Okay I have had SO much problem with my ASUS R9 380 card. I have been "fighting" for a WEEK to find perfect GPU driver. And now I finally wanted to talk about my suffering.
15.12 Released. Kind of nice Crimson driver first. Few annoying Core Clock problems happened and stuff. Nothing seriously bad.
16.1 Released: Yeah fine. Getting lots of stuttering in few games (Arma 3, Far Cry 3, CS:GO and Smite) and I had to downgrade to 15.12 Crimson
16.1.1: Sameish problems AGAIN! But more worse GPU Load and Core Clock speed jumping / not full speed in GPU intensive games.
16.2: It ruined everything. Except it gave over 100fps boost in CS:GO but ALL OTHER GAMES (Arma 3, Smite and Far Cry 3) SUFFERED! Indescribable fps... Well basically I had non. 1-15 fps in Far Cry 3 and Arma 3 freezing every second...
16.2.1: Have download it but I haven't installed it yet. Watching Katowice.
Now I am using 15.11.1 Catalyst Drivers and I am "meh" currently with these. Atleast this works. Now I have to test Unreal Tournament if it crashes. It has crashed with every Crimson driver.
TL;DR_ AMD fucked up drivers. Or just R9 380 problem. Currently using 15.11.1 for "best performance" edit: OH BOY Unreal Tournament Crashed :D <3
My 6950 was shit, my 7950 was shit, my 280 was shit, and my friends fury nano is just on the border of being shit.
I mean the 7950 and the 7970 shared the same driver. I could literally swap out video cards on the same driver and they would have totally different problems.
The 7970 got a driver update and then after that it was golden. One of my favorite video cards of all time, but my 7950 never worked quite right.
When I upgraded to the 280 and saw issues again, I just immediately returned it. Someone talked me into a 290x which was pretty good but it was still chugging in some games.
I have all those cards and more and don't see these problems. Currently using a FirePro S9010 with a 7970 VBIOS on it and it doesn't seem to care what driver is being used, everything just runs.
My R9 Nano ran very well on 15.12, but did suffer a small performance hit with 16.1. It was mostly contained to synthetics while real gaming performance suffered very little.
I have to believe in some of these scenarios that something else is to blame for performane issues. I've run AMD cards since 2010 in AMD and Intel based systems alike (even machines from ages gone by) and have almost never had debilitating driver problems.
Or I'm just blessed by the gods of driver support.
I agree AMD needs to redo their code people for once. sometimes if I am playing TF2 on linux the game will slow down and rubber band from the drivers. Seriously? At least get the ATi guys back they at least knew wtf they were doing.
Its like if nvidia bought 3dfx but never learned how the cards worked but kept chugging them out afterwards.
No they didn't, the reason for the "AMD Drivers are bad" stigma even existing is because of ATi's driver development team breaking every other release, not supporting games on launch, and most famously providing drivers that would brick a Crossfire enabled system. This all goes back to 2005-2006 and hasn't gone away.
Of course nobody thinks to parallel these complaints with nVidia's recent run of bricking, nerfing, and setting fire to cards with horrible drivers. But that's not what this topic is about.
Got a sapphire r9 390, at launch Just Cause 3 ran like garbage, micro stutter, flickering/disappearing textures, horrible fps. 1.6 gb update for the game and new AMD drivers and since that it's a smooth ride. Besides that everything is running fine for me.
my r9 290 (unlocked to 290x via bios swap ) has no major issues with crimson 15.12 small issue with 16.1 then golden with 16.2.1 but i am running on a 990fx chipset mileage may differ