General Discussions

[narmad78]

I've been tasked with building a friend a PC, she's basically giving me $2k (possibly up to $2.5k) and I'm going to Micro Center and buying whatever I think is best. I was thinking 7900XT or XTX, but here's the thing -- she's not technologically knowledgable, and I don't want to be on the hook for too much support if something goes wrong. She mostly plays Rainbow Six Siege, but also some CoD, Minecraft, and other games.

I have owned an AMD GPU before (RX 480) but it's been some years since then. I don't remember having any driver issues myself, but I've heard people complaining about them, and obviously the number one argument that people trot out for not buying Radeon is "the drivers are bad!"

So, here’s my question: are Radeon drivers good enough to give to someone that doesn’t know how to troubleshoot? Or are things still going to be buggy?

[CaligoVereor]

Well I've been using AMD cards for 15 or 16 years now and only once had serious driver related issues (in 2021). But while searching for solutions I discovered that Nvidia drivers had the same problems around 2019/2018 so that wasn't really unique.

Overall I never quite got what "bad drivers" people are talking about, they always seem functional enough. In the past there have been complaints about lack of features, but that seems to be improving in past couple of years and I'm guessing if you're saying it's for someone who doesn't know how to troubleshoot more indepth features are probably not going to interest them anyway.

So I'd say my personal experience with AMD drivers has been perfectly fine, I see no real reason why someone would avoid AMD cards due to fear of driver issues. As someone who builds and configures the system you should consider settings though. I mean, maybe it would be worth it to make sure the driver update only updates to "recommended" driver versions (you can easily change that setting) since smaller optional updates  can in rare cases cause issues with specific games. But that's just something to consider.