Hi Red Team Members..
Firstly, a little music from Garbage, and aptly Shirley Manson with her over the top red-ness 
I'm Dava.. sometimes Tech blogger of little to no significance hehe.. but I have in the past been minorly noted.
I wrote a few articles at a time where AMD needed a little support.. and to my surprise it sparked a minor debate within our community.
Here's my creds:
Realworld Performance and What It Means to You… – Overclock.net
And one on the history of AMD vs Intel
An Underdog Has It's Day.. – Overclock.net
So, if you read the above articles, you get what I am about to say is said with love and not hate
I have supported AMD's CPU efforts for many years* up until 2015 I got a very dodgy ASRock board they refused to fix.. as a stop gap I bought a HP Z400 workstation.. this sent me spiraling* out of control towards cheap Xeons hehe.. I haven't came back yet but wow, I was sorely tempted with Ryzen. I now own a HP Z600 with dual Xeon X5650's and 24GB of DDR3. My GTX 970 was getting past it's best and I was searching for alternatives I found that in a Sapphire RX 480 8GB.
Now compared to anachronistic Catalyst Control Center, Radeon Settings is much more modern looking.. however here comes the crunch, there is a lot more work to do with RS, we cannot even set our resolutions and refresh rate from the app itself. Some of the settings (Global Settings) in RS should imho be part of the Display section and in fact I would place this first.. I found rooting around in different places within the app counter-intuitive. Thank you so much for adding a customs res. section! When I had my old Gaming PC in 2015 (FX 8350, CFX- 280X) that was a bit of a deal breaker for me, as my panel would do 2k easily and other res's but back then we had little to no option to create our own resolutions. I won't lie and say I have been full team red forever.. Nvidia have been my mainstay graphics usually paired with an AMD CPU.. why? why?? when AMD frequently offers much better play-value? Well the NVCP was much more developed for many years while Radeon users languished in the one-step-forward-two-steps-back XP style menu graveyard*. There's still LOADS more work to do.. which I am sure Radeon software engineers/developers are well aware of
NVCP found a balance of nature and technical difficulty that became an acquired taste.. but one that's palatable. For many years.. I felt.. AMD Radeon was afraid to swamp users with too many options within CCC, but I find that a contradictory reasoning; You provide affordable POWERFUL graphics cards for gaming, then give users only a media style experience with the app. I pointed this out to AMD in feedback sent in 2015. I am so glad they listened to anyone voicing this concern.
I believe in AMD empowerment. While the Intels and NVidia's short change us*, I have found from my 13 or so years building AMD have always been there ready to give us a fair shake at the tree.
Now with Ryzen.. the sky's the limit, I hear those Performance APUs I blogged about many years ago are in the pipeline, but much like Cassandra, I don't think anyone read my blog ..I just seen the future haha.
Do we need intuitive software for our Radeon cards? yes. But are AMD 'working on it'? yes.. I am sure they are.
Ryzen might be taking center stage right now, but I see that AMD are releasing regular updates we are not forgotten.
Can I become 'Team Red' for cards on a permanent basis? .. with further development, I certainly hope so.
peace
Dava
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Notes:
* see video for why 'hehe'.
*from first build 2006 to that date gaming PCs etc, with Intel as backups/Media Server.
*NVCP now does look a bit dated I will admit but it's layout is somewhat a flawless gem compared to CCC. IF you want to argue with this.. I'll say this, please think about it; I once took 45 minutes trying to find something in CCC. 45 minutes.
* NVidia has been imho holding the industry back with low memory size for what.. 4 years?? 4GB is dead.. long live 8GB/12GB!!
For The Republic - Computer Enthusiasts United
^ New Blogs after I left OCN.
