[SOLVED] Upcoming AMD Video Cards.

[ubercake]

I haven't gotten an AMD video card since the Radeon 5850s of 2009.
The reason I quit AMD at that time was the constant driver issues and lack of timely support.

I have had zero issues with Nvidia cards since 2009 but feel like Nvidia has been taking advantage of the lack of competition by charging increasingly higher prices through the last decade.
Nvidia has taken video card pricing to a new level because, for years, you can either have high-level graphics at a high price point from Nvidia or at most mid-level graphics from AMD (sort of like 15 years of Intel price gouging in the CPU market - until a few years ago with Ryzen).

These new AMD cards coming in November and December appear to be game-changers from a cost and performance standpoint. Simply based on the release information, I'm very much considering an RX 6800 XT or RX 6900 XT.
What I would like to know is if anyone out there has a good amount of experience with any of the more recent AMD cards and the associated drivers.

Are drivers now a non-issue with AMD or are frequent bad driver releases still a thing with AMD?

 

[DrummerManSpike]

Some people are still having some issues with their drivers, but most users aren't. I have a 5700 and only ever had one crash the first week I put my rig together (back in February). Since then, not a single crash! There have been a couple times where my entire system has some kind of weird error that effects the driver, but the most that happens is my GPU fan curve gets reset. A bit of an annoyance but easy to fix. Easily worth not having to pay luxury prices for Nvidia cards!

 

[renz496]

the most recent one is the issues surrounding 5700 series. crashing, black screen and have issues on older games (DX9 based). and from what i heard while some people able to get it fixed with driver updates some are not. several pc builder that also express their experience before saying several of their customer end up returning the card. usually they get it fixed when change it into older AMD card (like polaris or vega) or with nvidia card. in one cases he even own the card (and it work fine) but he never get it work with his client PC. and to roll out software issues he even use the same windows image he had to his client PC. so with 5700 it is more like hit and miss. some people able to get it to work and some not. at one point some people even speculate that there is some hardware issues with Navi 10 chip itself that AMD unable to fully fixed with driver updates. it reminds me of the issues that AMD had with eyefinity before where we got mouse corruption issues during 5k and 6k series. back then people fault it to how AMD handles their implementation needing active DP and such causing the issue and it cannot fully be fixed with drivers. starting with 7k series AMD change the way they implement eyefinity (no longer needing active DP) and we never heard about those mouse corruption issue anymore.

for the upcoming series we probably need a month or two to see if AMD can deliver stable driver from the start.

 

[DrummerManSpike]

for the upcoming series we probably need a month or two to see if AMD can deliver stable driver from the start.

Definitely a good practice to have regardless of manufacturer! Nvidia had massive driver issues out of the gate for the new 30 series cards.

 

[renz496]

Definitely a good practice to have regardless of manufacturer! Nvidia had massive driver issues out of the gate for the new 30 series cards.

AFAIK the only issue they had was the crashing issue when the clock exceeding 2ghz. but it was fixed with the driver updates that released a week later. the problem is if the issues still happening after several driver fix unable to truly solve the issue.