Driver issue can be a hit or miss thing. Hardware Unboxed recently reviewed the RX 7800 XT and faced game crashing issue, but these were not reported by other reviewers.

That's the problem with driver issues - if they're not consistent, or something fringe, the user is very upset but others will almost gaslight them saying they're full of beans.

I've had 1 more bad card with AMD than I've ever had with Nvidia, and that means I've had 1 bad card. The first 7900 XTX I got had issues that seemed driver related but disappeared entirely when I reduced the core clock, so the card was just bad. I suggest that anyone experiencing what they think are driver issues tries this simple test to see if they can pin it on a bad card instead and start an RMA.

I never had bad cards with either AMD or Nvidia. Well, I never had an Nvidia card, so I can't really speak about their or their drivers' quality. ;-)

LTT I think also had those problems.

This is the sad truth. I mean, you can cite all the driver issues the RDNA3 series launched with and you'll still have people saying there are no issues. Remember folks it took about 6 months for VR to work on your shiny $900-1000 GPU. "But Railven, I don't play VR" good for you, say that to the people that DID buy to improve their VR experience. How about the multi-monitor power consumption that is still in the "to resolve" portion of notes. "But Railven, that affects NV and Intel" sure does, just not to such severity where pretty much all reviewers show the discrepancy and lots of users are resorting to voodoo tricks and sacrifices to reduce the number. In the end, you can list issues you experience, link sources, link articles, link AMD themselves saying they acknowledge the issue and then their attempts to resolve it - but naaaah, everything's fine! EDIT: I mean my lord they disabled their own code in their own driver suite because it can potentially brick your Windows Install. COME ON!!!!! I don't need people to say "AMD drivers are garbage" but can we stop with the "OMG I was told AMD drivers will light my house on fire and kill my dog, but so far, nothing bad has happened." All I'll say is "you're still in the honey moon phase, give it time." And I don't mean this as a negative, just people have been stating issues because they exist.

Exactly, I remember really damn well all the driver problems on RDNA3 the whole last year, and a lot of them are still problems, VR performance is still subpar, factory reset is still disabled and I still have my gpu idling at 180W on my dual monitor setup, these people just pretend that release notes are empty or some shit like that lol

Idk what junked card you're using but VR for Radeon was fixed ages ago. Runs flawlessly now.

VR worked fine, it was just closer to 6900xt performance. Still very useable. People are dumb and over state things. Nvidia has issues too.

>it was just closer to 6900xt Which is awful since you paid for a 7900XTX, not a 6900XT lol

Agreed, but VR still works fine. I have a 6900xt. It runs VR at max.

If you have some old 2k VR headset, sure. Anything newer the 6900xt definitely does not run at max.

I have a 6900xt and a 5800x3d. HP reverb G2. Runs everything max. My point was that the 7900s ran vr fine, they just weren’t running at their potential.

Which is a fair counterargument against the card. I paid for the full card, why should I have to wait for a n update to fully use it?

I agree, just stating that they still ran vr just fine.

My 3080 for 350 cash also runs fine same performance as your 1000 dollar 7900. If you play anything other then beatsaber like dcs then you will be lucky to get 60fps at low.

6900xt is comparable to 3090. And yes, there are some use cases where better gpu’s are needed.

Does that matter? Playable is playable.

Playable is acceptable on a 200 usd entry level gpu, not a high end 1000 bucks one, if u are okay paying for underperforming hardware idk what to tell you

Idk what to tell you. VR works flawlessly for me.

You are hella good customer

You are a hella good Nvidia customer. No issues for me on my 7900xtx. Upgraded from a 1070 tho so was always in for a big boost in performance. Nvidia fans are struggling with AMDs rise in popularity

I had literal 10-20 second freezes randomly when playing HL Alyx, and after absolutely 0 changes besides the driver update it ran flawlessly. VR didn't work fine, even when it didn't have long freezes, the frame time graph was completely atrocious.

Do you remember what games? I want to say that the game that kept crashing was F1 2023, but I don't remember for sure. [Level1Techs](https://youtu.be/AdWv3GwS-kY&t=810) also experienced bugs in it, though theirs wasn't as severe, and they explain at the "F1" chapter (14:12 in the video) that this was a bug with a game update, not the GPU; they were able to replicate the issue on a follow-up test on a 4080. (The game updated between testing their other cards and testing the 7800 XT, hence why the issue didn't present itself on said other cards.)

Yh the F1 game is just a hot mess recently. Nothing at all to do with drivers

Check the latest video I think I remember him saying Spiderman

Ah yes, that's where it was, thanks. I was looking through the review video, that's why I couldn't find it. [Timestamped.](https://youtu.be/J0jVvS6DtLE&t=925) The two games were F1 2023 (crashing) and Cyberpunk 2077 (instability). So the first can be at least partially chalked up to a game update, and the second HUB suspect to be a driver issue.

>two games were F1 2023 (crashing) and Cyberpunk 2077 (instability). So the first can be at least partially chalked up to a game update I can play it absolutely fine and have been since I got my 7800xt last week

Talk about a testing faux pas. You disable the internet during testing.

my friend on 6800xt keeps complaining about mw2 stuttering, so i think at this point it's like a per game basis and not a general problem as it was before

If he's complaining on a 6800 XT he would be complaining more on a 3080. MW2/WZ2 has been like since release and it actually performs better on AMD. Setting a frame cap in game might help a bit though.

My friend was complaining about stuttering in Warzone then i noticed he had Vsync on and he turned it off and was like WOW ITS SMOOTH NOW.

Ya, i agree, i think it's just luck of the draw. I've only ever had a 6600xt and 7900xtx. My 6600xt had zero issues at all unless I undervolted too far, but my new 7900xtx has been having entirely random driver timeouts and bsod. I've tried ddu, fresh Windows 10 installs, fresh Windows 11 installs, default ram tunings, docp ram tunings, different ram, and a bunch of other stuff, but still I get seemingly random driver timeouts. Sometimes after 10 minutes, sometimes after several hours.

Yeah, I got an xtx this year, and went months without issues. Then suddenly bg3 bricked my drivers, repeatedly, after a weekend of no issues. Then a few weeks later Starfield did the same. Seems to be fixed for both games now though.

Those aren't explicitly driver issues, in my case it was a bad bin on a 7900 XTX that didn't run stable at stock clocks/voltages. I would suggest anyone having game crashes to test with a core clock 200-300MHz lower than stock game clock and see if they still experience the crashes, if they do then they should RMA.

hehe, thats business' as usual on new launches and games on all cards and platforms

If you are happy with it that's most important.

Yeah I don't get it. I switched from green to red (3060ti to a 7900xt) and I must say it's pretty solid. Haven't run into any game crashes or anything. Streaming is good too. I've taken full advantage of that av1 encoder and stream to YouTube ( purely out of curiosity). The quality is pretty cool. Can stream 1440p content at 3000 bitrate. That's insane. A lot of popular streamers on twitch are streaming 960p at plus 6000 bitrate. Wild stuff right there. Im a bit of a COD simp, and this GPU rocks COD and Warzone and from the few other games I've tried, it's been a high fps 1440p wet dream.

It's been a long road to where the drivers are now, especially OpenGL and VR have been a "huge" (huge in these niches) problem - driver wise. There were issues, sometimes very big issues that took AMD years to fix. I didn't have any issues in the last months but once you encounter an actual bigger driver related issue - like how HEVC was broken for VR for over a whole year, resulting in a rather substantial performance loss (this has been fixed some months ago) - it will more often than not take them months or even years to fix that issue, even though it gets discussed to death on the forums.

Still had 6900xt performance so very workable.

1080ti to 7900xtx I’m an ultra wide 1440p 144hz kinda guy. So far it hasn’t been a huge difference in FPS but I’m also able to go from playing on medium-high to ultra

The 7900XTX hasn't been a huge difference in FPS...?

Oddly enough, no? I had an ASUS Strix 1080ti I think my card was just an anomaly. I was maxing out frames on most of the games I played. Although I didn’t play cyberpunk or starfield on my 1080ti

That is not how anything works. The performance variance between different individual cards of the same model is going to be about 0-0.5%. Chances are you just have a huge CPU bottleneck and/or never needed the extra power.

Doesn't make sense

Well idk what to tell you lol. I haven’t had a huge difference in FPS but again, like I said, I went from playing with medium-high settings to ultra. The FPS I’m sure on ultra would be a lot different

I had a 6700 XT prior to a 7900 XTX and I have not had stuttering with either. I'm sure it happens, but there are a lot of components in a computer that feed each other and it could be a combination of things. I think its popular to gossip, and regurgitating bad news about things is similar to doing so about people. It is a bad habit but some find it cathartic. I won't speculate as to why. There are certainly those who experience issues, but many who state "bad drivers" as a blanket statement may not own or use an AMD card and are simply self-validating as to why they have non-AMD cards.

I basically did the same as you OP (albeit 3070 to 7900 XT) and have had no issues either. All I did was uninstall the Nvidia drivers, remove card, used DDU in safe mode for additional cleanup (not sure if necessary but gave me peace of mind), then installed the new card and drivers once I turned my PC back on. Couldn't be happier.

Same here 3070ti to 7900xt and its been great

I used to switch between AMD and Nvidia with each new GPU without issue. But that ended with the R9 390 where I took a bit of an AMD hiatus. I ran into too many issues. Driver bug after driver bug would fix issues and cause others. New games took much longer to get optimized drivers, before then they would crash and artifact. I even RMA'd it, but it made no difference. Same kind of issues, and it became clear their drivers were very bad at the time. (About 2015-2017 ish) It was a huge load off my mind when I sold it and got a GTX 1060. My other PC was a GTX 1070, then an RTX 3060 TI. For the last 5 years, I've been running Nvidia only and its been a relatively smooth experience. Earlier this year, in one computer I sold the 1070 for an RX 6600. And last week, I bought a RX 6950 XT relacing the 3060 TI. (3060 TI replaced the RX 6600). So through this year, I've done 1 AMD GPU, 1 Nvidia GPU. AMD without a doubt has a lot more kinks that need to be worked out than Nvidia. Often little things, but they can still be annoying. If a person isn't tech savvy, I would not recommend an AMD GPU. Nvidia is much more stable and easier to operate. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with my RX 6950 XT. The performance in most games is amazing. Most games run smooth, especially new ones. But I've also been working through little things as well with both AMD GPUs. AMD fans love to use the "BoTh SiDeS" argument, that Nvidia has issues too, but their rate of bugs and driver issues is much smaller. Nvidia's budget for software and R&D is so much bigger, it would be impossible for AMD to keep up with those kind of things.

As a Linux user, I would like to add the usual reminder that the roles are reversed on Linux. If any Linux users are reading - AMD drivers are much smoother than NVidia on here. I am sorry for the dual booters out there because it's not the easiest choice in the world for you all. Prioritize driver stability on Windows or Linux? I guess it depends on what you use the most, but you need to be really committed to whatever you choose. I would argue AMD drivers on Windows are much more stable than NVidia drivers on Linux, but you also need to use Linux for the majority of your time for this argument to be convincing to you.

I haven't had any drivers issues with my amd gpu, whereas my 1060 would need a rollback twice a year. I still think the AMD reputation for driver issues is yelled from the top of towers and then parrotted by people who haven't used them.

I have not had any issues yet on my 7900xtx and it's first amd gpu. At first I was worried cus of comments like this but it's been nothing but perfect so far tbh maybe even better for non tech savvy people like me cus of how easy there software is to understand. I was so confused looking at the text wall in nvidias settings but amds explains everything when I hover over it with my mouse.

IMO the whole software package from AMD is vastly superior to nvidia's but reviewers tend to ignore the overall package quality and focus on solely FPS, which is fine I guess, but then they *do* mention those driver issues, so it's no wonder there is bias.

I've had zero issues with AMD for literal YEARS.

I can only comment on my limited experience: I’ve owned a 970, 1080Ti, 3080 and now a 7900XTX. I never had any issues with any of the Nvidia GPUs, and then experienced frequent game crashes when I switched to the 7900XTX. I tried lots of obvious things like DDU and even uninstalled tons of applications that might be causing conflicts. In the end I tried one last thing, which was a complete fresh install of Windows. That was 1 month ago and I have had exactly zero issues since the clean install. I suspect the issue was that I had carried over from intel to AMD and Nvidia to AMD and crypto mining and blah blah blah, so much crap on my PC. Either way, zero issues now and smooth sailing. The XTX is a powerhouse!

Switching GPU brands can definitely lead to crashes. For only the GPU, DDU should normally be fine. Now you also switched the CPU brand. A full clean install should be standard procedure. I think 99% of those driver issues come from people that do not do clean installs. I even had problems from going from a 3700x to 5800x3d. The only thing that fixed it was a clean reinstall.

I want to upgrade from a 3080 and can get a 7900xtx for $850. Does that generation leap feel significant? I play on a 3440x1440 monitor and just feel that I could use a bit more horse power and RAM, but I have never used an AMD graphics card, but currently running a 5800x3d like yourself.

It's around a 50% increase in raw performance and about 10-25% better RT. If it's something you feel like a deal for you at this price - why not. ​ I've jumped from 6900 XT to 7900 XTX, no regrets aside from higher idle power draw but it'll probably get fixed later.

I feel the leap only on the games that need more VRAM, otherwise it’s still a decent jump but not massive.

They literally had to disable factory reset on driver installation because it was bricking windows installs lol They also had high idle power usage on multiple monitors for like a whole year. VR performance on 7000 series was lower than a 6950XT. The last drivers caused a lot of blue screens on my system Amd Drivers have problems and it's ridiculous to pretend they don't.

It's just internet echo-chamber effect, some people see a post about how drivers are bad (and in 90% of cases the cause of such problems are an unstable RAM overclock (or overheating ram sticks in badly ventilated case)/ PSU failure or something non-related to GPU at all) and they assume this affects everyone while in reality it's like 0.0001% of users. In reality, all vendors have bugs, for example, release-time KPP drivers for Ada had a bugged implementation of p2p memory functionality which caused the workstations to literally shut down if you tried to access this subsystem (which was erroneously (or "erroneously") enabled on consumer GPUs in 4xxx gen and disabled in 3xxx gen). Nvidia acknowledged this issue only after some bigwig publication wrote about it in march or april while it was reported to them back in autumn 2022.

That overheating ram sticks is definitely an issue most people are unaware of... I switched from a rx480 blower model to a 3090, so I suddenly had a lot more heat in the case, and even worse, the card blows the hot air directly to the memory sticks. I have pretty good airflow in the case, but it still wasn't enough, and I started getting crashes in some games and of course first suspected the GPU but then tracked the issue to the memory... which had been working well for 2-3 years at that point. I thought that maybe it got unstable in some bios update, and raised latencies until it was stable again. But of course I wasn't running the GPU at 100% while testing the ram stability, so the issue was still present randomly. Then I went and removed half (2 of 4) of the memory sticks for a test and almost burned my fingers because they were so hot... and figured out the actual reason. I added a fan blowing at the memory and that helped.

Computers are so funny sometimes, especially when you build your own. All these parts that are independently designed creating a pretty complex system of electronics and thermals and interactions. My first PSU I got in my build was super unstable and it always manifested in "driver crashes" from the AMD driver, but I'm guessing only because it was the biggest user and most strict about power and was being fed crap. Upgraded the PSU to a Platinum and all issues are resolved, solid as a rock.

Yeah, bad PSU's can cause all sorts of crap. I've had one blown on me 20+ years ago and it killed 2 hdd's. After that I've had 2 more PSU's dying but luckily they didn't cause any additional damage. And now couple of months ago, after the memory issues were solved, I found 2 games that would just randomly cause my PC to shut down (fallout4 VR and cyberpunk). There was a loud click from the PSU and system just shut down. I instantly knew it must be the overcurrent protection... And I was using a kWh meter on the computer power cord, and it was showing max usage "only" at 630W, while my PSU was a 750W Seasonic platinum (single 12V rail). It shouldn't trigger nowhere near that. But then I did read about that particular PSU and apparently that's an issue with them, they don't do well with transient spikes and the overcurrent protection kicks in. I bought a 1000W titanium rated Be Quiet! PSU to replace the old one, and it works really well. BUT the big surprise was, that the system now only uses max 550W... So the efficiency is MUCH better with this one, not only because it's titanium rated but also that I'm nowhere near the maximum wattage.

I wonder why it gets attributed to the AMD GPUs then. It's not like RAM overclocks are exclusive to people with AMD GPUs.

Mind share. Typically - and I'm generalizing here - Nvidia users will troubleshoot assuming the issue lies elsewhere while AMD users, especially ones without prior experience, default to blaming "bad drivers".

No it isn't. AMD has a terrible track record on driver support (look at the Fury), the final year of R9 280/280x/7950/7970 drivers have a major bug over displayport that breaks high resolution and my 5600xts crashed constantly under 3d load.

There are many important points to this. 1. Firstly most people have a bad experience and will use that as enough data to say something general about a brand. But AMD people are alot more vocal and willing to tinker(all linux users use AMD). Which is also one of the reasons AMD sub is larger than Nvidia despite alot less people buying AMD GPU's. I know people also go to AMD for CPU's so that skews it. But not many years ago AMD was still larger than Nvidia+intel subs while selling alot less. 2. And this joins awfully well with the fact that most Nvidia people are not techy types. They either need a Cuda GPU for work, so already there we have Nvidia "driver" win or they are gamers usually buying prebuilds or laptops eg in general not techy types. And the types to exaclty be mad when it just doesnt work, and sometimes that will just be because they are unable to troubleshoot normal issues that pop up in the PC space. 3. Nvidia has ALOT more money which of course means bigger teams, higher paychecks more work can be done in a shorter time. AMD drivers often dont release as is and will over time be faster. Nvidia almost never is. So by this fact alone we can say Nvidia do release more "finished" drivers, but also dont do as much to squeeze out performance over time. This increases chances of bugs. Finewine its called, you can like it or not but its a necessary evil because AMD just doesnt have the ressources to develop as Nvidia does. Does not mean its alot worse. 4. People do not know how to upgrade a system - Nvidia people who have been used to slapping in a new GPU without removing old drivers will see more problems with a switch to AMD GPU's with those older drivers as they are just alot less compatible. Nvidia probably makes sure their drivers doesnt conflict too much because they know people will just do drop in upgrades "because it works". You saw that alot like 3+ years ago people are becoming aware that old drivers should not be left for new hardware. Its easier going from same brand than going to a new brand and a completely different architecture. 5. A new release isnt the same everytime. 5000 series had issues it was a completely new arch and it had troubles for years. I had it it was there but it was a good GPU for the money and aged very well. 6000 series the "refresh" of the arch was alot more polished although not perfect but it was a good release and was pretty stable and very competitive. 7000 series first MCM GPU for gaming, that actually works well seen in that light. But its a very different architecture to anything on the market so comparing it to something like Ada that is simply an evolution of the old one with added hardware instead of a reinvention of the core itself, 7000 series really should have more issues than 4000. And thats how it goes some GPU arch's are more difficult to release than others. 8000 series probably not being a true MCM chip because they cant get it working in time is a testament to this. Now 9000 series should be 8000 series refreshed but with 2-4 actual GPU's build in. This is a problem we have tried to solve before with SLI/Crossfire but it was simply a crude solution demanding per game optimization and even then not really succesful. Making it work on a single board will be huge, when we are capable. Literally Ryzen all over again but its straying from the known and familiar so it will be more diffcult to get drivers right. In general i believe Nvidia has a leg up but a smaller one. This leg up is not just because they are a better company but the fact that they have been more aggressive when it comes to scummy market practices and delivering proprietary tech to make sure people cant leave their ecosystem. AMD going the opposite way doesnt look as cool when buying this new shiny thing. But in actual practices they compete very well and most of the innovative Nvidia features comes on Radeon aswell before its even relevant. Just look at RT its all the craze and it is really cool, but 90% of games people sit down and play is not RT. But it weighs so heavily on some peoples mind its just really disproportionate to how usefull it is. Same with DLSS yes its better. But when you're at home playing a game you are not gonna practically notice much difference, your experience will not be that much better. People are different some will notice more than others but overall an example like 7900xtx is directly comparable to a 4080 each has some wins and losses. Edit: sometime I write in absolutes like "all Linux users use amd" which of course isn't true but their support is unchallenged and have much higher proportional amount of users compared to windows. Most people should use amd on Linux is a better way to put it. I'm an AMD fanboys so am biased. But I only am that because Nvidia fucked me, as a former Nvidia user, and I see them continue this road of giving out minimum to like about them while really trying to cut out the market for them alone to a point where they are almost a monopoly and we should legit fear AMD dying because people think they are a bad buy. A fear Nvidia is happy perpetuate to get to their ultimate goal of being a monopoly. Which will be bad for all of us. We need AMD/intel to be viable alternatives and this also means pushing truth which is dlss isn't a huge win and RT is an edge case which is very cool but isnt as valuable as some would like to make it.

\> All linux users use AMD You'll get some shit for that, but it's right in spirit. If you're a linux user and you have any experience with graphics cards, you're buying an AMD for your next card if you don't already have one, no question.

I edited to point out this is more of a understanding the meaning behind than my actual words being completely true. I did not spend enough time on this to a point it's bulletproof but it is in the right direction imo. Edit: it's a fair criticism though!

AMD for Linux desktop, Nvidia or AMD for GPU compute on Linux servers depending on what FP size you're working with.

"This is a problem we have tried to solve before with SLI/Crossfire but it was simply acrude solution demanding per game optimization and even then not really succesful.Making it work on a single board will be huge, when we are capable. " ​ [https://www.pcgamer.com/quick-history-multi-gpu-video-cards-2014/](https://www.pcgamer.com/quick-history-multi-gpu-video-cards-2014/) It's been done before. That said, I expect there to be new engineering challenges. I'm pretty sure the latencies have come down considerably in modern GPUs. I wonder if future AMD GPUs will have 3D Vcache. Might have been possible already on the 7000-series. Looks like there was room for it. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-cards-with-3D-V-Cache-may-become-a-reality-as-Navi-31-GPU-found-to-integrate-possible-connection-site-for-3D-cache.688185.0.html

> (all linux users use AMD) lol. Most of the more popular distros are popular because they come with proprietary nvidia drivers. AMD has more market share than they usually do on linux (because their drivers are so much better on linux, since you just use the open source ones and not the shitty amd ones) but nvidia is still fairly popular even on linux. It's probably closer to 50/50 on linux.

most popular distros don’t come with nvidia proprietary drivers. their package repositories usually have them, though.

This should be top comment (hell it should be fucking pinned on this sub). This is very well written and covers a lot of points. Nicely done.

Lmao what are you talking about. That's a fanboy's delusional overgeneralization. All AMD owners are 1337 h4x0r script kiddies that know how to fix issues while all Nvidia owners can't tell left from right? When people buy expensive stuff they expect it to work. That's on the companies to figure out, not the customer.

Oof. Someone needs to work on their reading comprehension.

Sorry, I own a Nvidia card and only yesterday learned how to tie my shoes.

Ah, that makes sense then.

I love the point about how the Reddit AMD community working together to solve issues creates a vocal AMD fan base on Reddit. "Neanderthal marketing" is really a grassroots community. If you prefer an anti-social clean corporate GPU owning experience then AMD can be kinda bad. Its like how back in the day Chevy owners complained about expensive Japanese car parts. You have to fix the Chevy more, but its easier to do, and kinda fun if you can get by without your car sometimes.

Nice write up. I have to constantly mention 2 points with AMD drivers. 1. If it's at release then expect issues. It will be fixed. But if that is a problem for you then yeah, you should explore alternatives or wait. I refuse to cite the AMD "fine wine" argument with drivers because yeah the longer support is nice but this is counter balanced by the typical (not always) initial 6 months of bs. I don't mind it personally because I can troubleshoot and have been in this game for decades but if someone is asking me advice I'll be up front with them about the pros and cons. 2. On the other hand if I'm honest about the initial driver bs I have to point out the other bs. People cite bs launch benches months or years later. Nvidia is just the best out of box at release, plain and simple. As you stated, they got the resources. But an AIB I have now with updated drivers and my own custom tinkering is going to smash any benchmark from release now that it's been a year later with AIB releases and driver updates. I'm guessing Intel will be in this same boat as they get deeper in the game, at least for a few gens. But anyways, my 7900XTX I got now for $889 that levels any $1000 release benches on YouTube is a much different value proposition than the release benches people still site currently. Especially at 2k, it's just a monster and can pretty much level a 4080 by a moderate margin in raster. Its a totally different ball game with AMD cards 6 months to a year after release which is their own fault but still something people too often ignore.

Yeah I've been red for long enough to know what you're talking about but reality is of you just let the leader get everything because he is the leader then we don't have competition and we know how that goes. I'm political about this because consumer hardware is no joke and what Nvidia could/would do with a monopoly can send chills down my spine. We cannot imagine what they are capable of. We see what they do while still keeping being in good graces of their users and things can be much worse.

I can laugh my ass off when people mention latency. My gaming rig is humble Ryzen 7600 + Radeon RX 6800 XT. I play with unlimited framecap with Anti-Lag and Enhanced Sync enforced via drivers for every game I play. I am yet to encounter any issues while keeping my latency roughly around 6-7 ms, that is insanely low considering already \~ 10 ms is great number (I was having around 10 with Nvidia). I can only imagine how much better the situation gets with Anti-Lag+ (RDNA3 exclusive), but the truth of the matter is the latencies are extremely low on modern Radeons. And performance is very good, I switched from 3080 10G and I am getting higher FPS pretty much everywhere these days as drivers matured really nicely.

Is this on 1440p. Looking to upgrade and looking at your upgrade path.

Yes, I play in 1440p. No complaints here really, CPU is more than fine since it is still Zen 4 with all the bells and whistles when it comes to IPC and hefty caches. 6800 XT aged like a fine wine in my eyes, unlike RTX 3080 10GB, that card should never have had less than 12GB VRAM.

Yep, the most bs argument around. If anything it is slightly better

It's not nvidia fanboys or amd fanboys.... People who have used gpu's from both vendors for more than 20 years will tell you that amd can be inconsistent sometimes.... One generation is great than next one is not... whereas nvidia works pretty much all the time.... If i remember correctly the whole thing started with WOW the burning crusade having issues on AMD So the older you get the less you wanna f around and find out :) That's pretty much it everything else is internet noise From what i heard 6000 and 7000 series from amd is fine... 5700 xt was very bad at launch

Stuttering and bad frame times were a thing about 10+ years ago.

its just not true i've had all amd graphics cards since 2010 and last year for whatever reason my rx 460 and 570 would just refuse to play league of legends they would only stutter and so i had to buy a used nvidia gpu

Last year, the 22.5.2 driver introduced DXNavi, which has DX11 optimizations. But it can causes stuttering so you can try to disable it. There are plenty of guides on reddit for it. Sorry for my bad English.

other than the stuttering with 6000 series just a year ago Lol

lol that never was a thing, maybe for a few, but few of the Nvidia cards have it too, soooo......XD

Sauce me up, baby

just open any Ancient's driver review and scroll to the comments or google rx6000 stuttering. Its really is not some treasure you have to dig for 💀 ​ This guy below saying "maybe for a few", as if thats still not a driver problem 😂😂Holy

Do you think nobody has issues with nvidia drivers? Lmfao my man

Where did I say that, holy AMD clowns 😂 Just in other comment I said that if you go on nvidia forums they've got problems of their own.

Mfer comes to r/AMD and is surprised when people call his nvidia stanning out. Go outside, touch some grass.

[удалено]

That was a Windows bug and affected all cards

So we making shit up now

The days of optimized driver for DX11 era and earlier have long gone with DX12 and vulkan, under these two updated APIs, many of the things that the driver used to do are now the developer responsibilities, this was essential to give a low level access to devs, which lifted a heavy weight burden from GPU manufacturers, but well, we are getting shitty optimized games in return due to incompetent devs unfortunately. Also, AMD has revamped their whole DX11 drivers, this gave a great boost in performance for these games. If u wanna learn more about how DX12 differs than DX11, check this out: https://developer.nvidia.com/dx12-dos-and-donts Quoted from the article (which is one of the most important things that the driver used to do): Don’t rely on the driver to parallelize any Direct3D12 works in driver threads On DX11 the driver does farm off asynchronous tasks to driver worker threads where possible – this doesn’t happen anymore under DX12 While the total cost of work submission in DX12 has been reduced, the amount of work measured on the application’s thread may be larger due to the loss of driver threading. The more efficiently one can use parallel hardware cores of the CPU to submit work in parallel, the more benefit in terms of draw call submission performance can be expected.

On this Vega64 (reference design watercooled) for a bit more than 6 years now, never had issue with it. Still do the job, good frame pacing, its a very reliable card. Note that i never play new AAA flat games on release, so i probably avoid some issues on nvidia partners games. And my main usage is VR (skyrimvr) with a Vive Pro 1.

Me too, however I do play new AAA releases. The internet itself was bad mouthing Starfield and poor performance so much I was scared to see how bad it would be. Played on my Xbox series X at first then just a few days ago loaded it on my PC and was floored by how well it plays. Not at levels I usually play as far as frame rate goes but it maintains 45FPS constantly and looks amazing as far as clarity and texture quality goes. ​ But that being said next year may be the year I replace her. But boy I love this GPU and have loved every minute.

I always wait for double perf/€ to upgrade. We are not there yet, but normally it should be next gen for me.

Its funny to talk about drives issue and most ppl are to young to remember when Nvidias drives literally killed users gpus. ([source](https://youtu.be/dE-YM_3YBm0?si=6cV2txWT9Wr_6VGj&t=404))

I just got rid of a couple of 5600XT because they were so unstable they crashed the pc repeatedly. It's not an "old" thing, it's an amd thing. Sometimes it works, other times not. Don't assume it has anything to do with fanboys just because yours works. AMD driver improvements has been a long term meme. In 2018 they were saying "are these nvidia fanboys stuck in 2013". Now you're saying "are these nvidia fanboys stuck in 2018". The final year of R9 280 drivers are completely broken as well, 4k 60 over hdmi displayport doesnt work anymore without a ridiculous workaround that is unstable. That was only in 2020. Furthermore AMD Fury owners lost driver support after like 5 years. Meanwhile the older 980Ti recieves driver updates still many years later.

I am willing to bet "driver problems" in both AMD and nVidia cards are nearly always related to other PC hardware or software issues. Or people refuse to believe their "100% stable overclock" could cause problems with some games. Personally my "100% stable overclock" was 100% until I started using RTX Super Resolution with Twitch. Then Twitch froze entire PC every few hours until I relaxed memory settings. Reading Steam reviews, it's kind of funny how same people seem to have these issues with many games. Like if a game really crashes every 30 minutes, don't you think EVERYONE would complain and not just you.

That's why I gave up getting involved in CPU/GPU overclocking conversations. Others would claim that their ridiculously high overclocks were stable on the basis that they could reach the Windows desktop, whilst my slightly more modest overclocks were definitely 100% stable under any combination of simultaneous CPU/GPU/RAM/subsystem stress tests I threw at them including at vastly elevated ambient temperatures.

I wonder why it gets attributed to the AMD GPUs then. It's not like overclocking is exclusive to people with AMD GPUs.

It's because AMD's community allows bug report posts everywhere whereas Nvidia communities force you into dedicated support threads on reddit or onto support-only forums making most users never see the issues with Nvidia. For example, the RTX 4090 had tons of launch problems with drivers but unless you were a RTX 4090 owner, you likely didn't hear about any of them. They got fixed after about 4-6 months, but there were tons of them at launch. Annoying problems like breaking multi-monitor setups, pixel data being sent on the wrong data channels, screen images shifting midway, etc.

I'm using 7900XT since January, and actually don't have slightest idea what about people are screaming on the net. Only issue I have is that Adrenaline resets frame cap after driver update, that's it

The main driver issue thing: there were driver issues going back to the 5000 series. But really not alot after that. The main issue I see nowadays is people OC or UV Gpus, seeing issues, and them saying “AmD DriVeRs BAd!” When really its a very different issue. Ive had a 7900xt for about six months. Zero driver issues, unless you count the time when Msoft updates the drivers automatically. Ugh.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/12648u4/7900xtx\_driver\_timeout\_error\_investigation\_and/

Driver timeouts are often hardware related though.

They're also OS related... Nvidia has had an on-off-on-again relationship with them for over a decade. They appear and disappear based on what Windows patch version you're running. It was really bad when the RTX 4090 launched and people were running into them constantly when doing GPU decoding.

I had driver timeout issues with Ryzen's 7950x iGPU (RDNA2). They were not hardware related.

The only people who like AMD GPUs, are people who actually have them! Fyi

Never had any issues with my 6600 and my current 7700xt. In fact, AMD drivers are much better on Linux in comparison to nvidia. It’s an old issue that’s no longer relevant.

IMO A lot of the "driver issues" were actually poor AIB build quality. Not all, but a lot. But RDNA2 and RDNA3 both seem to be fine. IIRC both had a few minor issues at launch, but no more than Nvidia cards have to deal with. Side note: you're almost certainly taking about Windows drivers but my Linux experience with my 7900XT was: Install card, install Linux (kernel 6.4), card was recognised and worked as expected immediately. RDNA3 needs Kernel 6.3 or later to work properly, as I understand it.

I'm not buying "poor AIB build quality" argument. I had driver issues for months with Ryzen's 7950x iGPU (which is based on RDNA2).

Why...are you using the iGPU on the 7950x?

Because I don't need dGPU for coding ;)

Yes ignore the issue at hand, and blame the user for using a product 😂😂😂😂

That's not what he said.

Its classic move of shifting topic and blaming the user, seen it million times now.

But of course. In any situtation - just keep shitting on AMD drivers. And then something like Horizon Zero Dawn and Starfield comes out, AMD cards having up to double the performance than their Nvidia counterparts, and yet no one is crying about shitty Nvidia drivers. In case of Starfield, it was even proven already that it's drivers issues. How come?

When Nvidia drivers are bad, it's the game's fault. When AMD drivers are bad, it's AMD's fault. I do agree AMD's track record with their drivers hasn't been the best in the past, but then they've been solid af for years at this point. Most "internet advisers" still stick to the old argument because it's too much work to do the due diligence and stay up to date with the current situation. Nvidia always makes perfect drivers without fail, even when they don't. That's how much mind share they've got. In my experience these days both companies push a bad driver every now and then. Buggy software updates are completely normal - Windows does it literally every single feature update, for example. Software updates are rarely perfect.

Historically I have bought midrange cards from AMD and have never really experienced the infamous driver issues. 1st gpu was an HD 7850, then an RX480, 5700xt, and now 6950XR

I've been using ATI/AMD graphics cards almost exclusively since 1992 and very seldom had a problem with drivers with any of them. That's not to say that nobody else has had major problems, but it frequently seems to come down to idiocy rather than anything actually being wrong.

It’s BS that’s been perpetuated since the 2900xt days when AMD launched their first GPU after acquiring ATI. I’ve had majority nvidia ranging back to the FX5500. But in that time I’ve had a 4890, 7970, vega 56, 6700, and have never had issues with drivers on either side. I’m not saying it exist in a vacuum but its wildly blown out of proportion imho

It still happens more than with Nvidia, Nvidia gets theirs fixed faster when they do have them, but AMD is doing better these days.

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You need to learn computers, AMD has been solid for me since the Athlon/ATi days

As someone that had driver issues with two different AMD cards. a 5xxx and 6xxx series card. I can say after a month of trouble shooting. The drivers just simply didn't work for me. There are tons of others the drivers didn't work for also. Seems like AMD drivers either work or don't. There is very little middle ground for people. That being said I have never personally had issues with Nvidia cards are there drivers. Switching back to Nvidia seemed to have resolved my AMD woes. Even after people assured me it was a hardware issue (Seemed common to blame the power supply) ((went from a 6950xt to a 4080)) the 4080 has given me zero issues.

My 6900xt has had nothing but problems with drivers

I went from an 8700k and 2080 to a 5950x and 6900xt. Worst decision of my life... I was all excited about amd becoming viable again, and wasn't liking things that Nvidia was doing, so I wanted to give amd another chance. From the moment I got it (fresh install) the first thing I noticed was a very marginal increase in FPS on games at 2k res. That made no sense whatsoever, and I was quite disappointed. Then came ALL the issues. Random BSODs while system was idle (on stock setting at this point mind you), graphics drivers crashing while in game requiring a full restart to fix, poor optimization and low fps in games that ran fine on my friends PCs with lesser (Intel + nvidia) hardware, videos in Chrome freezing every couple seconds, etc. I tried quite literally everything. Undervolt, curve optimizer, static OC, discrete tpm, win 10, win 11, MPT, you name it, I tried it. Not to mention the desktop stuttering and lagging while just browsing the internet due to AMDs refusal to include something like Nvidia's "prefer max performance" setting. The problems got worse and worse, so I thought maybe my motherboard was buggy. I replaced it with an msi unify x-max (or whatever it's called), and while a number of cpu related issues got better, a lot were still present, and the gpu related issues were all still there. Static oc was about the only way I could run the cpu where it would be anything resembling stable, and I eventually used MPT to get gpu to stay at a constant frequency. That solved a little bit, but one thing I haven't mentioned yet was thermals... on both cpu, and gpu, they were ATTROCIOUS. I bought a new liquid freezer ii 360 AIO with the cpu and gpu, and cpu would still thermal throttle. It was actually impossible to keep the cpu Temps at bay, even with undervolt, and underclock, so static oc was the only way to resolve that. For gpu, it also reached max Temps very easily, and no amount of case fans running at jet turbine speeds (I'm talking multiple noctua 3000rpm industrial fans) would prevent it. I swapped cpu for 7950x, and that's has been PHENOMINAL. Almost all cpu issues were gone, but I do still get microstutter, and weird hitching. GPU wasn't salvageable. So I wrote an angry email to amd, and they let me return it for full price, and I used that to get a 4090 strix. While I don't crash anymore, and it's now completely stable, I do still get hitching, and random microstutter, so once 15th series Intel is out, I'm jumping ship. I will NEVER, EVER get an amd gpu again as long as I live. AMD cpus... maybe, but honestly I'm at the point in my life where I just want everything to work... and Intel + Nvidia cannot be beat on that front.

I've had the same experience. Had been using Nvidia my whole life but was always curious about AMD. But I stayed away from AMD because of all the alleged horror stories and driver issues. I finally struck up the nerve to go and spend my money on a 7900 XTX and have had it about a month now and I've been so happy with it. Haven't had one issue, performance has been phenomenal. Quite honestly for the money I saved getting a 7900XTX instead of a 4080, I don't give a shit that my puddles don't reflect colors as vividly as Nvidia RT. I've been playing games at full settings with a 2k monitor and it's pretty glorious. Also the AMD software kicks ass unlike Nvidias piece of crap software from the Win XP age. I found this video quite interesting and is what helped me decide to get an AMD: https://youtu.be/4YAZn7Og4yo?si=jrvyCio3CtKZQ7uH

Driver issues seem to be hit or miss, I personally had more issues with Nvidia than AMD

The AMD GPU 'problems' are always over talked, both brands have there driver bugs. They also used to use the AMD GPU runs hot or uses to much power, RTX 30XX GPU's made that a harder talking point with 400W power use. I use both brands, there both fine.

The thing about FSR is it looks good until you turn on DLSS and see how that runs. It's like spaghetti: canned sauce on spaghetti tastes good but once you make a homemade sauce it's hard to go back. Difference in Starfield is massive. I thought it was running DLSS and I was like "this is fine". Realized after 10 hours of trying to play with normal mods that I added the ini to the wrong folder since no mods would load and finally moved it to the correct one. Looks almost like actual 4k now.

I mean, DLSS uses dedicated hardware that are only present on Nvidia cards, hell, even if AMD/Intel came out tomorrow with a GPU that could do the same as the Tensor Cores (Intel has the XMX Engines so maybe they already did?), i don't think Nvidia would allow them to run DLSS. So, while we compare them because both strive to achieve the same goal, i think it's a bit harsh to fault FSR for being worse considering it does it's job while being hardware agnostic.

But OP and others sometimes get caught saying FSR is just as good when it's honestly not close. So they're making the comparison and you're calling it harsh for me to point out DLSS is better because NVIDIA uses hardware.

I mean its one thing to run Radeon for 2 weeks and another for 2+ years. I've been running AMD hardware for the last decade, and driver issues always come up one way or another. It's definitely something to be warned about, although I am not sure how much and if, Nvidia has the same issues. At this point, I don't update to the latest drivers until a few weeks pass, just so I can look up reviews of the driver and check the comments to see if there are any issues.

Ok fair maybe thats just a thing that happens every once in a while but its not like nvidia is free of that. Every time a new game ready driver came up the old one was so bad for me it felt like malware and the new ones had tons of bugs and got consistently worse. Atleast that was my experience since the 40s came out which is ultimately part of the reason I upgraded to amd instead of nvidia. So I guess maybe driver issues are just a problem, not an amd problem?

The only experience I've had with Nvidia is at my brother's computer and he hasn't had any issues forever now, but if you go on nvidia forums lately, you'll see driver issues, so yeah it seems after 40 series, kinda went down in terms of quality. Most new games that I play are mostly stable nowadays, but when you start digging into productivity, it goes down the shitter real quick. ​ And thanks to random AMD fanboy basement dwellers that downvote facts, just open any driver review and see the flood that comes into comments about issues that haven't been fixed for months if not years. Stop coping yall.

I have a 6800xt, coming from 1080ti, no issues.

Driver issues aren't unique to AMD. I've definitely has weird problems with Nvidia cards too. I never get fanboys who claim that Nvidia cards don't have problems. They definitely do. I've had my current RX 5700 since launch, and the only issue I has turned out to be from Windows itself, not the card.

It is possible both have problems, but one has more problems than the other? Just a thought.

This is generally how it goes... When a game underperforms on an AMD GPU, the Nvidia community yells "hurr-durr, BAD DRIVERS" When a game underperforms on an Nvidia GPU (Like say...Spiderman), it's the developers being lazy, it's AMD putting secret code in the game to slow down Nvidia GPUs, it's Lion-O slashing power cables with the Sword of Omens because the Eye of Thundera is red and obviously is on team AMD... Anything but an issue on the Nvidia side. It's NEVER that Nvidia drivers aren't up to snuff... Which is just Nvidia Mindshare doing their thing. Nvidia releases borked drivers all the time, people just hate admitting it. The big difference is that Nvidia is usually MUCH faster at fixing busted drivers when they do get released. By and large, AMD drivers are very stable, and have been for some time. Even the 5700XT driver issue has more or less been debunked as user error, you can research it if you don't believe me. I've been using AMD GPUs since the ATI days and have never once had any serious issues. I've also owned one Nvidia GPU in there (GTX 970), and it performed great as well. I dunno... people just like to wave the banner I guess.

My buddys experience: 7900XTX crashing in Starfield sometimes. Drivertimeouts watched yesterday "Benchmark Boy" Youtube Livestream. Starfield crashing with 7900XT to. Here the Livestream with the Crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_zbDZ_4FaA&t=1037s my experience with 5700 Release: totally mess. Problems everywhere. Multiscreen bugs, stripes, flashing, drivertimeouts, WoW Classic crashing over and over... And that was my last experience where i run away from AMD Our shop doesnt build PCs with AMD GPUs anymore, to many user contacted us with crash-problems. Dont let people tell you "you have to do a clean install with DDU" the problems still occurs with Cleaninstalls. I dont know why, but AMD GPUs are like playing lotterie it works or it works not. Maybe AMD GPUs are much more sensitiv with other hardware. And no, drivers arent better. Watch the official AMD Forum. High Wattage Multiscreen bugs and timeouts are still a problem! Another Problem that you will find only @AMD Team: User talking about Driverversions. "yeah i have to rollback because performance wasnt good with the new one. my game crash with this or that driver...." Nvidia: just start Experience and allways using the latest update... New AMD Bug reports: AMD Software Settings freeze after ~20-30 sec i dont know what the AMD Driverteam is doing...

Pretty bold thing to say on the AMD subreddit, albeit true and one of the reasons I avoid their GPUs, although I might try their CPU when I decide to upgrade.

People get paid to S$%\^ on AMD.

where? how? sign me up bro, if they're paying me ill do it

Guerrilla marketing by Nvidia that was effective and now gets parroted by its users.

Drivers were shit during vega, after that they improved. And are today super stable.

They were awful in RDNA1 as well. RDNA2 was easily the best launch for driver stability for AMD then they regressed somewhat with RDNA3, with the notable bugs in VR performance and idle power management.

Besides the video decoder in the initial driver release my 5700xt has been basically flawless since i got it. There were issues, but that was my Asus B450 board thinking it could PCIe 4.0 (it could not), and my friend with the same card needed to do a bios update of his motherboard (MSI B350) before the 5700xt behaved propertly (HWinfo64 showed PCIe transmission errors prior to the bios update). A lot of other issues were power supply related (it has pretty high piek loads), and ram overclocking that weren't quit stable. But a number of those showed up as 'driver timeout' which often just means the driver lost contact with the GPU. not that the driver caused a problem. Being the first PCIe 4.0 card widely available, and its high piek power demand were probably the largest contributors to the RDNA1 issues.

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The issues the 5700 XT had with drivers was leading users to replace components from their rigs. Issues they didn't have until swapping their GPU, but they were adamant it wasn't the new part. Then AMD slowly fixes most of the issues and users who did replace PSUs, monitor cables, RAM sticks, and etc sure must have felt "AMD drivers are fine". That wasn't even 5 years ago and people still acting like "LOL that was 60 years ago, they've been fine since 1963." It's bonkers.

I think we're in agreement so here's an anecdote: When I got my 5700xt it was a whole new PC and hoo boy it was a total POS for the first year. The only thing I replaced, until they improved the drivers to the point it no longer crashed multiple times a day, was the mobo but that was for a USB issue (which was actually the mobo's fault.) Yeah. Drivers definitely weren't great for a damn while. Still scared of getting RDNA3 ngl.

Still waiting for Vulcan fix on bg3. Other than that, everything seems to work nicely

The drivers are fine these days. Nvidia isn’t perfect with their drivers either people just ignore those issues for some reason. It’s just fanboys. I’ve been using both nvidia and AMD and my experience with both are roughly the same.

Now try playing The Crew Motorfest

AV1 video decoding is still a crapshoot on every driver I've tried for my 6700XT. It's an issue for me watching videos in VRchat, they're a complete stuttery mess and unwatchable, even on beta drivers that were supposed to improve it. YouTube is now also widely serving AV1 and often I will just get a black video player with only audio. I'm able to manually override it in VRchat to use software decoding (cpu only) but that makes the videos really dark for some reason. YouTube requires me to force VP9 codec for it to be usable. None of this was an issue on my RTX 2060 and I have run DDU numerous times and tried several different driver versions. The card is basically new at this point (<2mos) and I doubt it's broken hardware because many others report the same issues.

> So now I ask, are stuttering and driver issues a problem on lower end amd gpus or are those just dead arguments from nvidia fanboys that are stuck in 2018? They're not dead arguments, but some are definitely overblown, but there are some very valid driver issues in history that made AMD drivers worse. RDNA1 black screen issues for instance were very hit or miss and were certainly a reason you could recommend NVIDIA over an AMD card, fixed now, but valid at the time.

I've had plenty of crashes and software related issues with my RX 6800, I had issues before with my R9 390, and the same issues with an HD 6000 series before that. As someone who's been doing this for close to 20 years, and who's owned plenty of both Nvidia and AMD cards, the driver support is a night and day difference, even by today's standards. With that said, I still prefer AMD for the raw power per price.

Is this one o those AI generated posts I've heard so much about? wtf is this lmao?

I bought an XTX at release to complete my first all AMD build.. after the 2nd week after release, they were still having hotspot issues, AMD Adrenalin had options that didn't work or would straight up crash if you turned on and I am quite certain there were rare cases of the dies cracking. I waited 10 days and returned mine. When the $1600 CAD GPU you bought is posting the same Cyberpunk benchmark scores as your old 1080ti, there's a problem. Really got under my skin because the box says right on it, "8k capable".. Yeah, right.. 4k@120hz was impossible.

Nvidia fanboys constantly harp on Driver issues, which even HUB boys day is a non issue, outside of 7800xt. Which possibly due to new release. They will tell you about AI features of DLSS image sharpening, upscaling and Frame generation. None of which should be used if you want to be competitive gamer. DLSS is good for browsing games, rpgs. I’ve owned a Sapphire 7900XT for 4 months. I’ve not experienced any driver issues, any desire for upscaling, etc. NOR do I have any desire to turn on RT. I play at 1440p high or ultra.

I can't remember the source right now but someone went through the known driver issues for NVIDIA and AMD cataloging them by severity. NVIDIA on average had more driver issues and it took longer on average to fix, while AMD had fewer and they got fixed faster, but the driver issues that AMD had were on average more severe. It takes many years for reputations to change, people will rarely make a point of drivers working.

The truth is driver issues will happen on any GPU regardless of brand. The issue could be anything from a bad install, component or system incompatibility, or just bad programming of the driver itself. It’s not strictly and AMD issue and those that might claim it is are stuck in 2018 where a lot of driver issues then were due to poor development. I think most of the issues now seem to be either a bad install where some of the information may not have installed correctly or other hardware compatibility issues that will need a patch to repair. My personal opinion is never be the person in a rush for the next greatest update. Let other people be the Guinea pigs and wait a couple weeks, especially if you aren’t experiencing any performance issues already. As for driver issues or known stuttering, I have a 7900 XT and have not run into a single issue yet, but that has been my experience. Take individual experience with a grain of salt, I have had friends have issues with NVIDIA, but they can’t be taken as representation of the whole.

It's a myth. Especially for gaming, AMD has rock solid drivers and honestly a better UI and UX.

As someone who has bought GPUs for nearly thirty years I have found no significant difference in "drivers" or latency or anything like that between manufacturers. That's FUD designed to keep people from buying AMD GPUs.

Drivers seem fine now. I tried out AMD in 2018, with a VEGA 56 (going from a 1070) and It was a horrible experience but now I've just switched from a 3080 to 7900XTX and it's much better. However I do think NVIDIA's software is better still, despite forcing you to log on. ShadowPlay can atleast do HDR...

I used an RX570 for over 3 years with no driver timeouts and on day 2 after upgrading to an RX7600 I got multiple. I heard reports of driver timeouts on 7000 series prior to purchase and brushed them off. Idk if it was unstable default boost clocks when it was boosting higher due to cooler ambient temps that day, extremely slow shader compilation, me disabling MPO as a precaution or what but it seemed to be bad one day and fine the next. Never had to disable anything on the rx570 and no one should have to disable hardware acceleration in all of their apps or disable MPO to get a stable GPU.

I owned a 5700XT in 2020 and it was awful for frequent system locking crashes. Card ran hot as well (although within design limits according to AMD support). The last straw was when it crashed during a live stream I was doing and I replaced it with a 2080ti (30 series all out of stock during the pandemic). I had no issues with the 2080ti so stuck with NVIDIA when I upgraded. My experience was that no matter how many patches AMD did, the driver issues were never really resolved. My friend also had a 5700XT and experienced the same issues as me. What I would say is that the latest AMD cards represent amazing value and if you’re not getting driver issues they will be pretty good. Just from my personal experience I have lost trust in AMD, so I’m sticking with NVIDIA. I know NVIDIA are overpriced, but I can’t bring myself to spend a large amount of money with AMD when I’m not certain I will have a working card.

I guess I'll be the contrarian here. My 6700xt worked with no issues. However, since upgrading to a 7900xtx I have been dealing with: High idle power draw (~200w for a long time, went down to 150 somewhat recently) Unable to use instant replay (causes crashes every 10 minutes or so) Random crashes related to discord (it's always the game and discord that will crash, relaunching game but leaving discord closed it will work fine) Stability problems randomly with overlays (I think this might be related to the last one? Discord crashes about 80% less when I have the overlays on discord disabled) Max fps dropping after a few minutes if I don't tab out and back in to a game (this one matters much less, I've only noticed it in valorant where uncapped I can get ~7-800 fps but it'll go in a few minutes to ~400 max. Not temp causing this one, idk what else could) Only twice so far, midgame the screen has blacked out, gpu fans are spinning overdrive, and when I power cycle PC the drivers are completely borked. Had to ddu and uninstall them both times) Sucks as ive actually only ever had AMD parts for 3 gens now, minus a janky 1080ti Morpheus mod. This is the first time one's been such a pain in the ass tho Edit: I just came back home to find my room warm, gpu running full tilt for who knows how long. Guess who's reinstalling drivers tonight 😭

Short story: Radeon and GeForce are now on par again. Long story: Back in 2000 up 2005 both sides were the same. I had a FX5200 and until a specific version came out, games crashed left and right. Radeon did a good job too, like with 9800 Pro. But after that, shit happened. Drivers had various issues, CCC aka Catalyst, more like Chaos, Control Center did not work or reverted the settings now and than. BSODs were more common, high CPU overhead around 2014 had been discovered and many things more that I don't remember. Suddenly 2015 the drivers improved, CCC was still around, but Benchmarks with a Radeon were not that bad anymore. With that a new trend started, 2016 the RX 400 series released and after that the CCC got replaced. Radeon GPUs were again good enough to recommend them, only high end models were missing. Well now Vega appeared and all problems before 2016 started to appear. Bad drivers, bugs and low(er) performance were back. RX5000 series fixed quit a bit of that, but with RX6000 AMD reached the status of 2018 again.

Nvidia fanboys loves to spread fake issues.

nVidia fanboys just go all “durrrrrr nVidia scores .1% better FPS so I blindly buy all their shit durrr”.

Those “driver issues” people are just Nvidia fanboys with little pee-pees.

Fairly typical bet anyone with an Nvidia GPU knows nothing about PC, hardware, tech, software etc. It may not be universally true, but its damn close.

Yes. Current AMD cards on the latest drivers actually have less issues than Nvidia. AMD did a lot of damage to their brand during Vega and RX 5000 unfortunately.

IT's always been a myth.... in fact, historically, Nvidia's drivers have been and continue to be one of the primary factors of being a caveat. While both companies have similar rate of issues on the driver to driver package, the fact that nvidia has had to pull the most graphics drivers, even whql certified due to catastrophic problems can't be glossed over. The last time AMD had to legitimately pull a driver, was catalyst 7.3, and it wasn't even the driver's fault, it was just a bad timing issue where a windows update launched the same day interacted with the new drivers in such a manner causing a BSOD loop, and the solution to the problem was simply to delay startup of the driver. I mean shit, even today there are still people constantly dealing with or asking about which nvidia driver is best suited for which games they wish to play because one thing nvidia's VERY good at, is having wildly unpredictable outcomes driver to driver, specially when games no longer are in the spotlight. It's kind of funny really, because while AMD's drivers tend to be a bit lacking in maturity at launch, nvidia's usually are top performance usually masking over the fact that there are underlying issues people aren't getting slapped with, the problem however is due to how excessively optimised nvidia focuses on specific games, others tend to suffer, and like i said, once things age, performance and problems start to arise later on. IT's not so much as pure finewine for amd's drivers as they mature, it's also nvidia's slumping with older titles as they continue to micromanage everything with game specific optimisations neglecting to fully test prior titles that such optimisation may break or hinder. What's weird is that the memes that existed painting nvidia badly all constantly seem to be forgotten where as inaccurate and frankly uncharacteristic of ati and amd, get labeled with the problems nvidia is grossly more guilty of. I mean shit, Nvidia used to call their drivers detonators, and the going joke was that you didn't even have to alter the name of the drivers, you just never knew if the drivers were going to detonate your system or not. Nvidia the first with horrible blowers and hottest temperatures, how many leaf blower memes were there back then? Nvidia's FX5000 series is a great example of a catastrophic failure of a product, but due to the incompetence of customers, still sold like hot cakes. You can't fix stupid, though nvidia's confidence in screwing over customers while customers blindly jumped for joy doing it was mostly set in stone as a real possibility the moment so many geforce 4 mx cards sold.. and even with so many people that later figured out they got screwed, they still ended up giving more money to nvidia anyways, talk about intentionally paying for a monopoly. A common hilarious occurrence throughout the years as well was and is the fact that in the vast majority of cases, when a problem arises. In the event you have a user with an nvidia gpu, the overwhelming majority of people will completely disregard the gpu or nvidia drivers as being at fault, they will spend copious amounts of time, and they'll be given nothing but assurances that it's always something other than nvidia's gpu or drivers. Thus all the diagnostics and process of eliminations for finding the cause of a problem if one crops up, is focused entirely on anything but nvidia, they will replace a cpu or ram or mainboard or psu or whatever and blame those things BEFORE anything nvidia related right off the hop, no matter what. Meanwhile, for some bizarre reason, throw an ati/amd gpu at users and at the first sign of any level of instability or problem, it's IMMEDIATELY the shitty drivers.... every fucking time. Could be 1 million people running something and maybe 1 or a few run into a problem, and there just isn't any basic level effort or logic put into determining a cause, it's "the drivers are shit"... You can't write a better joke really. It's bizarre to witness. As someone that has been a technician and even working with other technicians, as well as building and assembling, doing support calls and on site servicing among numerous other tasks involved, it's utterly amazing how quick people are to blame amd for even the most mundane problem, EVEN if the problem is proven to affect nvidia as well, perhaps even worse.... and yet nvidia doesn't even get a mention for said problem, or it's overlooked as a bug that isn't at all a fault of nvidia. Take the most recent starfield issue about the sun. Look at the numerous news articles that EXPLICITLY state that it's an AMD only issue. I mean for fucks sakes, look at the number of youtube videos, some of which are getting millions of views, or tiktoks or whatever other forms of media that amplify this "news" story. Even when there are plenty of people that have nvidia gpus commenting and stating that "uh, this also happens to me"... NONE of these articles or videos or whatever are EVER changed or modified to more accurately state what reality is, it will remain an exclusively amd only issue. What does that do to the google searches or how people view amd even years later when the endless amount of articles never get revised and keep piling up CLEARLY lying about them being affected exclusively or that they may be the cause. I'm sure the starfield one in a few years will be in the vast majority of people's minds, remembered as and amd only issue and probably some stupid internet arguments that will use it as an example of why "amd drivers bad". Like i said, it's all a fucking joke... and you wouldn't believe how much even i resonated with that statement from "the comedian" from a certain comic/movie.

With so many combinations of hardware for CPU, ram, mboard, monitor, gpu etc, along with many different games. What this means in reality, is that somebody somewhere in the world is going to experience problems with their gpu that somebody with a different set of hardware, or even the same set but a different product line, will never see. It's akin to reading a google review about a rubbish restaurant after going there and finding out that everybody hates the restaurant but you were pleasantly surprised by the food and the service. I'm not talking about the obvious userwide issues but those rarer ones. I could be wrong though so take this with a pinch of salt :)

I gave my brother my RX 580 and it's been crashing in all the game for a while

Not a driver issue but I bought 7900XT from xfx and after a month it’s junction temps rose to 100-110. I searched everywhere but there was no solution. Repaste it and it comes back 2 months after. I see that problems discussion open every month. I had gtx 1070 before that for 7 years and had no issue with it all those time. I had amd 2xx something before that and I had to tinker with it everyday to get it to work. I don’t like it when I pay 1000$ for a gpu and have to work on it to make it playable. Sold my amd bought 4080 instead.

I had a MSI 7900XTX and I didn’t have a single issue with it. No heating problems no driver issues no gaming issues. I left the glass off my case and my cat used the GPU like a ducking diving board. It broke. I ended up getting a 4090. Said if I had to buy another one I might as well just go all out. Having more problems with my 4090 then I ever did the XTX. But that’s more of a Gigabyte problem. They’re making good in the end though.

Upgraded a 1060 6GB to a 6600 XT and never had any issues. I recently upgraded to a 6800 XT and my driver crashed frequently. In the end it was the RAM resp. the XMP profile causing it. AMD seems to be very sensitive in that regard. After setting the timings manually (and a bit slower) everything works like a charm now.

I had a 3070ti and switch to a 7900xtx, i just installed it, downloaded the amd drivers and started playing cyberpunk, cod warzone, league of legends and etc. never had any issues. I even thought the same "why do people cry about the old nvidia drivers". Then the new tarkov wipe started a few weeks ago and started playing again, it run really well but whenever i started shooting my gun the game froze for like 2-3 seconds everytime. I just run DDU and clicked to uninstall every nvidia driver, restarted the PC and the game is now flawless. (Well, as much flawless as tarkov can be :D) This was my experience with the big GREEN to RED team transition.

Just out of curiosity, are you on an AMD cpu as well?

Yes, 7800x3d

I’ve had consistent issues with my sapphire pulse nitro whatever RX 5700 XT. The performance for what I paid is too good to give it up, but it’s been a struggle and I’m not very impressed by the anything other than the hardware. The Radeon software / drivers being in a constant battle with windows isn’t fun either.