Gamers are ditching Radeon graphics cards over driver issues

[redgarl]

Hi Steve,
I am one of the users who bought a new Sapphire RX 5700XT Nitro+ in november 2019.
I can confirm that I encountered a lot of drivers problems.
My comp specs are:
Ryzen 3900X, 64GB GSkill Trident Z Neo F4-3600C16Q-64GTZNC, Asus Crosshair VIII, Samsung C32HG70 FreeSync 2 HDR Monitor and up-to-date a Dell S3220DGF monitor.
I tested a lot of AMD configurations, I also had Ryzen 2700X, Ryzen 3800X, Sapphire RX 580, Vega 64 and Radeon VII.
When I update Radeon drivers I restart in safe mode and use DDU uninstaler every time. After that I reinstall also drivers for both monitors.
I can summarize these kinds of issues to help you replicate them if you want for Sapphire RX 5700XT Nitro+.
1. With Windows 10 fresh install - and drivers prior to 10 Dec 2019 not so many problems. With new AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver the issues just flourished.
2. With Windows 10 with all drivers and more programs installed, especially more than 3 or 4 games from different platform - like steam, origin, blizzard, epic the issues also begin to manifest often.
So I think that drm games can cause a lot of problems but is not entirely from them.
3. Freesync and HDR can multiply the issues. If you have an HDR monitor - most of the black screen issues. If you disable HDR from Windows 10 and monitor settings the issues are present but not so often.
4. If you have dual monitor setup in extended configuration - the issues occur so often (almost every day with adrenalin 2020 drivers) especially with Freesync 2 and HDR enabled.
In extended configuration if you switch (or glide the mouse) from the game monitor to second monitor where you have an YouTube or twitch window - color issues, game crushes and more problems may appear.
5. With new AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver - all of them until the last from February 2020 - I had the most issues. So I reverted to Adrenalin-2019-Edition-19.12.1-Dec2 drivers. Even with Dec2 2019 drivers I still have some issue but less than with Adrenalin 2020 drivers.
6. With AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver those new Overlay and Relive options just screwed all the experience. A workaround solution is to delete (disable) all shortcuts from Relive. The issues are less but still present.
7. Games with DirectX 12 enabled - more issues than playing with DirectX 11. I tested with Deus Ex Mankind Divided.
8. Most game crushes I had was with Overwatch and Deus Ex Mankind Divided - with Overwatch it's like 10 times more.
In Overwatch, when you leave a game, even it's not your fault you are penalized. So I stopped playing Overwatch, because the game crushed so often.
9. I noticed (and also one of my friend noticed) like a low flicker on Dell S3220DGF HDR monitor even this monitor is flicker-free by its specs. My friend noticed in PUBG. Prior to, he had a GTX 1080TI and Acer XB27HU monitor. Now he has Dell S3220DGF and Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+.
9. Playing games from GOG platform and Guild Wars 2 from Arena Net - no issue with them or too few to bother. All games from GOG are DRM free.
10. An interesting fact - Radeon VII was the most stable video card, I had the least driver issues from all cards - like 1 issue to 20 issues from RX 5700XT.
This article and also your YouTube video "Can We Still Recommend Radeon GPUs? AMD Driver Issues Discussed" came right on time because I am at the point where I am very annoyed by these issues and was asking my self what is going on.
Hope to be helpful and if you have time, I'll be glad to hear your response or your thoughts and maybe, together from this forum, to urge AMD to FIX the DRIVERS!
Best regards.

Okay, first off, whatever cards you are using, games are going to crash. Deus Ex was crashing a lot with my 1080 TI.

Second off, do you have ANY components OC? If so, try one of your config with STOCK settings.

Lastly, did you test all of this on your Asus motherboard? It could be the motherboard and you don't even know it.

As of me, went from a 1080 TI to a 5700 XT and have seen no DIFFERENCE at all. One component of your system is having an impact.

As for me, Senua Sacrifice, Metal Gear Solid V, Tekken 7, Street Fighter V, SoulCalibur 6, The Witcher 3... anyway, they work flawlessly.

 

[tekknikal]

I have to second this article, in terms of DDU. Now, I'm not going to go as far as saying it will solve all your problems, nor would I recommend Amd over nvidia if you just want zero headaches. In same price situations, for sure go green. I think the only one that really makes sense is 5700 xt vs 2070 super... And again, in that case, if you're buying it for long term, and especially if you plan to overclock, I'd just pony up the extra cash and go with 2070 super.

Personally, I wanted a 5700 xt to upgrade my 1070 until this next gen of nvidia cards hit. So for me I didn't want to spend extra.

Initially I just uninstalled the nvidia drivers and put in the 5700 xt and tossed on the amd drivers. As expected, I immediately had issues. DDU in safe mode fixed everything and I have only ever had any minor glitches since.

I suspect this is a great deal of the problem, considering this is one of the first amd cards that was enticing for multiple gpu generations, and almost everyone would have upgraded from nvidia and not Amd.

I still think you are going to get a more solid experience going with Nvidia, but if you're already stuck with amd and can't switch without losing out on your investment, please make sure you've tried a clean safe mode DDU install.

 

[ChickyBoom]

Damn the green and red!!! When the heck is the blue??

 

[Polycount]

I've never considered myself a fanboy of any one hardware maker (except, perhaps, EVGA if we're counting OEMs, due to the excellent customer service I've received from them). I've always taken the stance of "If X company offers a product that delivers the level of performance I want, I'll buy it." Don't care if it comes from the red, blue or green team.

For the past several hardware generations, I've purchased nothing but Nvidia, and from noone else but EVGA, because I like to grab the flagships (preferably when they hit the used market and can be had for ~$200 cheaper) and don't mind paying a premium for it. However, when friends ask for my opinion on what GPU they should buy, I've pretty much exclusively recommended AMD cards due to their (often) excellent value and the current state of RTX from Nvidia.

But this... This might make me change my tune moving forward. Hopefully AMD resolves these issues quickly, and the people who have bought 5700s and 5700 XTs on my advice don't end up regretting it.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

And this is the reason I went directly to Microcenter for an EVGA 2080Ti.

 

[Rayneofpayne]

Why aren't people using DDU to clean install their drivers?
When I used RX 580 and Vega 56, I haven't had any of those issues even upgrading the drivers to latest version was relatively painless.
The only problem I encountered with Vega 56 was that my system would wake up from sleep mode by displaying Static noise on the display which could only be remedied with an OS restart (and this issue started appearing on drivers after version 19.5.2 - but nothing in regards to flickering, black screens, pink or green screens, or driver crashes - and the static noise on display is relatively easily remedied by using Hybernate as opposed to sleep, though I'd prefer AMD fixed that problem).

With major changes to drivers, yes, you'd be expected to use DDU to clean up any residuals from before (as there are too many changes in between drivers to expect a 'clean transition') and do a clean install of latest drivers instead.

Its standard practice.
If you had an NV gpu in your PC and then decided to change for AMD, how the freaking heck do you expect your GPU to function if you have REMNANTS in your OS from the previous GPU you used?
Those are NOTORIOUS for causing problems and people were recommending clean driver installs (and removing remnants of old drivers) before installing a new GPU in your system.

Not saying that AMD doesn't have driver problems, but I also do think people are exacerbating this issue with their own lack of competence by not using any logic or reason for that matter.

People know and have done this even NVidia users do this DDU has been a staple and not a secret for many many years....call it man they are just cheap with software that reflects it. AMD graphics division is just wretched, while the CPU side is banging great, the GPU side is suffering.

It is what it is, if you keep buying this crap and justifying it the way you people are, you are simply Looney toons In the head making excuses for a company cutting corners..

Btw Vega was just wretched in the GPU space, cheap compute but beyond that a useless piece of garbage. Koduri at his finest making promises he could never deliver.

 

[PEnnn]

... even though I have been 100% correct all of these years...

Dude, slow down a bit! You're going to give yourself a dislocated shoulder patting yourself on the back so hard.....

 

[Evernessince]

People know and have done this even NVidia users do this DDU has been a staple and not a secret for many many years....call it man they are just cheap with software that reflects it. AMD graphics division is just wretched, while the CPU side is banging great, the GPU side is suffering.

It is what it is, if you keep buying this crap and justifying it the way you people are, you are simply Looney toons In the head making excuses for a company cutting corners..

Btw Vega was just wretched in the GPU space, cheap compute but beyond that a useless piece of garbage. Koduri at his finest making promises he could never deliver.

If you think this is about AMD cutting corners, you haven't been following along.

FYI Vega wasn't just cheap compute, it beat the 1080 Ti in blender render times by 40% and in other compute benchmarks by a good margin. Vega VII beats the 2080 Ti in many professional workloads. "Cheap Compute" does not aptly describe it unless you also consider the 2080 Ti cheap. It provides more compute for around half the price.

I think you need to tone down the hyperbole two notches. Vega wasn't "trash" and AMD isn't "wretched". You need only look at reviews of the products to see that.

Also, what's with all the new accounts posting? 3 accounts made today in the comments. I don't think accounts younger then 1 month should be able to post in the new comments, let alone a few minutes ago.

 

[Johnathan491]

I've tried both a asrock 5700 xt and a xfx 5700xt I returned both unfortunately both had issues with drivers just crashing playing games. I thought maybe I had bad drivers I uninstalled all of them and had the same issue so I tried it in a different system and same issue. Between that and the heat they put off I just gave up returned my xfx and paid the difference for a 2070 super not a single issue since and that was about a month ago. I really tried to give amd a chance I love my ryzen CPU but it just wasn't usable.

 

[Danny101]

My last purchase was the RX 570, which is a mature node on a previous generation. It could be that AMD pushed out flawed nodes on an immature generation. Hopefully they will rectify this. Sometimes software just can't fix was is a hardware issue. Could also be conflicts with other drivers, like sound.

 

[BLARG!]

I am using an AMD Radeon VII literally no problems with the graphics card at all. I think much of the problems are hardware compatibility AMD recently jumped from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0. It is important to know that you are using a newer motherboard to support some of the PCIe sub system. It might be worth AMD investigating the card's ability to switch between PCIe versions. I recall a similar issues with 1.0 to 2.0.

Do yourself a favor update your bios completely.

 

[Lionvibez]

I'm on a RX 580 that I've been on since the mining craze and haven't had any issues. And this guy went from my old X58 i7-970 Rig into my new Ryzen 3800X build and still rock solid. I won't be looking to upgrade until there is a Navi out with Ray tracing hardware so I will check out what is going on at that time.

I've been strickly radeon's for about 20 years now.

Very first one Radeon 64DDR the last Nv card I owned was a Riva TNT 2.

 

[jbc029]

Years of pretty much flawless vega usage across two 56s, a 64 and two VIIs now leads me to believe that, frankly, I keep much cleaner system than most. I dont use DDU, ever. I use the AMD cleanup utility. Every time there is a major suite update. I also have *never* left a standard profile. Always tweaked (undervolted/OC with hbm OC).

The *only* time things have ever been unstable (and it is fairly annoying) was the brief period where windows would drop the applied profile on startup and you had to apply it again every time.

 

[hcgazoo]

It's endlessly frustrating to see AMD doing such a good job pressuring Intel on the processor side with Ryzen yet be so woefully incompetent pressuring Nvidia when it comes to GPU'S and largely due to the drivers.

I have been running an old PC I built years ago and I'm currently in the process of deciding what parts to buy for a new rig that is badly overdue. I likely will be using a Ryzen 5 3600 and while I'd like to use a 5600XT or 5700 I can't see a way to do it with risking endless frustration. Honestly how they can let someone mismanage this situation so badly and remain employed is beyond my comprehension.

 

[krizby]

There is no need to share your personal experience with AMD/Nvidia here people, just doing the poll is fine, the Statistics is self-evident and does not lie.
Of the 52000 votes as of this moment
48% of AMD users are having problem compare to 22% of Nvidia users (9900 vs 6800 votes).
The fact that this lead to a large number of 5700XTs being returned to retailer was confirmed by Steve.
Don't try to blame this on clueless users, there are clueless users for both AMD and Nvidia.
The issue lie solely with AMD, most reviewers have stated the issue with drivers since day one and gave AMD benefits of the doubt, yet 7 months later there are still game breaking bugs. This damages not only AMD reputation but also the reviewer's reputation for recommending the 5700XT. If anyone read through the comments on Youtube, alot of comments have something along the lines of "I bought the 5700XT because of this channel but after a week I had to exchange it for 2060S/2070S".

 

[JimboJoneson]

And this is the reason I went directly to Microcenter for an EVGA 2080Ti.

Can you post another picture of it? Maybe with a "thumbsup" in front of it to show how proud you are? Not everyone knows yet.

 

[JimboJoneson]

I'm on a RX 580 that I've been on since the mining craze and haven't had any issues. And this guy went from my old X58 i7-970 Rig into my new Ryzen 3800X build and still rock solid. I won't be looking to upgrade until there is a Navi out with Ray tracing hardware so I will check out what is going on at that time.

I've been strickly radeon's for about 20 years now.

Very first one Radeon 64DDR the last Nv card I owned was a Riva TNT 2.

No issue on my 580 either. But I will say this ... AMD drivers does not recognize when you change cards ... you need to do a full manual proper driver sweep ... why, I don't know .. .at one point AMD had an options for "clean and install" or just "install" ... what happened to that?

I went from 3870 to rx580 and the drivers didn't even care that I switched cards ... it worked, but settings were carried over, mostly, and not only did it not recommend me to reinstall drivers, there was no option (greyed out) because I was "up to date" ... this is probably 95% of the entire problem ... after proper clean install ... I had proper 580 fearures like "sharpening" that were absent with 3870 ... I've noticed no other issues except the custom fan curve doesn't work proper .. ok, because the competition doesn't even offer that so I can live with "auto" or afterburner.

 

[Evernessince]

There is no need to share your personal experience with AMD/Nvidia here people, just doing the poll is fine, the Statistics is self-evident and does not lie.
Of the 52000 votes as of this moment
48% of AMD users are having problem compare to 22% of Nvidia users (9900 vs 6800 votes).
The fact that this lead to a large number of 5700XTs being returned to retailer was confirmed by Steve.
Don't try to blame this on clueless users, there are clueless users for both AMD and Nvidia.
The issue lie solely with AMD, most reviewers have stated the issue with drivers since day one and gave AMD benefits of the doubt, yet 7 months later there are still game breaking bugs. This damages not only AMD reputation but also the reviewer's reputation for recommending the 5700XT. If anyone read through the comments on Youtube, alot of comments have something along the lines of "I bought the 5700XT because of this channel but after a week I had to exchange it for 2060S/2070S".

Those numbers are far too large for Nvidia and AMD and clearly do not represent the whole market. 22% of Nvidia users are not having issues just like 48% of AMD users are not having issues. If either company were having anywhere near that many issues, it would be all over the tech news. 5% is a significant amount, let alone 22 or 48%.

As a counter to this poll, go and look at Newegg and Amazon. Many 5700 XTs score 4 to 4.5 stars. Where are all the people having issues? The 2080 Ti has a lower average review score then the 5700 XT.

This is why I take polls with a huge grain of salt. This poll was up for a limited time only visible to those who browse on mobile and only to those who subscribed to HWUB. Number of poll respondents means nothing if none of those responses are verified in the least bit and the data collection methodology was far from perfect.

 

[Gothmog3vz]

I wonder if there's a breakdown among card variants experiencing the issues? Brands and specific models.

I upgraded in December from my rock-solid 960 Strix to a 5700XT Tuf (because prior Asus experiences were great, and the price was competitive). Card had the same black-screen issues described, stuttering frame rates, system locking when playing Destiny... Turns out, ASUS basically didn't give a **** when they did their card variants, after a bit of research, and these Tuf 5700XT's suffer from inadequate cooling + some funky factory VBIOS configuration.

Returned the Tuf, bought a Sapphire Nitro+ 5700XT, and now the computer is just as stable as it was with my old 960 (but with much better graphics, naturally).

 

[wiyosaya]

Those numbers are far too large for Nvidia and AMD and clearly do not represent the whole market. 22% of Nvidia users are not having issues just like 48% of AMD users are not having issues. If either company were having anywhere near that many issues, it would be all over the tech news. 5% is a significant amount, let alone 22 or 48%.

As a counter to this poll, go and look at Newegg and Amazon. Many 5700 XTs score 4 to 4.5 stars. Where are all the people having issues? The 2080 Ti has a lower average review score then the 5700 XT.

This is why I take polls with a huge grain of salt. This poll was up for a limited time only visible to those who browse on mobile and only to those who subscribed to HWUB. Number of poll respondents means nothing if none of those responses are verified in the least bit and the data collection methodology was far from perfect.

As I see it, it's pretty clear that we have a click-bait article here - and I very rarely say that.

 

[krizby]

As I see it, it's pretty clear that we have a click-bait article here - and I very rarely say that.

After recommending 5700XT for so long, made review for each and every 5700XT model out there, yet HUB published this article knowing it would also damage HUB's reputation (since people were buying 5700XT following HUB recommendation). I would call this journalistic integrity.

 

[Baron Munchausen]

Radeon VII owner/user here and no driver issues with my GPU. If anything some of the drivers really improved the GPU. Now the 5k GPU series is a different story of course.

 

[Supelex]

I am on the same boat as the author; I don't have any issues with my card. I can say, I recommend disabling Radeon settings in task scheduler or if not that, installing a 19.x.x driver has the option to not install. From my testing, the latest drivers starting from I think 20.1.3 or 20.1.2, do not get affected by task scheduler change; might be per system type situation. The reason I disabled my settings is because of 5700xt has a voltage curve starting at 678, whilst global wattman forces 750 at lowest. Although minuet, it bothers me how my gpu outputs a buzzing noise, a couple threads said they have the same, when just scrolling through chrome or such. I also believe Radeon settings are just iffy at the moment, hence consumer issues. I recommend trying to disable it, and make sure it's actually off on task manager; then attempt your everyday routine. I run 19.9.2 as it's proven stable for my current system.

 

[Indianapolis]

One of the things that keeps me away from AMD video cards is all the Radeon Overlay hotkeys, some of which cause conflicts with other programs such as Photoshop and generally just pop up unexpectedly and cause problems.

 

[Bojan Davidovic]

Never had any problem with Amd or Nvidia drivers. I guess some people need too learn how to installl drivers, use ddu or im extremly llucky.