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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

The last time I owned an AMD video card was more than a decade ago. At the time their video card drivers needed work and could blue screen your box. There was a lot of back and forth on the internet about which driver version to load to get the most stable experience.

Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-f.... This may just be confirmation bias since there are also articles refuting that AMD still has driver issues.

On the gripping hand AMD themselves apparently acknowledge they have issues and are trying to address them . https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-downloa...

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> Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place

Maybe for Windows, but the same cannot be said of Linux or macOS, where AMD's choice to open-source their drivers has led to these OSes having great support; while Nvidia, having to support their own closed-source drivers, seemingly hasn't had the bandwidth to get their drivers for these OSes up to par.

This. I've already decided my next GPU will be AMD regardless of if it's competitive at the top end in terms of performance. I am so sick of nVidia's Linux driver bullshit that I cannot wait to drop them. I don't game that much anymore anyway.

AMD is great for gaming on Linux, especially with projects like radv and ACO.

I'm not super interested in Linux gaming, I just want my desktop to be usable.

Honest question: If you're not interested in gaming, why even get a discrete GPU and not an integrated one? Are you interested in using it for other purposes?

I dual boot Windows for gaming. I work and code on Linux, except my monitor setup + nvidia graphics card results in a virtually unusable desktop. Integrated graphics can't run multiple 4k screens very well, if at all.

I do all my gaming on Linux and AMD works very well for it.

I'm not the author of the previous comments but I use Linux, not interested in gaming, and I have a dedicated GPU (2080ti). Mostly for working with Blender and Houdini, where the integrated one would work as well as using the CPU, at least for the workloads I'm dealing with, so having a dedicated GPU for both simulations and rendering helps a lot to speed up the workflows.

I can answer this question from my own perspective, at least. CPUs with integrated graphics are not as fast as standalone historically. Compare say, a ryzen 3600 to a 3400G.

Passmark below:

3400G: 9425

3600: 17850

for fun

1600: 12444

Their Windows drivers are a pain as well, to be honest. I've had more than a few blue screens from various versions of their drivers over the last few years.

Not really, drivers for Navi were equally bad on Linux. Second thing is that you need to wait several months before open source driver is stable, first months you have to use latest kernel + mesa-git. On the other hand, you can use Nvidia blob from day one.

And you can undervolt your AMD card with the open source drivers to improve efficiency and gain performance at the same time.

Linux support exists, but is a royal pain. With my 5500XT, even on Arch linux it wasn't properly supported unless I compiled a few things from Git.

I applaud the open source effort, but let's not pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.

I was on the market for a GPU and I would agree with you and wouldn't say it's confirmation bias. On Amazon, most Radeons have 3.5 stars vs 4.5 for Geforces; many reviewers say they purchased a Radeon only to return it later because of driver issues.

Also, as the owner of Macbook 16" with a Radeon 5500M Pro, I'll add that I find the bootcamp drivers much subpar. They're also rarely updated although the issue seems to be Apple there.

I happen to have a macbook pro now but 10 years ago that was the reason I avoided ATI cards. I had a Dell laptop with one and it always had driver's issues. On a windows machine I have nvidia card and I don't remember the last time I had an issue with it.

Yeah I got a good deal on a RX590 last year and I still regret it. Tons of crashes and outright hard lockups on my desktop. Looking forward to the RTX3070 so I can toss the 590 in the bin

Back in 2018 I was upgrading my computer, and I wanted an all-AMD system, so I picked up a 2700X and a Vega 64. I’m really happy with the 2700X, but I returned the Vega because the Linux drivers (open source and proprietary) were shoddy for separate reasons. I picked up a 1080ti instead and never had a problem.

I've had 2 Nvidia cards (GTX760 and GTX 1070) and between those 1 AMD card (Sapphire Radeon R9 390) and it was the AMD that constantly BSOD on me. It would run well most of the time but crash my PC often. I appreciate the competition but not willing to risk spending so much if AMD still can't manage.

Sounds like a hardware defect to me. I've had the 380 and never had a BSOD even once.

Sapphire 580 here too zero issues

I've had multiple generations of Nvidia GPUs in my PCs, all the way back from a Riva TNT up to a GTX 460 as the last one.

I switched to an RX560 and I couldn't be happier. Linux drivers that actually work and aren't a mostly closed source garbage heap. The current Windows drivers are fine too.

Am I the only person on this site who has had no issues with the blob (aside from Wayland), especially on desktop? The last actual thing that I remember being a bit of a pain was an Optimus laptop years ago but from what I understand that’s finally been officially fixed; the desktop cards worked quite well, including the 2060 in my current desktop.

No, I've been using NVIDIA Linux drivers on RedHat/CentOS for the last 14 years and seldom had anything like the problems everyone complains of here.

I've not had much luck on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus though, maybe that's improved.

The current situation with Wayland and EGLStreams is regrettable though.

Yup, I've got about a dozen motherboard/video card combinations that I'm adminning. All of them require some sort of hack to get the binary driver to work with our code. Most require a kernel flag, some require sub-optimal bios settngs, some require pinning to an old version, and one requires a monitor attached to boot.

Not had a single crash on the Linux open source drivers though, here my RX 550 is rock solid with excellent performance for the given hardware. We have two different Vulkan drivers and two different shader compilers to choose from, all open source.

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