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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

It's not unbelievable when you know AMD's drivers have always been hit or miss since the ATI days, with more misses than hits.

Fans call their driver development "fine wine" since they keep getting better over time, while realists call it "not being able to release good drivers from the start, unlike the competition, needing months to reach parity".

Yeah, their HW is good, but that's nothing without good SW and AMD still has loads of room for improvement there.

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AMD being absolute crap on the software front is where Nvidia simply dominates and Intel still makes for a reasonable purchase.

I have a laptop with AMD and NPU. AMD still has no good easy to use out of the box examples on how to use that NPU for on-device AI applications. Nvidia has been delivering that for over 10 years now. SW seems like an afterthought at AMD.

If AMD expects their chips to take off for AI, they should be spamming us with ready made apps and code samples that just work and that we can then modify.

Much like AMD/ATI, Intel has had botched 3d graphics drivers since at least GMA 900 (probably earlier but that's as far as I remember). Try the new Intel Arc card and see how it works for you.

Except that AMD was never competing with Intel for graphics. Their competition was always Nvidia who's drivers and SW support was net superior. Intel was happy to just serve the ultra low end market with integrated GPUs for rendering MS Office back when AMD didn't even have integrated GPUs in it's chips.

Also, on this tangent since you brought up Intel, their Linux driver support is net superior to that of AMD. I have laptops with Intel CPUs (8th gen, 6th gen and 3rd gen) and Ryzen (5000 and 7000 series) and on the Intel ones linux is way more "Just Works" than on AMD. Sample zise of one person of course.

I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. My experience with Intel GPUs on Linux is features getting progressively disabled in newer kernel versions due to hardware bugs (FBC, PSR & DC6 C-state on my Goldmont laptop for example).

My favourite bit is how the intel xorg driver supported TearFree for years, then got sunset and everyone was told to migrate to the modesetting driver. Except there is no TearFree in the modesetting driver (just use a compositor!). It eventually landed in xorg master last year [1], but no one is making releases of it any more.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

Just an anecdote, but the Arc A380 on my kids’ Fedora gaming PC has run everything on our Steam library just fine. A mix of older and more recent titles. I’m sure there are games that don’t work well, but it was cheap and it’s been rock solid.

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