I don't want this to be a rant post, but I feel I really need to write this down and try to summarize all the issues I have faced so far with my AMD card and let other people know about them. It is not meant to be an angry discussion, but an informative post that everyone should look at before buying another card, because some of these are not documented anywhere else.
General issues with AMD drivers:
- Bad OpenGL performance: as everyone knows OpenGL implementation on Windows just sucks. It's miles behind the Linux one, and this is particularly bad for emulator fanatics who wants to play old console games.
- Driver settings not affecting games: so AMD gave you a really cool redesign of the driver's GUI with Adrenaline, but forgot to update how the driver interacts with games. Yes, all the driver settings (Antialiasing, Anisotropic filtering, VSync, etc.) only affect DirectX 9 games. These are USELESS for nowadays standards.
Issues I had with my AMD graphics card (which is an RX 480 8GB):
- Bad Vulkan performance: I don't know if I am the only one, but could not find anyone else noticing this problem. What happens is that on Vulkan games the GPU is used only at 70-80% max, depending on the game. This is confirmed if you check the dissipated power (around 10W less in my case) or even the card temperature. This is incredibly frustrating because limits my framerate just below 60 (around 50 or so) and I have to make big compromises in terms of graphics quality in order to play the game at a reasonable framerate.
- "Fake" GPU usage: I extensively use the sleep mode on my PC. Sometimes, it happens that when I wake it up from sleep mode and play a game, the game runs with half the frame rate. GPU usage, however, remains the same. I have to restart the driver (using the utilities that come with CRU) or restart the computer entirely to fix it.
- Wattman: I modified my BIOS to use a more aggressive fan curve, but no matter what, AMD Wattman prevails and sets its own fan curve. I spent countless hours digging into the registry trying to disable it. Fortunately MSI Afterburner never gives up on me.
Issues I had with specific games:
- Anisotropic filtering in Death Stranding: in this game anisotropic filtering implementation is very weak and many users suggest to force it through the driver settings. Guess what? AMD driver settings do not work on this game, because of course is not a DirectX 9 game!
Bonus issues: these are just unrelated issues that however should be stated once
- Ryzen CPU not idling: I got a 2600X. It works really well, never had a problem so far except this little thing that's really annoying: it does not idle. The core frequency always stays at around 4GHz. I come from an i5 2500K which automatically downclocked to 1.6GHz on idle. I had to write a script that runs on background to change the Windows power plan to "Power Saver" in order to keep it at 2.2GHz while I'm not using the PC.
