Any of you that have read my contributions to this forum over the past year probably already know that I absolutely try to help fellow users. I only want to see users get back to gaming. Currently I believe I am among the top contributers on this forum. I only bring this up in hopes that if a top AMD person actually reads this stuff it will make them read my story to the end.
Before a little over a year ago I had never belonged to this forum, as I had never had any real issues other than not getting the free games I was supposed to when I bought cards. Always wrote it off as bad luck. But it happened on 3 different cards I purchased and you should get what you paid for.
My experience with AMD had been pretty stellar and I will absolutely give them the opportunity in the future to try again.
That being said I came here because I purchased an RX 580 that upon installing did nothing but black screen and hang in games. Kingfish kindly replied and got me fixed informing me about the power limit settings and further reading I found I needed a custom fan and temp curve. Since then I have at least been gaming. The card still works as good as it could as long as YOU DON'T DARE TO USE DEFAULT settings. So this was all around the time of the Wattman driver introduction, and I didn't have any my other 3 AMD GPU's updated to those drivers. All was still well. Shortly after getting the 580 and finally getting it going and beginning to help here I started updating the drivers. Over the last year on the 3 older cards it has been a mix of breaking features to causing black screens to not booting the cards at all. Some of this is yes a conflict with Windows 10 and the AMD driver installation. But I can't just blame MS for this as I have never seen a complaint about this in an Nvidia forum. The 580 in this same time frame has had good freesync in the beginning to being completely broken to somewhat working and now works but isn't smooth like it used to be. If you frequent the forums you know that high refresh users and vega users are lucky if it works still period. I felt fortunate it worked mostly.
Then bottom line is that AMD has taken cards that worked flawlessly and made them worse to inoperable. The new card the 580 doesn't work out of the box at default settings with a single driver in going on 1.3 years.
In this past 1.3 years and not at all because of the AMD experience I have bought 2, 10th gen Nvidia cards. One came as emergency purchase for my sons entire computer that fried and the new computer came with a 1050ti. The other was a GTX 1060 6gb, I got on an open box deal and I bought it because it was a heck of a deal and my son could game on Ulrta at 1080p on it. At the time the mining boom was going on and I got it for about 100 bucks less than an RX 580 was going for. In this past year plus these Nvidia cards and their drivers have just plain worked plus the over clock like crazy.
Not a single issue other than a couple older games that my AMD cards work with the Nvidia cards don't.
It's funny but it was Nvidia losing older game compatibility that made me look at ATI for the first time. This issue today is much better. There are actually several older games that work on the NVidia cards that use Physx that the AMD cards don't work on. I truly believe the AMD game part of the drivers are really good, they just don't have good control over their hardware.
2 nights ago I was browsing the Micro Center website and saw an open box deal on a RTX 2060. It was 314 bucks, which is a great deal. I ordered it. I picked it up and have been playing it for over 24 hours now. They have a cool auto overclock utility that scans and test and sets it at the best it will do automatically for you. My card overclocked by 600 mhz on the GPU and 1000 mhz on the memory, I'm at 2050/8000. Then card has yet to go over 65 Celsius and has not throttling issues. My benchmarks thus far are putting it ahead in most cases of a Vega 54 and GTX 1080. The Ray Tracing features that some say are unusable are not at that OC. I can use them on Medium in BFV but it is a pretty big performance hit. I go from a static 75hz which is my monitor limit to a range of 45-70hz but still playable. I turned it off as overall it doesn't add to much IMHO other than cool mirror reflection on glass and watter. Pretty much fluff and not worth the loss. Now the DX 12 performance I alway here being bad on NVidia is apparently much better now as it plays great at least in this game and tomb raider and BF2. Yest the card has 2 gigs less and down the line could be and issue. Likely by the time it is, I will be on to another card. Right now I have no games I know of that will be limited by the 6gb.
Then fear I had the most trying this card with my monitor proved to be a non-issue. My freesync monitor is working FAR BETTER with the new Nvidia G-Sync compatible setting than it ever did with my AMD card.
Next as I stated with the game redemption issues I had above I was scared to try and redeem my Free Game I just got with this Nvidia card. The receipt had a redemption code and I could not get it to redeem. I thought I was entering it correctly. The redemption page had link right to customer service and a link to chat with support right now. I clicked it, the agent asked me to upload the receipt with the code. Figured out I was putting in the code with a number 1 instead of a lower case L. And I was in. This took less than 5 minutes and most of the time was scanning the receipt. Comparing this to the horror stories I have read of people getting their games here in the last year and being cheated out of 6 games myself in the past by AMD, this was a refreshing change and what I call top notch customer service.
I am really sad about my experiences with AMD but am really looking forward to going back to trouble free gaming. While I love the few of you I converse with here, if AMD's quality was what it should be, we never would of met. Maybe that's the one positive thing in this all.
I'm still going to be around. No telling if as much as my current experience may very quickly be not current enough to help here.
I have always been a fan of AMD but I have also always spent my money wisely but not blindly. Honestly the 580 was the first card I bought ever without doing any homework, mostly because my prior experience had been so good.
IMHO AMD gamers deserve better than what they are receiving. A mostly trouble free experience is currently out there, it just isn't RED. Always vote with your dollars.
