is happening right now. Cards are getting returned because the drivers are not worth the hassle and AMD can't work fast enough to catch up.

Also a mass boycott of AMD products could effectively kill off the company. That means no competition for Nvidia and ultimately everyone loses!

Sometimes it can be well worth the community becoming more hands on when it comes to products they are passionate about. Just take a look at just about any game where developers have allowed thier games to be modded! Many many games have been overwhelmingly improved and in some cases even remade entirely thanks to efforts of a voluntary community.

The mentality of "why should we do thier job" is something that's very counterproductive.

 

[Tankas]

For the 3rd month I'm battling through random crashes on on my RX5700XT. It improved a bit, but still not there. Only because of that I've chosen RTX2070S when building a new PC for a friend couple weeks ago.

 

[Evernessince]

After recommending 5700XT for so long, made review for each and every 5700XT model out there, yet HUB published this article knowing it would also damage HUB's reputation (since people were buying 5700XT following HUB recommendation). I would call this journalistic integrity.

It doesn't matter what you think they would or would not do. What we have here in reality is an article based on a simple poll implying that 48% of AMD GPUs have problems when verified reviews on sites like newegg and Amazon say otherwise. Steve's own experience tells him the same thing those other reviews say. There are driver issues but 48%? Not a chance in hell.

You could have done this same article without the clickbait title and without the worthless poll numbers because there are in fact still issues that need to be addressed. Instead what we have is hyperbole and as you can see by the comment section, clearly it worked.

 

[fadingfool]

Afterburner + Rivatuner is literally the best tuning/monitoring softwares there is, it also make troubleshooting so much easier.

Which I've had nothing but problems with (7820X with 1080Ti) to the point I've had to uninstall Afterburner. Strangely enough a couple of gaming buddies both with 5700XT's have had no problems with the last few drivers (multi-monitor was a bit of an issue originally but no black screens) and can run Afterburner probalme free. Plenty of other monitoring software I can use but Afterburner causes crashes and all manner of strange behaviour.

 

[Evernessince]

You mean do AMDs job for them?

I think a mass boycott of AMD GPUs would have the same effect. If reviewers made it clear in their reviews that right now you should not buy AMD because they have broken drivers then maybe AMD would find the problems themselves?

I don’t think it’s too out there to expect not to have to beta test and troubleshoot a finished product.

Yes, drivers so broken the newer Navi cards have 4 to 4.5 star reviews across the board.

Those are verified purchases. How many people who took the HWUB poll verified they purchased their card? 0%.

It's an unverified source vs a verified one.

By the way, 4 accounts less then a day old now in this thread. TechSpot really should put some restrictions on new accounts to prevent spammers and thread manipulation.

 

[krizby]

It doesn't matter what you think they would or would not do. What we have here in reality is an article based on a simple poll implying that 48% of AMD GPUs have problems when verified reviews on sites like newegg and Amazon say otherwise. Steve's own experience tells him the same thing those other reviews say. There are driver issues but 48%? Not a chance in hell.

You could have done this same article without the clickbait title and without the worthless poll numbers because there are in fact still issues that need to be addressed. Instead what we have is hyperbole and as you can see by the comment section, clearly it worked.

Ha, as always you commented without actually reading the entire article, I will just quote a paragraph from the article that you seem to miss:

"We’ve also spoken with a few retailers to see if they’re seeing issues with 5700 XT boards and we’ve received some interesting reports. Basically the return rate for 5700 XT's is more than 5x that of competing Nvidia products and when they get these systems back with various reported issues, they’re unable to replicate them due to their random nature."

This is not some simple poll, Steve reached out to some retailers and that's what they said. Going through AMD reddit and people also mentioned that Microcenter employees were saying the same. This is a widespread issue.

Newegg and Amazon reviews, if you had actually read the content of the reviews instead of the superficial stars, a lot of 4-5 stars 5700XT reviews will mention drivers instability but it's not the card fault, it's AMD. Going to Nvidia camp and people dock stars off because it's either noisy or coil whine, those are hardware faults, not driver. Yet you can still play game on a hot and noisy card but not one that crashes mid-game.

Oh yeah and how newegg average 4 stars for both Gigabyte 5700XT and Gigabyte 2070 Super is beyond me
5700XT

2070 Super

The percentage of 1, 2 and 3 stars reviews for 2070 Super combined is less than the 1 star percentage of 5700XT (14% vs 18%)

 

[Irata]

This is just from personal experience:

- Radeon RX 550 - no issues, only the initial driver install was a bit borked since the installer found the R8-6500B's iGPU and complained that it was not supported, so I guess a conflict. Not difficult to sort out but still annyoing. No issues since then.

- Ryzen 2500u iGPU - no issues, zero, but the laptop is not used that much, but has been used for some Fortnite gaming on the road by my kid.

- Sapphire Radeon 5500XT in my new system. Kid has been running it pretty hard for the last two weeks. It's a dual monitor system and he's playing games while either recording (Hevc) or streaming using the GPU. He also has Youtube on one monitor and the game on the other. I'd say that is not light use.

Again, zero problems. Now, the new PC is a fresh install and does have an oversized PSU and cooling (built for future upgrades). Am only using WHQL drivers and no overclocking.

Regarding RMA rates: Mindfactory actually shows them for each article. While the 5700XT has higher RMA rates than nVidia products, you can see that they are not high enough to show that the driver problems make the card unusable or are really that bad.

5700 XT have an RMA rate of around 2-3%, the worst one had 6% (which is high). In contrast, 2060 (super) cards have RMA in the 1-2% rate, the highest I saw was 4%.

I am not doubting that there are problems, but I am doubting that they are as bad or widespread as reported. And all this fudding makes it harder to troubleshoot the real problem.

Just a note on numbers: You'd be surprised how many people with mental issues have turned GPU into a surrogate religion. Just go to e.g. Wccftech's comment section. And if you have twenty of them with multiple aliases / accounts they can vote / comment making it appear as if there is a huge issue.

 

[Irata]

After recommending 5700XT for so long, made review for each and every 5700XT model out there, yet HUB published this article knowing it would also damage HUB's reputation (since people were buying 5700XT following HUB recommendation). I would call this journalistic integrity.

It's definitely good that they published this article as it is a topic that is talked about but note how they say neither they nor RX 5700 users they know are seeing these issues.

 

[trgz]

Overly warm and always seemingly plagued by driver issues was the reason I steered away from AMD (again) and went for a RTX2060Super - I know there will be some (possibly many) that will feel that I made a bad choice but after a untroubled run of GTX260, GTX 560, GTX560Ti (SLI), and GTX 970 I cannot recall a driver issue that ever left me in the dark (or a card(s) that ran 'thirsty').

 

[trgz]

Overly warm and always seemingly plagued by driver issues was the reason I steered away from AMD (again) and went for a RTX2060Super - I know there will be some (possibly many) that will feel that I made a bad choice but after a untroubled run of GeForce6800, GeForce8800, GTX260, GTX 560, GTX560Ti (SLI), and GTX 970 I cannot recall a driver issue that ever left me in the dark (or a card(s) that ran 'thirsty').

 

[Evernessince]

Ha, as always you commented without actually reading the entire article, I will just quote a paragraph from the article that you seem to miss:

"We’ve also spoken with a few retailers to see if they’re seeing issues with 5700 XT boards and we’ve received some interesting reports. Basically the return rate for 5700 XT's is more than 5x that of competing Nvidia products and when they get these systems back with various reported issues, they’re unable to replicate them due to their random nature."

This is not some simple poll, Steve reached out to some retailers and that's what they said. Going through AMD reddit and people also mentioned that Microcenter employees were saying the same. This is a widespread issue.

Newegg and Amazon reviews, if you had actually read the content of the reviews instead of the superficial stars, a lot of 4-5 stars 5700XT reviews will mention drivers instability but it's not the card fault, it's AMD. Going to Nvidia camp and people dock stars off because it's either noisy or coil whine, those hardware faults lie entirely with the AIBs.

Typical return rate on GPUs is under 3%. Even if you assumed the worst, 3*5 (GPU return rate * the purported increase over Nvidia cards) equals 15%. That's FAR from the 48% the poll purports.

So what I see here are two completely conflicting numbers. Both can't be true as one disproves the other.

The poll itself is worthless. TechSpot could have simply ran the story based on said retailer data. Just that 5x return figure would have been sufficient.

Newegg and Amazon reviews, if you had actually read the content of the reviews instead of the superficial stars, a lot of 4-5 stars 5700XT reviews will mention drivers instability but it's not the card fault, it's AMD. Going to Nvidia camp and people dock stars off because it's either noisy or coil whine, those hardware faults lie entirely with the AIBs.

So let me get this straight, you assume I didn't read something and then go on to make a random unfounded observation about how reviewers treat AMD cards differently then Nvidia. Yeah I'll file that right under "DNR".

I'll reiterate, an article should have been made on this topic as it's certainly an issue. I just find the poll, and the hyperbolic response it's elicited, as overly unnecessary.

 

[Irata]

LOL, you did exactly what he said you'd do. Look up. The article you're posting about says 48% of people with AMD cards reported driver problems among all cards still in use. Not a thing about "Just since the 2020 update". The problems clearly existed well before that and were SUPPOSED to have been FIXED by the 2020 update. They weren't.

Try being a little more objective and a little less fanboy.

That's the thing - if you have no (major) issues and you do not know anyone who has them, what *are* you supposed to post? Clearly, the article writer does not know anyone either. It's a bit of a Catch 22 situation really.

And with the reported problems we are not talking about minor annoying issues but rather "dealbreaker" type problems that make the card unusable, I.e. RMA rates should be abhorrent. Checking the only shop that I know which shows them (Mindfactory), they are nowhere near that.

Again, not saying no one is having problems of any kind and that drivers could not be improved- that would be unrealistic either way. But I personally do not buy that Radeon 5xxx cards are basically unusable as it is often portrayed.

I also find it interesting that this only has blown up once AMD managed to have all around competitive cards in the mid range.

Edit: To be perfectly clear - if I had issues that were even remotely close to what is being reported, I'd RMA the card right away and something else would go into the PC in its place. I expect my PC to work reliably and my kid would chew my head off. So people supposedly putting up with major issues (read: making the card unusable) for months when there are alternatives is beyond me.

 

[Badvok]

I know it's probably just confirmation bias but I love how this situation ensures that I will never touch an AMD GPU (or CPU) having been burned with exactly this sort of poor software from ATI/AMD in the past. AMD may offer better value for the initial outlay but they certainly continue to fail at offering better value when you take into account the loss of your personal gaming time.

 

[Nobina]

By the way, 4 accounts less then a day old now in this thread. TechSpot really should put some restrictions on new accounts to prevent spammers and thread manipulation.

Those are paid shills.

 

[krizby]

That's the thing - if you have no (major) issues and you do not know anyone who has them, what *are* you supposed to post? Clearly, the article writer does not know anyone either. It's a bit of a Catch 22 situation really.

And with the reported problems we are not talking about minor annoying issues but rather "dealbreaker" type problems that make the card unusable, I.e. RMA rates should be abhorrent. Checking the only shop that I know which shows them (Mindfactory), they are nowhere near that.

Again, not saying no one is having problems of any kind and that drivers could not be improved- that would be unrealistic either way. But I personally do not buy that Radeon 5xxx cards are basically unusable as it is often portrayed.

I also find it interesting that this only has blown up once AMD managed to have all around competitive cards in the mid range.

Good catch about Mindfactory, since I don't want to go over every model I pick the one with the highest sale number
PowerColor 5700XT Red Devil - 3560 unit sold - RMA rate 4%
KFA2 2070 Super EX - 4920 units sold - RMA rate 1%
(Cheapest 2070 Super vs highest reviewed premium 5700 XT model nonetheless)

Well 4x more return is pretty close to what Steve reported.
And I will just reiterate the point of this topic is that AMD users have to put up with persisted driver instability for months, the fact that people say use a 2 months old driver already prove that. If you happen to play newly release game on day 1, good luck with 2 months old AMD driver.
And when people say they have no problem whatsoever, congrats you just won the lottery .

 

[Irata]

Good catch about Mindfactory, since I don't want to go over every model I pick the one with the highest sale number
PowerColor 5700XT Red Devil - 3560 unit sold - RMA rate 4%
KFA2 2070 Super EX - 4920 units sold - RMA rate 1%

Well 4x more return is pretty close to what Steve reported (more than 5x).
And I will just reiterate the point of this topic is that AMD users have to put up with persisted driver instability for months, the fact that people say use a 2 months old driver already prove that. If you happen to play newly release game on day 1, good luck with 2 months old AMD driver.

The RMA rate is definitely higher than for 2070 cards - nor argument here. RMA rates for 2070 cards are very low - seems like they are around 1% across the top sellers, so very nice.

Note: If you check 2060 and 2080 models you also see 4% - 5 % on some high selling models (e.g. MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO has a 5% RMA rate ).


Still, even an RMA rate of 4% does not support the picture that is being painted on the internet right now of Radeon cards basically being unusable.

People would have to be much more patient than me.

 

[gamerk2]

I've owned one ATI/AMD card in my lifetime: An ATI 4850. The driver install program GUI would not launch due to some MSVC conflict, so I had to install/uninstall via command prompt, which coming from NVIDIA cards was shocking their software was that bad. The card itself? Dead in 9 months.

Granted, sample of one, but I've heard lots of stories over the years that have constantly shied me away from AMD/ATI products.

 

[krizby]

The RMA rate is definitely higher than for 2070 cards - nor argument here. RMA rates for 2070 cards are very low - seems like they are around 1% across the top sellers, so very nice.

Note: If you check 2060 and 2080 models you also see 4% - 5 % on some high selling models (e.g. MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GAMING X TRIO has a 5% RMA rate ).


Still, even an RMA rate of 4% does not support the picture that is being painted on the internet right now of Radeon cards basically being unusable.

People would have to be much more patient than me.

Yeah there were some initial problem with 2080 Ti - 2080 - 2070 dying, it was widely reported back then.
2080 Ti dying
I bought 2 2080 Ti back in Dec 2018 (one Gigabyte and one Asus) and they are running perfectly, does it mean people were lying about dead 2080 Ti ? definitely not.

 

[max0x7ba]

Another issue with AMD drivers is that they have never been great in DirectX11 or OpenGl. Some games with AMD optimizations extract the most of AMD hardware and perform great, but that is more of an exception. Some popular DirectX11 games perform poorly on AMD hardware (GTA5, BF4, PUBG) due to the infamously poor implementation of DirectX11 by AMD, so that powerful AMD hardware can't perform at its full capacity. And AMD seems to have given up on this API, they are pushing more primitive low-level DirectX 12 and Vulcan which are simpler to implement in the driver because they push all the complexities onto the 3D engine. That would be fine if only AMD dedicated resources to implementing support for these new APIs in popular gaming engines, like NVidia does.

Whereas with NVidia drivers you can be sure that all games utilize NVidia hardware to its full capacity.

And these December AMD driver releases have always introduced new bugs. That new Crimson driver in 2016 made my 290X crash in 2D mode due to wrong voltage and AMD never fixed that, so I had to RMA my perfectly working card.

Got a RX580 as a replacement and suffered from that infamous mouse pointer corruption bug for a few months that AMD allegedly fixed a decade ago. The mere fact that AMD could not fix this bug for a few months was hard to fathom for me, a software engineer.

I bought Vega 64 LC in 2017 and, again, the December drivers were so poor, as you mention, the frequency, voltage and fan controls didn't work or didn't persist, the reporting was wrong. (Never mind the fact that much touted feature of Vega - the primitive shaders were never enabled in the driver.) That was the last straw for me, I switched to NVidia for good and never had GPU issues ever since.

AMD GPU drivers have historically been poor since ATI days.

Sure, new NVidia drivers sometimes do have a bug, but NVidia always fixed that within a week.

 

[max0x7ba]

If you think this is about AMD cutting corners, you haven't been following along.

FYI Vega wasn't just cheap compute, it beat the 1080 Ti in blender render times by 40% and in other compute benchmarks by a good margin. Vega VII beats the 2080 Ti in many professional workloads. "Cheap Compute" does not aptly describe it unless you also consider the 2080 Ti cheap. It provides more compute for around half the price.

I think you need to tone down the hyperbole two notches. Vega wasn't "trash" and AMD isn't "wretched". You need only look at reviews of the products to see that.

That cheap compute was nearly useless because most compute software requires CUDA. I couldn't run Tensorflow on Vega, despite trying hard with ROCm. Sold Vega, got 1080Ti and all my software works perfectly.

AMD GPU software have been trash.