[Gamers Nexus] The RTX 50 Disaster
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Intel has great hardware in the Intel Arc. The biggest problem is their shitty drivers.
Their drivers are getting there. I have not heard many bad things about Battlemage's driver support beyond typical launch day bumps, and would consider buying one myself now honestly.
Their biggest weakness is that their entire architecture is built around dx12 and Vulcan, it has NO hardware level support for dx11/9 or older graphics API's. The largest problem Arc had at launch was it would run modern games decently, but even games a few years old would run at single digit framerates (if at all!) as their driver tried to translate older api draw calls into a newer API, and very poorly at that. They've apparently vastly improved that translation layer by now so it's no longer a problem.
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AMD seriously needs to start taking driver support seriously.
Both my dad and myself have (begrudgingly) moved to Nvidia because we both got hit with constant driver timeout crashes. My dad also got rapidly flashing black and green screens countless times. I use my PC for work purposes so that kind of crap is unacceptable; I need absolute reliability that I can depend on.
Myself and so many other customers would love to see better bang-for-buck options in the GPU space like the good old days, but AMD really needs to sort this shit out. Intel has the excuse of being a brand new player that is working entirely from scratch, but AMD has been in the GPU game for decades and should know better. I mean, christ, their CPU division is basically printing money right now.
I'm not gonna lie, if you're having continuous driver timeouts that's probably a personal Windows issue. I had some issues with my 7900xtx until I just fresh installed Windows (despite the install only being a month old) and all those problems magically went away.
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Their drivers are getting there. I have not heard many bad things about Battlemage's driver support beyond typical launch day bumps, and would consider buying one myself now honestly.
Their biggest weakness is that their entire architecture is built around dx12 and Vulcan, it has NO hardware level support for dx11/9 or older graphics API's. The largest problem Arc had at launch was it would run modern games decently, but even games a few years old would run at single digit framerates (if at all!) as their driver tried to translate older api draw calls into a newer API, and very poorly at that. They've apparently vastly improved that translation layer by now so it's no longer a problem.
IIRC Intel is using DXVK for their drivers on Windows. Not sure if that ever changed.
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What does that have to do with AMD's driver support? AMD's Linux Vulkan driver (AMDVLK) was so late and bad that Red Hat and Valve had to make their own (RADV), which is the default in Fedora and SteamOS. AMD's first party drivers are still garbage.
FYI, you can run RADV in Windows using an experimental patch: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/29945
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IIRC Intel is using DXVK for their drivers on Windows. Not sure if that ever changed.
Exactly. I don't think it's that there is "no hardware level support for dx11/9" - hardware isn't really drastically different depending on API. The problem is that they introduce an additional software-based emulation layer instead of natively implementing D3D 8/9/10/11.
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Exactly. I don't think it's that there is "no hardware level support for dx11/9" - hardware isn't really drastically different depending on API. The problem is that they introduce an additional software-based emulation layer instead of natively implementing D3D 8/9/10/11.
Yes, but DXVK is a very, very good translation layer and is very performant. I can vouch for it as a Linux user who uses it on a regular basis.
Some people even use DXVK to make older games run better on Windows (most notably GTA IV)
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IDK if people over exaggerate but I honestly had more issues with NVIDIA driver on GTX 1080ti and RTX 3060ti than I had with my RX 6800 XT.
All issues could be mostly resolved with workarounds on both AMD and NVIDIA. The NVIDIA issues were actually more annoying as I had issues outside of games.
In conclusion, all GPU vendors have issues. NVIDIA is not the perfect guy, people just learned to ignore their issue or work around them.
You're not wrong (as someone who has owned both cards) but lets be honest here, two generations ago AMD had HOORIBLE drivers/support, like epic-level WTFness bad.
They had a hole they dug themselves into to dig out of, and I believe they have, and then some. But they are still battling that negative rep from that time. Some people still see them in that "hole", flailing about, which is what I was initially pushing back against with the OP, to say that AMD is no longer in that hole.
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What does that have to do with AMD's driver support? AMD's Linux Vulkan driver (AMDVLK) was so late and bad that Red Hat and Valve had to make their own (RADV), which is the default in Fedora and SteamOS. AMD's first party drivers are still garbage.
AMD’s first party drivers are still garbage.
As I mentioned in my comment you replied to, I use Linux, and not Windows, so can't speak (today) towards AMD's Windows drivers.
For me, I let Linux worry about the drivers, so I don't have to.
Best decision I've ever made, PC build wise. So nice to get away from NVidia and not worry about graphics drivers.
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I'm looking for a new gaming laptop. It's impossible to find any with an AMD GPU here.
I did a search on "gaming laptop with amd gpu" in DuckDuckGo and got THIS link that listed gaming laptops.
I'm sure that if you take more time than you did to reply to me to look for them, you'd find them.
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I did a search on "gaming laptop with amd gpu" in DuckDuckGo and got THIS link that listed gaming laptops.
I'm sure that if you take more time than you did to reply to me to look for them, you'd find them.
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Except that none of the major retailers in my country sell these.
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Except that none of the major retailers in my country sell these.
Which country is that?
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Which country is that?
The Netherlands. I checked a lot of major retailers like CoolBlue, MediaMarkt, Informatique, etc. The only radeons are low budget ones.
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AMD’s first party drivers are still garbage.
As I mentioned in my comment you replied to, I use Linux, and not Windows, so can't speak (today) towards AMD's Windows drivers.
For me, I let Linux worry about the drivers, so I don't have to.
Best decision I've ever made, PC build wise. So nice to get away from NVidia and not worry about graphics drivers.
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You're missing my point. AMD's official Linux drivers are ALSO garbage. Try it. Go install AMDVLK and check how well games work. You're almost certainly using RADV, which was not developed by AMD.
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You're missing my point. AMD's official Linux drivers are ALSO garbage. Try it. Go install AMDVLK and check how well games work. You're almost certainly using RADV, which was not developed by AMD.
You’re missing my point. AMD’s official Linux drivers are ALSO garbage. Try it. Go install AMDVLK and check how well games work. You’re almost certainly using RADV, which was not developed by AMD.
I'm using whichever one Proton/Steam uses. I'm assuming its AMDVLK because its the 'official' one. I think I remember RADV being switched away from in Proton a year or two ago, but don't hold me to that. I checked my enviromental variable "AMD_VULKAN_ICD" but didn't see it set to anything.
Whichever one I'm using, I get 120fps on my 3D games (playing No Man's Sky and/or Baldur's Gate 3 on the second monitor while typing) running them through Steam/Proton without a hiccup. Never a problem.
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The Netherlands. I checked a lot of major retailers like CoolBlue, MediaMarkt, Informatique, etc. The only radeons are low budget ones.
Bummer. And I had such high/good thoughts about the Netherlands.
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You’re missing my point. AMD’s official Linux drivers are ALSO garbage. Try it. Go install AMDVLK and check how well games work. You’re almost certainly using RADV, which was not developed by AMD.
I'm using whichever one Proton/Steam uses. I'm assuming its AMDVLK because its the 'official' one. I think I remember RADV being switched away from in Proton a year or two ago, but don't hold me to that. I checked my enviromental variable "AMD_VULKAN_ICD" but didn't see it set to anything.
Whichever one I'm using, I get 120fps on my 3D games (playing No Man's Sky and/or Baldur's Gate 3 on the second monitor while typing) running them through Steam/Proton without a hiccup. Never a problem.
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The default driver used by Fedora is RADV. Steam/Proton does not choose your Vulkan driver. That's why your games run well - you aren't using the one made by AMD.
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I dual boot and can confirm the drivers on Windows are perfectly fine (I have a 7800XT). There is still a jank factor with the included gui and you have to stop windows from auto "updating" (actually a downgrade) the graphics drivers because windows sucks ass.
I have had issues with drivers on my 6900XT—either freezes in Fortnite or stutters in Delta Force with the latest drivers. Rolling back to 24.8.1 has largely fixed the issues.
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The default driver used by Fedora is RADV. Steam/Proton does not choose your Vulkan driver. That's why your games run well - you aren't using the one made by AMD.
Help me with THIS then?
This suggests that both (most/all??) are bundled, and you could even run one program in one driver and another program with the other driver.
This was mentioned in that post/thread as well ...
Also if you use AMD card RADV is the best for gaming and it's the default for most distros so it's an out of the box experience
Its also mentioned that environmental variables can be set at runtime to switch on the fly (at program startup) which is used. I just don't know if Proton does any of that for you under the covers at startup or if you have to manually add the parameters to the properties for the Steam game to force it to use another one.
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Help me with THIS then?
This suggests that both (most/all??) are bundled, and you could even run one program in one driver and another program with the other driver.
This was mentioned in that post/thread as well ...
Also if you use AMD card RADV is the best for gaming and it's the default for most distros so it's an out of the box experience
Its also mentioned that environmental variables can be set at runtime to switch on the fly (at program startup) which is used. I just don't know if Proton does any of that for you under the covers at startup or if you have to manually add the parameters to the properties for the Steam game to force it to use another one.
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I don't think AMDVLK is even shipped by default with Fedora. It can definitely be installed, but there's not much reason to as it's a really bad Vulkan driver.
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I can't wait for Intel to step up their game and for AMD to reengage. We really need the competition.
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Why? Even when AMD had better performance for cheaper long ago, everyone bought Nvidia instead. If consumers don't care, why should AMD or Intel? Mindshare is hard to beat.
The average consumer is not informed and they equate graphics to Nvidia. On a recent WAN show Linus was pontificating on whether tech reviewers even matter, considering the audience penetration numbers, and even inflating for the one tech person in the family spreading the message, compared to the overall units of cards moved, it was like a drop in the bucket, not even close.
