AMD's 22-year-old GPUs still getting driver updates thanks to the FOSS community
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
(freedesktop.org) 100 comments 2 days ago
AMD's 22 year old GPUs are still getting updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38868265 - Jan 2024 (101 comments)
Nvidia keeps its drivers actively supported for what feels like a very long time.
Nvidia is doing the work, the QA, dedicating the full time resources to this expensive, extremely time consuming, highly skilled, complex, mission critical, professional level, important task.
I can easily see how AMD might just happily drop driver support quickly now and say "Oh that's the communities job".
I remember for a long time after Amazon Web Services was launched it provided official drivers only for Java and kept praising and thanking its dedicated community members for implementing AWS features into open source libraries for Python 2 or PHP or whatever. It was an absolutely shithouse outcome. AWS would constantly launch new features and there was no way to use them because they were not implemented in your library because the guy who did it out of hours was away at a picnic or whatever. In the case of Python it took years and years and years before Amazon actually started taking responsibility for its own drivers, writing them, documenting them, QAing them and updating them with new features when the cloud launched new features - an absolutely massive task.
AMD should not rely on the community and should compete with Nvidia in duration and quality and feature of its drivers.
Dare I say it, open source support for AMD might actually be a bad thing for this reason - it will make AMD lazy.
AMD is lazy, or more to the point AMD can't software at all.
If AMD thinks being open source means it can just give up its software efforts in favor of "the community" - i.e. people volunteering personal time here and there..... then that's a bad outcome.
It's probably better to have closed source drivers that are fully the responsibility of AMD for better or for worse.
No, it is not. And I would automatically switch away from AMD GPUs if it became like this.
Documenting the hardware is the most important task, and AMD is doing it.
There's also the implication they don't fund developers. This is utterly false, although they're not the only party funding them, with e.g. Valve being a significant contributor today.
How about AMD does not have infinite resources and does not have 100% correct strategic vision ( like All other companies ) or priorities that align with yours.
How about not worshipping AMD and giving them free passes that nobody else has?
Both Intel and Nvidia provide software for the hardware they produce, and they wrangle in other developers if their assistance or cooperation is necessary. Why? Because it's their job to sell you a complete, usable package when they sell a product.
Why does AMD get a free pass to straight up not? The meme of small indie dev can only go so far.
I switched to an AMD card last year and I’m playing games old and new without any sort of issues. I even think the driver software is easier to use than Nvidia and I like how I don’t have the ugly 1990s Nvidia control panel anymore.
I also like how I don’t have to login to an account for automatic driver updates like I did with the GeForce Experience application.
Plus, you can turn off telemetry in AMD software, where that’s not even an option for Nvidia.
My last card was a 3070 and so far my upgrade to the 7800XT has been excellent. No difference in software has affected me in any perceptible way.
* AMD straight up does not provide assistive tooling for 7900X3D and 7950X3D's asymmetric cores, this has meant worse performance than the lower tier 7800X3D that doesn't need such tooling. This is in stark contrast to Intel with Intel Thread Director that provides assistance to the OS scheduler (Windows 11 and Linux 5.18 and up).
* Just one[1] of many more examples I can't bothered to keep track of. Also a piece of anecdata, a close friend of mine moved to Nvidia from AMD last year because he was fed up with problems involving his streaming setup which all stemmed from the AMD drivers; he hasn't had problems since switching. This isn't to say Nvidia's drivers are flawless, but overall there definitely seem to be more problems with AMD than Nvidia.
* The "AI" world can also tell you all about how AMD simply does not grok software. Nvidia is the overlord of "AI" in large part because AMD simply does/can not software.
[1]: https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/elite-dangerou...
>I like how I don’t have the ugly 1990s Nvidia control panel anymore.
I would argue that's a feature, using a GUI language (Windows Explorer) that is well defined and based on solid research and real feedback.
>I also like how I don’t have to login to an account for automatic driver updates like I did with the GeForce Experience application.
Drivers are absolutely not something that should be autoupdated, at least if you want a reliable system. Regardless of that though, you don't need to login to anything because Windows Update will autoupdate the drivers anyway if you don't opt out.
>Plus, you can turn off telemetry in AMD software, where that’s not even an option for Nvidia.
GeForce Experience has been optional for a long time now, all you have to do is uncheck it during installation. Even before Nvidia relented and gave us that option, it was simple enough to unpack the installer and install just the drivers if one was so inclined. The drivers themselves have no telemetry.
>My last card was a 3070 and so far my upgrade to the 7800XT has been excellent. No difference in software has affected me in any perceptible way.
I still have a Sandy Bridge era laptop with an AMD GPU in it, and while the hardware has been decent enough the drivers have been a headache. I can't even update the drivers beyond what came with the laptop because AMD seems to have forgotten they even made this particular GPU; it's supported on the release notes but doesn't actually work when installed.
On the desktop side, the last AMD video card I bought, which was 15 years ago, was DOA and I've been an Nvidia customer since. I don't have time to deal with hardware jank on top of their crapass software.
Both Nvidia and Intel have been flawless on this front, both hardware and software; they have always Just Worked(tm) when I needed them to. AMD should man up and figure out how to make software that's worth a damn.
No, the Nvidia control panel isn’t a good feature to me. I want a nice application like GeForce experience where every setting is in one place, not two different apps where one of them looks like a Windows 98 program.
I want easy driver updates because I play games. It’s critical I have the latest driver for the newest games. I don’t run them unattended, I just don’t want to have to go to the website every time. I want to open the app and click a button.
Your experience from 15 years ago buying a DOA card isn’t relevant. As far as hardware quality, Nvidia’s best quality and customer service AIB partner EVGA quit the market because of Nvidia’s abusive business relationship.
If your laptop is Sandy Bridge era it is beyond both AMD and Nvidia’s support window by now, that’s a 12 year old platform. That’s a platform that isn’t even compatible with Microsoft’s current OS. You can install the AMD open source drivers, stick with older ones, or get a new laptop.
Stop moving the goal post. You asked for an example of AMD not doing software, their pricing is irrelevant.
Incidentally, a 7800X3D is faster than the higher tier 7950X3D for general gaming precisely because of the lack of assistive tooling.
>No, the Nvidia control panel isn’t a good feature to me. I want a nice application like GeForce experience where every setting is in one place, not two different apps where one of them looks like a Windows 98 program.
Yeah, every single setting is in that "Windows 98 program". GeForce Experience has never been worth the CPU cycles it eats, it's just telemetry bloatware.
>I want easy driver updates because I play games. It’s critical I have the latest driver for the newest games.
If that's the case, Windows Update has you covered.
>Your experience from 15 years ago buying a DOA card isn’t relevant.
It is because that is a reflection of the experience I've always had with AMD: Unreliability. I don't consider any of their options anymore, always going Intel and Nvidia, because my time is worth more than that.
>As far as hardware quality, Nvidia’s best quality and customer service AIB partner EVGA quit the market because of Nvidia’s abusive business relationship.
Unfortunate as that was, it wasn't the end of the world. ASUS and MSI make decent products.
>If your laptop is Sandy Bridge era it is beyond both AMD and Nvidia’s support window by now, that’s a 12 year old platform.
That doesn't matter because I am talking about the last drivers that support the GPU in question, still provided by AMD. Those drivers only manage to drive the GPU in a very limited capacity, by which I mean it can detect the GPU but otherwise not do much better than Windows's built-in generic VGA drivers.
Doing the same with an Nvidia or Intel GPU results in a fully functioning GPU, as it should.
AMD can't do software, which is a damn shame given how capable their hardware could be.
It helped that it made gamers love AMD more because they perceive open source as being better for the community. In actuality, AMD is not willing to spend the resources to fully compete with Nvidia and open source is their only way of hoping the ecosystem adopt their usually inferior solution.
Both the 7900X3D and 7950X3D were laughed out of the room because AMD refused to provide proper tooling for asymmetric cores, unlike Intel with Intel Thread Director.
As for their GPUs? Stories abound about how their drivers exhibit far more problems than Nvidia's; and it's usually up to the game devs to try and workaround it on their end.
Last but not least, gamers very loudly do not appreciate AMD paying off games to be FSR exclusive because they can't compete with DLSS.
I don't care if he was at home shitting in his hands and clapping. It's not his responsibility to update the user side of this product to the sole benefit of Amazon. That's where the story should end, IMO.
Exploitation? Far from.
Nobody is forcing these people at gunpoint to work on improving support for ancient hardware. They do it because they want to.
Hard to fathom, I know. But then you've got people writing open software for e.g. classic Amiga too. This is just another form of the same thing.
AMD themselves (and these days, Valve too) do fund drive development and help the community when the documentation is unclear or defective.
>AMD should not rely on the community and should compete with Nvidia in duration and quality and feature of its drivers.
There's the implication NVIDIA is better somehow. No, it isn't. They quickly abandon support for old hardware, I have experienced it again and again before switching to AMD.
Faced with undecipherable XID errors, NVIDIA support told me to "buy a new gpu, as we don't support yours anymore". Note the GPU (MX440), while low end, had been purchased new in recent memory at that point.
AMD does something NVIDIA does not, which is to provide proper documentation for their GPUs. Thus the community does not need to reverse-engineer anything, unlike on NVIDIA side.
The GPU featured an AGP interface (an ancient competitor to PCIe)
Google "radeon 9700 site:slashdot.org"
Man that makes me feel old. AGP was the new thing the last time I built a PC before switching to laptops. 22 years doesn't seem to warrant the word ancient.