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Drivers & Software

kjenaneta
Journeyman III

Are driver issues still common in AMD cards?Are driver issues still common in AMD cards?

I have a GTX 1060 6GB and have been thinking about upgrading to a 6650xt for a while, but I haven't had a single problem out of this card for the 3 years I've had it. I remember the last gen AMD cards had a lot of driver issues, but haven't heard much about the 6000 series.

Are people still having issues with dual monitors / black screens / stuttering? Or has AMD solved most of those problems?

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toughy
Adept II

I have had screen corruption after login, sometimes followed by reboot, a couple of driver versions ago.

Also youtube has always been stuttering when I enable AV1 with my Radeon 6800 XT graphics card, with 5950X CPU.

Trying to run LuxMark (to benchmark OpenCL performance) sometimes shows a corrupted (black background) scene in the application, depending on your video card and the latest driver version. AMD tends to fix it really slow, and then the issue can still re-occur.

I do not play much these days and I can not tell you about stability in gaming, but for the little gaming that I did I had no issue. Except for stuttering in Elden Ring once, but that was related to my AMD CPU (Ryzen 9 5950X, which sometimes behaves as two CPUs (two CCXs) with an interconnect between them). So it was not the GPU.

So maybe the drivers can still have issues. The Factory Reset option during installation is still disabled, since they discovered that a factory reset during Windows updates could even leave the system unable to boot, but only in some corner cases ...

And don't get me started on Eyefinity (multi-monitor setup) ... it's like at any time you have a 50-50 chance for your Eyefinity setup to work. That is if you manually find and start the EyefinityPro.exe executable from the AMD installation directory (C:\Program Files\AMD). Otherwise, if I just use the default Quick Setup option in the AMD Software (the only user-facing option so to speak), then I don't stand a chance to get Eyefinity running.

I suspect previous generations of cards (RX 5000 series) can not cold-start with 4 monitors connected, but can still drive 4 monitors if you connect them after boot, one at a time...

However, that said, I hear NVIDIA still has their own issues. I tried a simple Surround setup (Eyefinity equivalent) with two monitors, and I run into pretty much similar issues as with Eyefinity. Even with RTX 3090 ! For example when I finally got the 2 monitors two work with Surround, NVIDIA Control Panel was still identifying and showing the monitors in the wrong order, so the resulting combined display had its two halves swapped.

So my conclusion is whatever issues AMD drivers can still have, they are not far behind what NVIDIA drivers exhibit either. Except for video encoding and decoding, as NVIDIA is still ahead on that one. I hear the same is true for professional applications (3D design, video editing), but I do not use those.

Oh, if you are curious to try Linux or you already have dual-boot (Windows + Linux), then an AMD or Intel card is a must, at least for the following 1 to 2 years, until an NVIDIA open-source driver can be properly developed and included with Linux. I mean NVIDIA also has a closed-source driver that, when it works, is pretty good ... but Linux people have bad things to say about it, as it is not open-source.