How are AMD drivers these days?

[delshay]

Well for the fist time I fired up my old DDR2 machine with windows 10 with 2024 AMD drivers. Compared to windows 7 2022 drivers, DX11 performance has gone up. I'm getting around 400 extra points in Crytek Neon Noir benchmark. This also shows up in Unigine Superposition. The only downside some games, not all suffer from stutter. Not sure what this is, maybe it's because i'm launching games from backup USB SSD.

Test conducted with Vega 56 Nano "driver only".

 

[jesdals]

I am a happy AMD GPU user, one thing I often see when people have problems is that they are running win 10/11 Home edition. Personally I run pro edition of windows and rearly have issues

 

[Frick]

EDIT : Oh ! And there is an overlay that you can disable if you don't want it.

The overlay can be finnicky though. It worked for like an hour for me when I first got the 6950xt I have, but after that it has never worked. Don't know why.

But yeah they're solid.

 

[c2DDragon]

The overlay can be finnicky though. It worked for like an hour for me when I first got the 6950xt I have, but after that it has never worked. Don't know why.

But yeah they're solid.

RivaTuner Statistics Server is breaking the GOG Galaxy overlay (just by being launched, without any RTSS overlay ON), if you use a third party overlay (or app which can launch an overlay) other than Steam, UBI, GOG, EA maybe it can be this.
At least, RTSS doesn't break the AMD overlay (I just checked). Afterburner maybe (even if I think it uses RTSS to show an overlay) ?
If not, you could check if you did let the hotkeys and the overlay settings at least like this in those tabs :

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

Drivers are fine but:

• You will certainly long for DLAA. In some games, native TAA is pure rubbish and you will be constantly distracted by shimmering and flickering. FSR is stone age behind, it won't help with that. Your only hope is XeSS.
• You will certainly run into major problems if you decide to enable heavy ray tracing. Even 7900 XTX is basically impotent in this regard.
• Some games crash drivers if you enable vsync. Very rare but happens more often than on nVidia.
• Some ancient games either straight up don't work or are broken.
• There is no "don't revert my OC settings every time the system crashes" and it majorly sucks because 99% cases of crashes are unrelated to OC but rather related to badly optimised games.

 

[kapone32]

Drivers are fine but:

• You will certainly long for DLAA. In some games, native TAA is pure rubbish and you will be constantly distracted by shimmering and flickering. FSR is stone age behind, it won't help with that. Your only hope is XeSS.
• You will certainly run into major problems if you decide to enable heavy ray tracing. Even 7900 XTX is basically impotent in this regard.
• Some games crash drivers if you enable vsync. Very rare but happens more often than on nVidia.
• Ancient games either straight up don't work or are broken.
• There is no "don't revert my OC settings every time the system crashes" and it majorly sucks because 99% cases of crashes are unrelated to OC but rather related to badly optimised games.

Ancient Games on Steam? Or on GOG?

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

Ancient Games on Steam? Or on GOG?

Steam mostly.

 

[damric]

I certainly can't understand why zero RPM can cause headaches. I wanted that feature to use with custom fan curves long ago and I'm glad its here.
I find the auto function a bit quirky, as I dont really understand how it works exactly. But with custom curve I couldn't be more satisfied.

View attachment 332805

I'll give you one example. Person has a Radeon 6900xt. This person left everything at default in the driver and only uses in-game settings. This person plays Hogwarts.

Game loads up and boom, card immediately hits 105C, fans cry, and clocks dive. This person hasn't even left the game menu yet.

Game finally loads, card seems ok again because there is an FPS limiter at 60, so fans are idle as temperature has gone back down to 60C.

Open the journal and boom, near meltdown, again, because the game's FPS limiter doesn't work during menus.

This happens in lots of games, but I most recently saw it in Hogwarts.

 

[Frick]

RivaTuner Statistics Server is breaking the GOG Galaxy overlay (just by being launched, without any RTSS overlay ON), if you use a third party overlay (or app which can launch an overlay) other than Steam, UBI, GOG, EA maybe it can be this.
At least, RTSS doesn't break the AMD overlay (I just checked). Afterburner maybe (even if I think it uses RTSS to show an overlay) ?
If not, you could check if you did let the hotkeys and the overlay settings at least like this in those tabs :
View attachment 332822View attachment 332823

I don't use Rivatuner or anything like it, only the AMD stuff. The overlay can't be enables, it immedietly switches off.

 

[Princess Garnet]

I'm recently back to AMD's GPUs after a long time of not using them (technically this might be a first because it's been so long they were called ATI last time I used them). Anyway, I initially had no major problems with 23.9.1 through 23.11.1, and think I tried all driver versions between them except one (23.9.2) and I don't think it would have been different. I did have an issue with the GPU itself but it was a faulty individual sample. The drivers seemingly worked well.

When I got the new one back and tried 23.12.1 (which released after I sent my first one back for RMA so I never tried it originally), I had some issues though.

1. One game was giving me TDR issues (and I wasn't having these TDR issues on my first faulty sample).

2. Minecraft (Java with shaders) had notably reduced performance. Might be a Minecraft thing (though another game had issues) but it wasn't like that before 23.12.1. I noticed something odd about it. If I checked utilization of the GPU, it was strangely locked at ~80% (plus or minus a few %) almost the entire time regardless of the scene. The exception was if it was either fully loaded and going to 90%+ or unless the opposite was happening and it was near idle. Between that it was like it was trying to intentionally keep itself 4/5th loaded? I noticed the clock speed was constantly going up and down (up as the scene was more demanding and down if it was less demanding). What I suspect may have been happening was it was trying to keep itself near that utilization level and simply adjusting clock speed frequently and this was resulting in lower performance? I don't know why it was doing this or if this actually was what was causing the reduced performance, but either way the reduced performance was confirmed. I uninstalled the drivers and used DDU and reinstalled 23.12.1 and it remained.

These two things were originally making me wonder if my second 7800 XT was also faulty in a separate way (first one was bad due to the infamous Black screen to restart issue), because I had consistent behavior from all drivers prior so I originally didn't expect the drivers to be a cause, but I used DDU again and went back to 23.11.1 and then both issues went away. So that's... good but bad? I haven't tried 24.1.1 yet and I'm not sure when I'll move forward from here yet. I've spent months fighting an unstable system (due to hardware failure and not drivers though) and I'm not ready to gamble that again right now.

I may have even had other issues with 23.12.1 but I only tried those two games and sadly I was two for two on bad results. To be fair, not long after I got my GTX 1060 ages ago, I stayed on a driver version that was barely newer than it as well because of changes with newer drivers (blurry rendering in Minecraft when using anti-aliasing in any version newer than 373.06). And I've had my share of other issues with nVidia's drivers, so... things with AMD seems similar all things told. The TDR crashes and recovery had/have me concerned though because behavior is one thing but crashing is another, and the only other GPU I ever had that gave me TDR results (a GTX 560 Ti and those were infamous in the Fermi days) ended up failing right after warranty ended...

As an aside, I love Adrenalin much better than nVidia's control panel (plus GeForce Experience, which I avoided when on nVidia).

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Got my first amd laptop or system ever recently on an acer I didn't want to pay the asus tax lol
So far drivers have been flawless even after a clean install which is mainly what I was worried about.

But the laptop came with a 4060 so can't say anything about amd gpu's
AMD onboard graphic's is pretty awesome though and what is usually used unless gaming.

 

[MarsM4N]

I have rejoined the Red team for my main PC and for the most part no issues apart from the black screen that shows up from time to time for a few seconds.

Single or multi display setup? HDMI or display port? Maybe try a different cable. Not some cheap no-name crap, something from a reputable brand with higher specifications.

Might even make a difference if you connect the display directly to the GPU instead of the onboard mainboard port.

 

[kapone32]

Steam mostly.

Well. I have TW Rome on Steam and that works fine. I do know that Steam does not play some older Games well like Crysis. I will give you the example. The GOG version of Crysis works no problem. The Steam version however refuses to load. Is that AMD's fault?

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

Well. I have TW Rome on Steam and that works fine. I do know that Steam does not play some older Games well like Crysis. I will give you the example. The GOG version of Crysis works no problem. The Steam version however refuses to load. Is that AMD's fault?

Iunno, I tried playing NFS Hot Pursuit 2 on RX 580 and 6700 XT to no avail but an RTX 3060 Ti was capable of running it under the same OS.

 

[Zach_01]

I'll give you one example. Person has a Radeon 6900xt. This person left everything at default in the driver and only uses in-game settings. This person plays Hogwarts.

Game loads up and boom, card immediately hits 105C, fans cry, and clocks dive. This person hasn't even left the game menu yet.

Game finally loads, card seems ok again because there is an FPS limiter at 60, so fans are idle as temperature has gone back down to 60C.

Open the journal and boom, near meltdown, again, because the game's FPS limiter doesn't work during menus.

This happens in lots of games, but I most recently saw it in Hogwarts.

I’ve seen this behavior with my previous 5700XT on auto and zero fan, but not near as so extreme as you describing it. No issues whatsoever other than my disliking the behavior.
That’s why I said this:

I certainly can't understand why zero RPM can cause headaches. I wanted that feature to use with custom fan curves long ago and I'm glad its here.
I find the auto function a bit quirky, as I dont really understand how it works exactly. But with custom curve I couldn't be more satisfied.

View attachment 332805

About FPS limiter…
I limit FPS from drivers (not chill) and this applies to game menus, journal, map and loading scenes.
At least on FarCry6 I currently playing.

Depending of how much anyone plays, zero fan can make huge difference on cooler maintenance (dust).

 

[DR4G00N]

I've noticed that whenever I upgrade my GPU(s) in my gaming system I alternate between AMD & Nvidia. And every time I get an AMD GPU I'm reminded of why I bought an Nvidia card the last time...

Generally I find that AMD's drivers are a bit fiddly, sometimes they work perfect and other times I'm having to re-install multiple times or trying different versions to fix an issue. IDK maybe they're better now with RDNA. The last time I had any real issues with Nvidia's drivers was 10 years ago when I was running a GTX 560 SE where it would get stuck at idle clocks.

 

[Tropick]

Typically they've been pretty good but I can only speak for RDNA2. 24.1.1 has been a complete mess for me though, bad enough that I chose to downgrade to 23.12.1 until they fix the stuttering bug. I've heard anecdotally that if you reset shader cache or disable/reenable SAM or something it fixes it but having to perform any janky feature resets to get a WHQL driver to work properly constitutes a busted driver in my book. With a gun to my head if I had to say whether AMD or Nvidia had better drivers I'd say Nvidia but AMD is by no means intolerable.

 

[i486]

I'd say AMD drivers are better than they're given credit for, but Nvidia still has the edge in terms of stability. I own a 5700 XT which used to be infamous for its driver issues, but it's been pretty solid for me. Once every few months I get the odd driver timeout or bug (for instance, the most recent 24.1.1 driver has introduced stuttering in RDR2 for some reason). Nothing too major, but my previous GTX 1060 had zero issues to speak of.

Keep in mind all of this is anecdotal, a guy I know bought an RX 7600 which has constant driver crashes. I told him this isn't normal and his card is probably defective, but he refuses to RMA it and insists it's the drivers. I also remember people on reddit bringing up issues with Nvidia drivers that I never encountered.

 

[DrCR]

7700 on Ubuntu 22.04.
Zero issues.
(Before that I was running the Nvidia Linux binary for iirc maybe 15 years.)
Steam Proton makes Linux gaming easy.

 

[AsRock]

Only two issues i had with them over the last 8 years, how ever i skipped the RX4\580\Vaga and 5700, ones due to the recording size in games and the other was them breaking refresh rate under some conditions ( older card ) ( multi monitor).

So just one issue with my RX6950.

 

[natr0n]

I like the idea of set it and forget it when it comes to drivers.
Nvidia always consistent. AMD can be bloated but you can do minimal install and be fine.

 

[mama]

I think I'm a little different on this question than some here. The drivers themselves are great. They work well on every game I play. The driver software (Adrenalin) has issues. The interface is much improved and while I have not explored them fully, the various game tweak options are solid and some may see the benefit. While the drivers are faultless, the Adrenalin software is buggy. I have a Driver Timeout issue with a number of games which I have managed to isolate to the software (X4 Foundations being the most recent example). The games would crash at random times but always a Driver Timeout issue. I tried reinstalling the driver, running games with vsync disabled, Registry tweaks and other things but nothing worked. Luckily AMD allows the drivers alone to be installed without the software. This worked. To answer the question, the drivers are great. Just a heads up about Adrenalin.

 

[lexluthermiester]

The drivers ARE a lot better than in years past. I'd still say nvidia drivers are more stable

I'll agree with this...

but the difference is mainly academic today.

..but not this.

There are very important options available in the NVidia drivers/control panel that are not present in the AMD side of things. Nitty-gritty type stuff. At least that I've seen.

 

[R-T-B]

..but not this.

In stability. That's all I was commenting on in that sentence.

I agree nvidia is a bit more feature diverse, but it doesn't terribly bother me either as I don't use those features. It's a "to each their own" type thing.

 

[Shou Miko]

I've noticed that whenever I upgrade my GPU(s) in my gaming system I alternate between AMD & Nvidia. And every time I get an AMD GPU I'm reminded of why I bought an Nvidia card the last time...

Generally I find that AMD's drivers are a bit fiddly, sometimes they work perfect and other times I'm having to re-install multiple times or trying different versions to fix an issue. IDK maybe they're better now with RDNA. The last time I had any real issues with Nvidia's drivers was 10 years ago when I was running a GTX 560 SE where it would get stuck at idle clocks.

Seriously, I am a huge AMD fan, only thing that made me change of the power draw because of the prices currently in the country I am in and being alone with all my bills and have 2x rent to pay ain't easy on a average in come.

This was why I change out my XFX RX 7900 XT Merc310 to Asus RTX 4070 Dual OC because I have 50% of the power consumption and average performance loss should be 30% but to be honest in the games I played the past month of owning my RTX 4070 Dual OC which is clocked +1200MHz on memory I do not at 1440p@165Hz see the biggest difference in performance only in power usage because my current card stays at 185W it wasn't happy with undervolting so didn't test it further but I would love to seen it at 150-160W with the mem oc I have.

In stability. That's all I was commenting on in that sentence.

I agree nvidia is a bit more feature diverse, but it doesn't terribly bother me either as I don't use those features. It's a "to each their own" type thing.

I agree with you @R-T-B

I like the idea of set it and forget it when it comes to drivers.
Nvidia always consistent. AMD can be bloated but you can do minimal install and be fine.

You say AMD is bloated? you then thing Windows 10/11 ain't bloated? Honestly there is more bloat like GeForce now in Nvidia's driver with a lot of extra thing a lot of people don't use that's why I run NVCleanInstall that @W1zzard has built to strap out what I don't need like extra services, GeForce Now and honest from a design perspective AMD's Adrenalin software is far more modern than Nvidia's panel that has been the same like the past 20years or something.