This is a opinion/advice in wheter it makes sense to keep a product that has reports of not working correctly. Specifically I start this because I am considering returning my 5700XT and going back to Nvidia given random crashes (aka ‘Black screen’) that have been widely reported for months in AMD forums and other places.
While I spent most of my time doing development in Linux, I like to have smoth experience with games, so I play mostly on Windows. So, I recently build a new PC and went for AMD GPU given their support for Linux. Untill now, I have always used Nvidia without any issue, from a Riva TNT to a Gforce 650 that I still use in my other machine. Only once had random crashes and it ended up being a faulty memory cell.
But with 5700XT I am getting random crashes every hour, that require a hard reboot + gliches (white bars) in half of the games. I still hoped for some fix and have been trying many things, but a recent video on another popular channel and a very long thread in AMD forums and reddit talking about this issues makes me thing AMD does not have the resources or will. Note the recent drivers updates have been focused on a new UI.
So, whats the opinion arround? Is it worth:
When some games require disabling things like FreeSync or cap frame limit? Or going to specific old versions of the drivers?
Is it really fair to say their product offers a better quality/price ration when the experience is so detriment? Is “good faith” towards Linux a compensation to you?
Can you trust a good Linux support given the quality of Windows drivers?
Mh remember the failing RTX cards? Cause I remember that. So essentially you shouldn’t be buying any GPU then, right?
Bottom line: There will always be faulty products, it’s perfectly normal in the volumes that are being manufactured, there’s just no way of catching everything defective at that scale.
That’s exactly what warranty is for.
If you’re not comfortable with what you have then return it, we can hardly tell you what you feel about it.
You realise that the driver you “see” is not the actual device driver right? It’s a GUI that sits on top of the actual low level driver and I doubt the people doing both are the same team.
Nvidia has had that too, it just depends on the game.
I feel like Linux is more of your problem not AMD, but on the real, what drives are you using. You also have to remember that when new gen stuff comes out your always going to have early adopter issues especially on linux.
Does the crash only happen when gaming? What OS/Drivers are you using?
I have been using the RX 5700XT since llvm 10 and the firmware have been available (as mesa 19.3 was out with navi support long before llvm 10 was available, in fact I was using firmware packages and llvm 10 off the AUR for a while before falling back to offical packages once they were viable).
I had issues the first couple months with the drivers causing random panics which required hard reboots, and issues with all of my monitors going black after idling for an extremely long time (never had the issue occur when in active use of my system, only when waking back up or coming back home from work I would see it) which would also require a hard reboot.
There have been occasional issues in some games with certain driver revisions introducing heavy artifacting and whatnot, but later driver updates almost always correct this. The only game that I am aware of that still suffers from weird issues is Far Cry: Primal whose issues may be unrelated entirely to the RX 5700 XT and may be more related to the configurations used in Wine/Proton.
Early adopter issues on Linux is a well known problem that always happens. It is less problematic on bleeding edge distros (such as arch/manjaro/gentoo as they will get bugfixes sooner than other distros) and distros that get updates slower will likely have issues that are already resolved on more bleeding edge distros.
If you would like help figuring out the specifics of your issues, i’m sure that we can offer assistance in determining the cause.
part of his question, as well as advising him that any issues he are experiencing TMK are not being experienced in linux, as well as an idea of what the early adopter experience is/was like in linux.
Are you getting the crashes in Windows? Try the latest Adrenaline 2020 WQHL drivers. They’ve been more “stable” for me with my RVII than any other 2020 drivers, still crash (black screen to a full PC reboot, it crashes hard) under F@H load but nowhere else. The most stable are the Adrenaline 2019 WQHL drivers though, AMD still offers once version of those.
Certainly avoid the Optionals if you want stability.
did you actually have an AMD or a board partner card?
I got my 5700xt from AMD the weekend of launch in July directly from AMD
I use Fedora 99.9% of the time and the only issue I noticed was with Rocket League when I was recording with OBS, but that hasnt happened in several weeks. (since kernel 5.0 - 5.2)
I also have played Rust and PUBG on win10 with my 5700x and didnt have any issues.
With regards to the actual question, I do take the reputation of a brand into consideration.
As well as individual reports.
This is the best thing about independent reviewers, they give you info that the seller (Insert Big Box Store/ Etailer here) won’t tell you.
Also companies have turned their products around.
So Trust, but varify.
Research before purchase.
Cast a wide net for independent reviewers, as each might focus on a subject.
Even some blatant shills can be useful, just need to take a larger grain of salt…
Also the underdog has something to prove, the incumbent can afford to gauge prices and stagnate.
As above there will always be faulty products. Especially with complex devices, and GPUs are some of the most complex devices ever made.
If you’re not willing to take a fairly significant risk on a GPU purchase, buy one after they’ve been out for 6 months. That goes for both AMD and Nvidia (as above, the RTX launch had a bunch of failing cards as well). Initial manufacturing issues, driver support, etc. take a little while to work out.
The more important thing to consider is how the vendor in question handles product failures when they are reported.
edit:
Whilst we’re bitching about GPU vendors… I had a Surface Pro 4 for about 9 months. For that entire time, there was a thread on the surface forum on Microsoft’s site regarding intel driver related BSODs. This impacted my workflow.
No fix. For 9 months plus. 60 plus page thread. Some blaming intel, but at the end of the day no fix for 9 months. I got rid of the surface.
so i add my experience with NAVI and windows here.
this time AMD just lost it not only did they release a CPU with a know broken instruction (or they really don’t test them…) to meme with 07.07 what they delivered as a driver that is just not ok.
for about 3 month the GPU driver could die any minute if hardware decoding is used and will not 100% recover. they claimed they fixed it but that was simply not the case so a major program like discord has to crash all the time before they finally do something about it. you can read this story in the windows driver “fixed” issues part. but don’t worry video decoding is reported as video encoding in the windows task manager i don’t even dare to report this just from the fear they break even more.
but the real big thing HFR monitors.
240 HZ freesync doesn’t work properly is was for month in the known issue part of the driver and is still not fixed and not listed and never was listed under fixed issues.
all i can tell you that when i use RTSS to limited the frame rate to 200 hz and it is reported as super stable 200 hz it is still just reported as what ever my screen like as a number it pretty much looks like that too. the screen obviously works fine with my old nvidia card.
low FPS in pretty much every esports game because the card is just not been used warframe i’m lucky to get stable 200 FPS at 1080p dota 2 not even close to 240.
and what are the clocks on the card 16 to 560 mhz maybe sometimes more. is the card broken? no that bug was a known issue listed in the driver and it was listed as fixed and the card will boost to ~2k and stay there when i give it something to do where i can’t get over 100 FPS.
but can this be topped?
sadly yes. driver crashes or even BOSD i’m pretty lucky it is over for me since the December driver but ufff…
for some system the driver just likes to go and kill it self i only have a theory why because i used the card in two different system but i can’t proof it (screen refreshrate) we talk about a dying driver every 15 mins and depending on the game it would range from crash to just turn the screen black for a short time.
this bug is listed under a lot of names in the driver from stack crash to black screen for a short term.
the problem here is not that this is a hardware issue the problem is that these major issues are general issue every card could experience and which where tracked as a proof in the driver history.
i could list more smaller things with workarounds like the new driver opens the overlay with alt+R(yes they are this ignored) so who can tell me why this is a very dumb idea any idea why that could be? yeah wasn’t that hard but no one at AMD plays games…
broken DXVA2 processing or decoding or advertisements in the driver (geforce spying experiences is still optional).
why do i still have this card i don’t know i guess i like the challenge maybe i’m pissed from the RTX scam i really don’t know.
the card was most of the time in my HTPC so i could use it for something and expect for the broken hardware decoder or issues every user had the driver never ever crashed when the max refreshrate i used was 60hz.
BTW. reported the DXVA2 issues to them expect for the fact that they didn’t even know what that is (most of you nearly for sure don’t know that too and that’s fine but you guys know how to google that if you care he didn’t even do that…) and even after explaining they said to me that doesn’t sound important" well i can not disagree when the driver is dying like it was made to do that but that’s something you should never ever say with an easy to reproduce issue… BTW. still not in the know issues and most likely will never end in there.
These are some very odd issues you are reporting. I can state that i have nothing even remotely like this on linux, maybe the windows drivers are the only ones having issues? The open source AMDGPU drivers are rock solid here, now granted we don’t have a fancy GUI for the drivers although radeon-profile has been nice to check clocks and temps and whatnot, but I have heard issues with the GUI on the windows side.
I believe Steve from GN reported that he spoke with some engineers and whatnot on the AMD side and they promised some fixes, it sounded like they were referring to the state of the GUI, however I could be mistaken.
odd issues well i’m ignoring the small ones i mean it took me 3 mins after the first December driver to notice you can’t disable the radeon overlay they didn’t test this it was fixed 1 or 2 weeks later the optionw as just ignored…
fixed no we just pretend it doesn’t exist. we had that bug for like 3 months on our radar and well we failed so it’s a feature.
and about driver crashes…
Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products may intermittently experience loss of display or video signal during gameplay.
they called it a thread stuck before that but i’m done with going through driver stuff i mean a line like GAME name may crash on some system fine happens all the time… but your 240 freesync screen doesn’t work with our new GPU for month after month and no word about a fix that’s something else AMD. the ironie that freesync works better on nvidia cards is just sad.
and about the GUI yeah they have to re do that every 12 months and release priorities… i understand a GUI designer can’t always be used to fix bugs but still…
On the subject of bugs, anyone heared of this small glitch called Meltdown?
Or what about Rowhammer, really hope y’all are using SRAM instead of this faulty DRAM-stuff.
Some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics users may intermittently experience a black screen while gaming or on desktop. A potential temporary workaround is disabling hardware acceleration in applications running in the background such as web browsers or Discord.
and i through this time it was an windows update.
let’s see if they disable VP9 just like with polaris.
