Do you believe the new navi cards will be released with stable drivers?

[cucker tarlson]

I forget what the exact type of bias is called, but the principle is that you're more likely to review a product, respond to a survey, make a negative forum post, etc. if you've had an extreme experience. Those people that are having awful issues are the ones that are making the posts. Those people that are having an okay or good experience don't have anything to complain about so they don't feel obligated to post anywhere. If you go to a restaurant and you have a fine meal (good service, good food, good environment, etc.), how likely are you to go and put up a positive review (assuming of course you're not a Yelp fanatic or something)? But if you went to that same restaurant and had an awful experience (service was awful, you found a hair in your food, the restaurant was filthy, etc) you'd feel a lot more obligated to go and shout from the rooftops that XYZ restaurant is awful and that you shouldn't go there.

I think the same thing applies here. The people that are having severe driver issues are the ones posting and switching to Nvidia, and they're the ones you see so the issue seems more widespread than it is.

I think it's just confirmation bias.If you type anything in google,it's gonna find it.It's never a good measure of a scale of a problem.
the tech world works on different rules than restaurants - if a product is good,it'll get good ratings consistently.

imo driver release notes and what some tech channels said about navi return rates being several times higher than previous gen.

that said,gcn got better over time and rdna will too.

 

[milewski1015]

that said,gcn got better over time and rdna will too.

I think this is the takeaway. Even with issues still around, you (meaning everyone, not you specifically) have to admit that AMD has made great progress in solving the issues. Like I said back towards the beginning of this thread, I like to think that AMD has learned from this driver fiasco. Will RDNA2 be driver issue-free? Most likely not. But I think that it will be leaps and bounds ahead of the issues that were present when Navi first launched.

 

[bug]

I forget what the exact type of bias is called, but the principle is that you're more likely to review a product, respond to a survey, make a negative forum post, etc. if you've had an extreme experience. Those people that are having awful issues are the ones that are making the posts. Those people that are having an okay or good experience don't have anything to complain about so they don't feel obligated to post anywhere. If you go to a restaurant and you have a fine meal (good service, good food, good environment, etc.), how likely are you to go and put up a positive review (assuming of course you're not a Yelp fanatic or something)? But if you went to that same restaurant and had an awful experience (service was awful, you found a hair in your food, the restaurant was filthy, etc) you'd feel a lot more obligated to go and shout from the rooftops that XYZ restaurant is awful and that you shouldn't go there.

I think the same thing applies here. The people that are having severe driver issues are the ones posting and switching to Nvidia, and they're the ones you see so the issue seems more widespread than it is.

What exactly are you arguing here? That instead of a 2080Ti he should have got the AMD equivalent?
We all know bad news travels faster, comparing the amount of bad news will still give you an adequate (not perfect) image.

 

[milewski1015]

What exactly are you arguing here? That instead of a 2080Ti he should have got the AMD equivalent?
We all know bad news travels faster, comparing the amount of bad news will still give you an adequate (not perfect) image.

Not at all. I only quoted the portion talking about looking at AMD forums. If he was fed up with the issues he was having with the Radeon VII and wanted to swap for a 2080Ti, that's his decision. Just because I was okay dealing with my minor issues for a little while before they were fixed, doesn't mean everybody wants to.
Like EarthDog and I discussed, we don't know the numbers for how widespread these issues are. For sure you can make a guesstimation based on what you're seeing in terms of complaints and whatnot. My post was meant to explain that doesn't necessarily give you the whole picture. As I mentioned, I agree that these issues are more widespread than normal. "But the reality is we have no idea just how much over 'normal' issues were there. But I'm pretty sure we can safely say that both of these issues were over what many would consider to be normal."

I think one of my bigger gripes is that people have just been conditioned to think "AMD = bad, Nvidia = good" because of the prevalence of the driver issues that were present at Navi launch when in fact AMD's hardware is pretty solid and their drivers continue to get better with age. Focusing in on all the negative forum posts and what not makes it easier to forget that there are plenty of people out there that haven't had any issues or have had very minor ones that have been fixed.

 

[bug]

... "But the reality is we have no idea just how much over 'normal' issues were there. But I'm pretty sure we can safely say that both of these issues were over what many would consider to be normal."
...

One article said return rates are 5x higher than normal. It's just one sample, but if normal return rates are ~1%, that puts Navi ~5%.
Not the end of the world, but it's about the same chance as drawing the short straw at Covid lottery.

 

[jaggafeen]

i have no faith left in AMD to produce reliable drivers. they failed to provide that for their flagship card even 17 months after release. if you want a stable platform take my advice and buy nvidia. I suffered for 17 months with radeon vii. trouble with AMD drivers is they fix a issue in one release and then its broken again in the next release. for example take the recent implementation of hardware accelerated gpu scheduling it was broken in the next release.

AMD fans can try to brush this issue under the carpet but the fact remains that many users are suffering from driver crashes and black screens resulting in having to hard reset and AMD have not been able to resolve this major flaw along with many other major issues.

Nvidia is a far more reliable platform.

My experience with nvidia compared to amd is night and day, the 2080 ti has been flawless and exceeded all my expectations.

 

[R-T-B]

Well there is/was legitimate driver issues. Just that people choose to complain without problem solving then posting miss information and claiming they are dumping Navi for Nvidia.
A lot of those reviews sounded fake and over blown IMO

I wish my "review" of my navi experience (and workarounds I developed that worked for some, not others) was fake and overblown, believe me.

 

[efikkan]

that said,gcn got better over time and rdna will too.

Did it get significantly better though?
Can it be that there is a spike in bug reports because many are buying cards around a launch? I find it strange that there was a spike in complaints about Vega when Navi launched, so unless AMD managed to mess up their driver again and again, I suspect it was about the same all along.

My old programmer intuition tells me that there might be some unresolved underlying cause that they keep suppressing by workarounds. Such fixes might "help" to some extent, but since the underlying cause remains, new variants will keep popping up. They fix that, it gets "better", but then there is the next case…

I've seen many "experienced" programmers who fix bugs this way; one day they get a bug report, fix it file A. Two weeks later, another bug report, fix it in file B, another two weeks then file C, etc. etc. Then I took a look at it and all the "fixes" were just suppressing incorrect state, so the actual bug was never fixed, just suppressed, and a large number of "bugs" were in reality just a single bug, and there could be a nearly limitless potential of new symptoms of the unresolved bug just looming there. So whenever I see a pattern of bugs, I start to think there might be some connection between them. I think most experienced programmers will know what I'm talking about here.

 

[AsRock]

Not at all. I only quoted the portion talking about looking at AMD forums. If he was fed up with the issues he was having with the Radeon VII and wanted to swap for a 2080Ti, that's his decision. Just because I was okay dealing with my minor issues for a little while before they were fixed, doesn't mean everybody wants to.
Like EarthDog and I discussed, we don't know the numbers for how widespread these issues are. For sure you can make a guesstimation based on what you're seeing in terms of complaints and whatnot. My post was meant to explain that doesn't necessarily give you the whole picture. As I mentioned, I agree that these issues are more widespread than normal. "But the reality is we have no idea just how much over 'normal' issues were there. But I'm pretty sure we can safely say that both of these issues were over what many would consider to be normal."

I think one of my bigger gripes is that people have just been conditioned to think "AMD = bad, Nvidia = good" because of the prevalence of the driver issues that were present at Navi launch when in fact AMD's hardware is pretty solid and their drivers continue to get better with age. Focusing in on all the negative forum posts and what not makes it easier to forget that there are plenty of people out there that haven't had any issues or have had very minor ones that have been fixed.

Swap ?, a $400 for a $600+ card ?. I came across a RDR2 player who's still having these blackscreen issue's, so i guess the problem is still here. TBH i am glad that i did not pick a 5700 up. I don't go buying new shit all the time so it has to be the right item 1st time.

If i did get one and was all so getting these black screen issue that seems like a lot are getting i be looking for a refund ASAP, would not take there word for it like i did with ROCCAT and there bad LEDS failing all the time to get told basically to F*ck Off after the warranty ended, which is why it had me buying my own LEDS to solve the problem they could not, I am done with ROCCAT for a long time going though their BS. Same reason ii will not buy Razor either.

 

[Valantar]

i have no faith left in AMD to produce reliable drivers. they failed to provide that for their flagship card even 17 months after release. if you want a stable platform take my advice and buy nvidia. I suffered for 17 months with radeon vii. trouble with AMD drivers is they fix a issue in one release and then its broken again in the next release. for example take the recent implementation of hardware accelerated gpu scheduling it was broken in the next release.

AMD fans can try to brush this issue under the carpet but the fact remains that many users are suffering from driver crashes and black screens resulting in having to hard reset and AMD have not been able to resolve this major flaw along with many other major issues.

Nvidia is a far more reliable platform.

My experience with nvidia compared to amd is night and day, the 2080 ti has been flawless and exceeded all my expectations.

The Radeon VII should never have existed in the first place. I don't know who made the harebrained decision to launch an expensive "flagship" (though not in terms of competitive performance) SKU from a workstation/HPC-focused chip that they at the time of launch knew full well would be replaced within 6 months by a far superior architecture. It was never widely available, had a weird configuration (16GB of HBM2? Why?), and was buggy and hot. IMO those chips would have been much better off being used in a lower tier accelerator card than as a consumer GPU. Instead they made a high profile, short-lived, expensive mess.

 

[cucker tarlson]

The Radeon VII should never have existed in the first place. I don't know who made the harebrained decision to launch an expensive "flagship" (though not in terms of competitive performance) SKU from a workstation/HPC-focused chip that they at the time of launch knew full well would be replaced within 6 months by a far superior architecture. It was never widely available, had a weird configuration (16GB of HBM2? Why?), and was buggy and hot. IMO those chips would have been much better off being used in a lower tier accelerator card than as a consumer GPU. Instead they made a high profile, short-lived, expensive mess.

well,it's been the only card so far that challenged the 1080Ti.

tbh I'd much rather get a 7 than 5700xt
of course I'd put 1080Ti over both
and a 2070S over 1080Ti

 

[bug]

The Radeon VII should never have existed in the first place. I don't know who made the harebrained decision to launch an expensive "flagship" (though not in terms of competitive performance) SKU from a workstation/HPC-focused chip that they at the time of launch knew full well would be replaced within 6 months by a far superior architecture. It was never widely available, had a weird configuration (16GB of HBM2? Why?), and was buggy and hot. IMO those chips would have been much better off being used in a lower tier accelerator card than as a consumer GPU. Instead they made a high profile, short-lived, expensive mess.

It's been part of AMD's marketing for a while now: always have something out there to keep you in the press' spotlight. With all the goodwill AMD has built up, even lackluster products get exposure and are even praised.
I don't hold that against them, I remember back in AthlonXP/64 days, neglecting marketing was arguably their biggest mistake, I'm glad they fixed that (even though I still hate marketing).

 

[Valantar]

well,it's been the only card so far that challenged the 1080Ti.

tbh I'd much rather get a 7 than 5700xt
of course I'd put 1080Ti over both
and a 2070S over 1080Ti

The 5700 XT is at worst a handful of percentage points behind the VII, at >75W less power and with much better coolers available. The VII has some value as a workstation card, but it was always a dud for gaming.

It's been part of AMD's marketing for a while now: always have something out there to keep you in the press' spotlight. With all the goodwill AMD has built up, even lackluster products get exposure and are even praised.
I don't hold that against them, I remember back in AthlonXP/64 days, neglecting marketing was arguably their biggest mistake, I'm glad they fixed that (even though I still hate marketing).

But even by that metric it was a very odd launch. Why not just hold off for another few months and market the identically performing 5700XT in the same way? The VII already launched a long, long time after anything that could be called a predecessor (Vega 64?), so waiting a bit and selling the same performance at a significantly lower price without that weird blip of a GPU in between would have avoided a lot of bad PR and driver headaches.

 

[bug]

But even by that metric it was a very odd launch. Why not just hold off for another few months and market the identically performing 5700XT in the same way? The VII already launched a long, long time after anything that could be called a predecessor (Vega 64?), so waiting a bit and selling the same performance at a significantly lower price without that weird blip of a GPU in between would have avoided a lot of bad PR and driver headaches.

Few things gather attention more than odd
Plus, it broke people's perception that AMD hasn't had a worthy contender at the high-end in like 5 years now.

 

[milewski1015]

Swap ?, a $400 for a $600+ card ?. I came across a RDR2 player who's still having these blackscreen issue's, so i guess the problem is still here. TBH i am glad that i did not pick a 5700 up. I don't go buying new shit all the time so it has to be the right item 1st time.

Sorry, guess I should've said "upgrade". Thought it was implied that I know the cards perform and cost differently. I agree with Valantar, the VII was made obsolete for gamers upon launch of the 5700 XT.

I never said the issues weren't still around. I mentioned that mine have been fixed and that overall they're more widespread than an average occurrence of driver issues.

 

[sepheronx]

For me, like everything else, it's a wait and see. I look forward to RDNA2 as apparently it's pushing DirectML which is a semi competitor to DLSS which I see is very impressive techmology Nvidia has there. But, because little is known about it and how well it will all work (ray tracing and directML), it's really hard to say. I can only expect it will be less prone to problems as the current RX series some are having (I myself have yet to experience this issue with multiple machines built for customers but I don't deny the issue since AMD admits it). But with MS and Sony invested a lot into RDNA2 I expect some real good out of it. If though first couple of months and major issues I'll have to buy ampere instead. But depending on prices as well...

 

[Fleetwire]

Always been on NVIDIA cards, but if AMD manages to make proper drivers and make RDNA 2.0 a success, especially in the price/performance department, I'll board the Radeon hype train. I'm getting a R9 3900x soon, so there's that.

I want them to strike NVIDIA like they striked Intel. More competition means more mercy to all our wallets. It's a shame NVIDIA is actually competent.

 

[sepheronx]

Always been on NVIDIA cards, but if AMD manages to make proper drivers and make RDNA 2.0 a success, especially in the price/performance department, I'll board the Radeon hype train. I'm getting a R9 3900x soon, so there's that.

I want them to strike NVIDIA like they striked Intel. It's a shame NVIDIA is actually competent.

I'm more mainstream in that I'll never buy highest end. To me, the value isn't there. A RTX 2070 is about $700 CAD. It's unobtainable for most people here. If AMD can make a card that competes against RTX 3070 when that comes out with of course DML and other functions while being competitive in price (those cards shouldn't cost more than $400 imo as they are mid-range and now low end side of it are in that price bracket), then I'll buy it on condition that drivers won't be problematic.

 

[Fleetwire]

I'm more mainstream in that I'll never buy highest end. To me, the value isn't there. A RTX 2070 is about $700 CAD. It's unobtainable for most people here. If AMD can make a card that competes against RTX 3070 when that comes out with of course DML and other functions while being competitive in price (those cards shouldn't cost more than $400 imo as they are mid-range and now low end side of it are in that price bracket), then I'll buy it on condition that drivers won't be problematic.

I managed to get my 2070 at $300 and overclocked it so much it beat a friend's also overclocked 2070 Super. Reason why I went with the 3900x is because I don't want to think about CPU upgrades for a good while. Such an investment for me into hardware is uncommon.

But as I said, if AMD makes something great, count me in.

 

[sepheronx]

I managed to get my 2070 at $300 and overclocked it so much it beat a friend's also overclocked 2070 Super. Reason why I went with the 3900x is because I don't want to think about CPU updates for a good while. Such an investment for me into hardware is uncommon.

But as I said, if AMD makes something great, count me in.

You got lucky on that RTX 2070. If they were reasonable priced I would have upgraded my 1070. But the 1070 still holds strong for me so I can't complain yet.