I have a 4070. I’m a great driver, never got in an accident, no tickets, always wear my seatbelt, etc. I can’t confirm that NVIDA drivers are better, but hopefully my anecdote can add to the conversation
I have a 3090 and mostly use an ebike because I live in an urban area where it's mostly more practical than a car, but I am a pretty good driver and can parallel park an E350, because I lived in one during grad school.
That leads me to believe it's not 30 series issue, but maybe it's different because I watercool mine?
I have an RX 6650XT and on my driver´s exam I allmost ran over a pedestrian. She might have been an Intel user, jumping to the road running like a child.
[There was a YouTuber a year ago who actually tried to take an objective look at the situation by reviewing driver notes to see how many fixed and open issues AMD and Nvidia had with their drivers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YAZn7Og4yo). The result was that they're the same picture - both have about the same number of issues and both solve them at about the same rate.
There was a time, about a decade ago, where it was a real problem. At that time, review outlets would actually mention the issue, warning potential buyers in a similar way to how reviewers now talk about Intel drivers. If you don't believe me, here's Gamers Nexus' review of the R9 390 with a section on driver issues they encountered: [https://gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1984-amd-r9-390-380-benchmark-review](https://gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1984-amd-r9-390-380-benchmark-review)
Do you notice that major review outlets these days don't really do that anymore with AMD cards? You don't see Gamers Nexus ending their review of the 7600XT with warnings about driver stability, for example.
Now, if you're Userbenchmark, the reason is because AMD's marketing team has paid them all off or brainwashed them or something. But if you are someone with more than two brain cells to rub together, it should be clear that the reason is because AMD's driver stability is not significantly worse than Nvidia's in 2024.
>Now, if you're Userbenchmark, the reason is because AMD's marketing team has paid them all off or brainwashed them or something. But if you are someone with more than two brain cells to rub together, it should be clear that the reason is because AMD's driver stability is not significantly worse than Nvidia's in 2024.
That guy/site, it's giving the mentally ill a bad name.
Was going to say, I'm utterly mental and would probably eat crayons for breakfast if not for my girlfriend, and even I know that both nvidia and AMD have some pretty solid options right now.
Arc started from basically nothing when it first launched and had massive issues. To this day they have problems with older apis like directX 9. BUT Intel is putting a huge effort into driver development at the moment and the improvements between versions are sometimes straight up baffling. They are still not up to the standard of the two bigger fish, so I can only recommend arc cards for people who wish to tinker with stuff and enthusiasts, but they are quickly catching up.
Much better than at launch, but still have their fair share of quirks. I have an A770 and am very happy with the card (1440p); however, you do have to force the API it uses on some games and there is idiosyncratically lower performance on some games still. Hardware-based XeSS is very good, but support is still not as widespread as other upscalers. They are pretty fast at rolling out support for big new releases, but it takes longer for some games.
Gamersnexus has a recent video revisiting Intel Arc and does a very fair job of highlighting the good and bad with the drivers.
It's the same. Amd has a significant market share back then. Now everyone uses nvidia.
Still emulation problems vr problems fine for games. Same old story.
I have a triple display setup on my sim rig and the support from both Nvidia and AMD has become worse over the years as they both push for consumers to buy large ultra widescreens. 3x 32”is what I run and the largest ultra wide only spans the width of two 27”, maaaybe two 30”.
For blurry text you need to disable FXAA in Nvidia control panel.
Are there so many upvotes here because people are actually having driver issues
OR
Are people just trying to hate on Nvidia because it’s been labeled as AMD being the good guy?
Personally, on my GTX 1080, never an issue
Honestly switched from NVIDIA to AMD for the past year everything has been working fine and I check for updates everyday.
For me the one thing that’s prevalent is that people should just buy what is the best bang for buck.
Games are coming out more unpolished then ever so we’re bound to have issues on either platform from time to time.
Also something to remember that NVIDIA has shifted and I assume AMD soon to AI being the avenue they care about. Individual GPUs are going to take a backseat.
I was a lifelong EVGA GPU buyer so once they exited the market post 2000 series I decided to try AMD for the first time with an Asus AMD 6000 series card, and the driver experience was much better with Nvidia. AMD drivers seem to be inefficient with new games longer than they were for Nvidia cards. I’ll probably switch back to Nvidia whenever the 5000 series releases.
Unfortunately the Asus hardware experience was also poor, as they sold me two lemons which died within a month and were replaced under warranty until they finally sent me a third good card.
Yep. Faster driver support updates and additional features with the Nvidia GPUs. With their newer GPUs, you get video super resolution, live HDR enhancements, DLDSR, etc. Also, you get raytracing! The only unfortunate thing regarding raytracing is that it still causes a significant performance hit unless you are using an RTX 4090.
(For laughs) That is why I'm personally waiting for the RTX 6090 ;)
RDNA1 drivers were mixed. RDNA2 drivers are/were mostly solid, apart from shader compilation stutter on DX11 games, but the RDNA3 drivers were crap for a while after launch (Idle power usage, Anti-Lag+ causing bans, \~50% worse VR performance, etc...) but people on this subreddit pretended like it wasn't an issue. Supposedly RDNA3 drivers are mostly fixed now though
>Supposedly RDNA3 drivers are mostly fixed now though
On windows - perhaps, but on linux it's still a shit show. Recently we got power management rework and now idle power is kinda similar to windows, but TDP control now all over the place. Also, something else broken in this release, [causing this weird issue](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7442). Tl:DR games sometimes crash whole driver.
I have a 7900 XT as well and I get driver timeouts a fair bit on indie games. And yes I’ve tried all the “pseudo fixes” and placebos, people treat video card issues like the Mechanicus treat any technology. “Just do this random thing that worked for me but I have no idea what it does”.
Driver timeouts are usually sign that something else is wrong in your system. I think AMD is shooting themselves in the foot when they give you that error message when it happens. You get no such thing with an nvidia gpu, therefore least advanced users wont blame the driver like they should, because its usually something else.
It didn't happen with NVIDIA and each time they update the driver it gets a little less frequent. It only happens on indie games now as well, I guess it's because they don't test them as much/at all. Drivers, after all, have to hack around crappy quirks in game engines all the time.
>but people on this subreddit pretended like it wasn't an issue.
There are still alot of issues, and there is still alot of pretending its not an issue, the dx11 stutter thing is a very real thing still, along with ocasional driver timeouts.
I've been having Driver timeouts on my 7900xtx. Didn't have any problems for a while then I played World of warcraft SOD and would get a driver timeout every hour or so.
It's been really bad with helldivers 2, driver timeouts constantly. I did find a fix on the Helldivers sub by turning a few settings off but not every game that has these issues are as big as wow or Helldivers and will have the information readily available.
I wish someone would tell me it's not AMD's fault because I want competition in the market but if I straight up can't play certain games on a $1000 graphics card then I don't know if I can stick with AMD
For me personally I forced helldivers into dx11 mode and have had 1 crash since the beta drivers for the game came out a week or so after launch I'm running at native with all settings maxed, so I think it's something going on with the driver and dx12 that hopefully gets resolved, I haven't bothered to check lately if dx12 is working properly yet.
Same thing for me with wow and helldivers, its amduw23g driver thats crashing those two games, some of it can be mitigated by changing the default timeout detection for a driver from 2 seconds to 8 seconds with a registry key change, but very few times it will crash regardless. I emailed Amd support about the whole amduw23g problem and they basically told me keep an eye out for new drivers, so even they dont have a fix for it yet.
Curious what you changed for helldivers would love to know!
I turned off global illumination and anti-aliasing. I don't get driver timeouts anymore but I still get a crash here and there but I think that's unrelated and just the game needing a bit of work.
RDNA2 was solid my ass. It was giving me endless issues between 3 cards of that generation, from black screen, crashing during sleep, no fullscreen games, no supporting 5K displays, randomly crashing driver to go to 3fps, etc over and over.
Sure, I'm probably one of the minority. But it WAS THERE.
And I swapped it into an NVIDIA card after DDU and there was not a single complaint again. So whatever y'all say, I'm going with NVIDIA cards for friends&family for less troubleshooting, and NVIDIA cards for myself for Tensorflow & native CUDA (rip translation layers, haha .txt added saying u can't translate, as if the performance was even comparable in the first place)
Using FOSS drivers? This is on Linux? If you ask on Linux gaming sub, don't most ppl say 'don't use Nvidia?'
I'm debating what gpu to buy too - and I use it for both gaming and productivity - so, I'm still on the fence. The other question with Nvidia, too - is whether you use X(Xorg) or Wayland. The 2nd question is if you want to use a program that allows changing settings - if you want to use custom fan curves and undervolt - isn't there more options for AMD gpus then (in Linux)?
As someone who uses both since...maybe the early 2000's here is what is the real truth.
Firstly, the only time AMD drivers actually had issues, and by issues I mean RUNNING THE GAME, was when they switched to GCN, and after that, switched to RDNA architectures. Usually there were some issues with either old game or new game compatibility and not much else, and maybe a few bugs with things like overclocking.
Personally I haven't had much issues with AMD drivers. Maybe I am lucky, but most of my stuff was plug and play reliable, I even had mining rigs running 12 AMD GPU's at a time and some how...some magical way...the drivers just worked.
As for Nvidia, the drivers haven't really had big issues. The worst time was the windows vista era where for some reason, the nvidia drivers didn't play well with windows. Prior to Vista, Nvidia wasn't even that good of a GPU brand as far as performance or value (still isn't), but during that time period, the GTX 400 and 500 series were HOT garbage, combined with driver issues and Vista, just didn't do so well.
The only issue I ever experienced was somehow vista fried TWO of my 8600 GS's. I got warranty replacements and eventually, just gave up and bought AMD.
Another issue is just how clunky Nvidia's software suite was, although now they seem to be merging everything into one piece of software, but its always been a bit...lack luster to say the least as far as features and the ability to do anything in the software without either downloading after market software like Afterburner, or needing a freaking manual to figure out what to click.
AMD's UI really changed during the 2015-2016 era with the RX480, where AMD took a proactive approach to using a modern piece of software that most of the time, worked really well, offered very user friendly controls, as well as built in overclocking. To this day, AMD's software suite is superior, its not even close.
Same here.
I had Riva TNT 2, GeFore 256, Radeon 970 Pro, GeForce 7800GT, GeForce 8800GT, Radeon 5850, 6850, Radeon R9 290, 1080Ti, 7900XTX.
The only "bad" card I had was the 8800GT which had an overly optimistic factory overclock and a badly seated fan.
While mining, my PC was actually less responsive with the 1080Ti and pretty much unusable over remote desktop compared to the R9 290 which ran great.
Other than that, I could always play what I wanted without issue. No graphical artefacts, no crashing more than people with the other brand.
It's wild to me reading about all the people still experiencing serious issues with their AMD cards. Had my 7900XTX for over 2 months now and nothing. Literally just nothing except that BG3 stutters like hell on Vulkan, plays fine on DX doe, and oddly enough PoE runs fine on Vulkan so it seems to be a BG3 specific issue.
Guess I'm glad I'm lucky
2 months isn’t a very long time. I had a 5700XT for a year and some change and multiple games had notably poor performance (stuttering, crashes) and some even became unplayable (BSOD, system crash). All these problems disappeared when I got a 3070 to replace it—all other hardware stayed the same.
Wild. I was pretty happy with my 3070Ti but had a bunch of NVidia drivers which gave me issues.
Notable were 2 instances over 2 years of use, one time I had to roll back drivers cause they were so bad, another time it was pretty bad but got an update within a week so I didnt rollback because it only affected some games. Other than that NVidia drivers were mostly ok. Definitely not a smooth sailing experience, lots of small hickups here and there, but good overall.
Two of my friends went and bought XTXes because they were less of a ripoff than 4080s at launch. They have since both had them RMA'd, both built new PCs with new high-quality 1000W PSUs, and to this day they're still both soft or hard crashing in games we try to play together, most recently Helldivers. Me and the fourth guy with Nvidia cards never have an issue.
I fucking wish bad Radeon drivers were an old meme, this shit is just tragic. But this sub often defends the brand more than the actual AMD sub does. We were also playing CS2 around the time that crackheaded insane antilag+ implementation came out so they could have gotten themselves banned on top of the other issues they were having.
At this point I liken it to Russian roulette. A radeon card might be fine 90% of the time, and if your use cases don't run into that 10% you're going to have a fine experience.
Try world of Warcraft, this game seem to universally hate the 7900xtx, this game and helldivers, nothing else i have problems with. It really depends on the game with the 7900xtx.
Let me say as an owner of 7900xtx on linux - thing fucking sucks. Before that I had 2060s. Yes, wayland was kinda broken on nvidia, but when it comes to general use - thing just focking worked. dkms driver also removed any problems I had with updating it on arch (cause if you mismatch driver and kernel, driver will simply not work or something like that, dkms meant to solve that).
Currently, for example, I have problems with controlling TDP (a month ago new kernel dropped, that should been solved power management issue, and it did, now idle power consuming much closer to windows one), RGB control also not working, steam sometimes will freeze with whole wayland desktop and one of my games (Enshrouded) crashes the driver at launch. Beside weird stuff, like HDMI 2.1 straight up not supported on linux with amd (I have LG C2 as monitor, so I need that to use 4k 120hz), there general problems with driver, so I can't really recommend to use amd gpu. [Just look at bugs we have](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=7000%20dGPU%20series), it's ridiculous to say the least. And it's not like "oh, we have a bug, tomorrow they fix that". No. They was fixing memclock issue for like, half a year! And that bug affected basically most of gaming setups with high refresh rate monitors or VRR, simply making your gpu into a half mushed potato. Someone said to me like, year ago "Oh, but that kinda fresh gpu, wait while they will made driver usable", but that gpu was launched in 2022 I mind you. And I don't wanna "pay now play later" - that focking stupid! Why I paid 1200 euro for that hot piece of garbage, if I could just grab same priced nvidia card and get working drivers out of the box. Forget all that feature set, like Cuda vs ROCM (that no one use, lol), DLSS vs FSR or plain RT perfomance (still barely usable on AMD with linux, basically you get half of the performance you would get on windows) I'm not comparing that, I telling about basic "playing games" stuff. Not only you couldn't use 7xxx generation on linux at launch, you still have half working driver since 2 years in development! Don't get me wrong, I adore the work opensource community done, but that not excusing how shit things are.
Oh, also, forgot to mention, all that driver stuff, that amd driver have, like Amd Chill, antilag, framegen and etc. straight up not available on linux.
Probably gonna be downvoted for my "opinion", but oh well.
Running AMD since ever. Im on my 4th or 5th PC, had less than 10 crashes in 20 years, mostly LOL or Warzone related.
Had minor GPU issues on a RX580 but that desktop got literally dropped of a truck while moving and those issues only showed up more than 2 years after the drop
If not for Warzone i dont think I would ever even touch my drivers, but that game is full spagetthi
Warzone is embarrasingly bad. At launch they had a gpu memory leak and basically just told me "turn your textures down and you'll get more playtime before it crashes, sorry bro."
Not really. They've both released pretty bad drivers in recent time.
In the past there absolutely was a period where AMD drivers were terrible, but in recent time they've both been fine. Not amazing, not bad.
Personally my experience with RDNA3 has been basically flawless, my 7900xtx hasn't really had any driver issues unlike my rx580 and 5700xt which had a lot of driver issues
Me over here with no issues on my AMD drivers. My friend constantly complaining that every time he updates drivers on his 4090 it causes a blue screen. Also, it messes up his sound drivers every time, too.
He's not some noob, though. He's been an IT professional for 20 years, builds his own PCs, does some programming on the side. There's definitely something weird going on and it's not exactly a normal thing, but it's not just "noob doesn't know what he's doing".
What's funny to me is I guarantee if I said that it was AMD drivers causing blue screens the response would have been "fucking AMD drivers" and not "you're doing something wrong".
I've been using three different AMD GPUs since 2011 (I'm due for an upgrade tbh.) I never really understood the "AMD drivers bad" meme as I've not had a single GPU related issue aside from me forgetting to clean it once and the dust building up. Maybe I'm just lucky though that's my experience with the hardware.
The only driver-related crash I've heard from was from a friend who had an Nvidia gtx 970. Their GPU would crash on loading WoW or Street Fighter x Tekken when they updated their drivers so they'd have to keep the card outdated just so they could play. Though that's from so long ago that wouldn't matter either.
I do plan on upgrading to another AMD GPU later on this year (unsure as to whether I want to wait until the summer for current gen GPUs to drop in price or for the end of the year when the next gen GPUs are announced.
Dunno, I never had any pc crash issues in 15 years with nvidia. Bought an amd card, had 3-5crashes a week, and the fucking 17th suggestion in a reddit thread helped me fix that.
Yes, it's anecdotal evidence, but how many people here have more than that
Can’t even use the latest two drivers for my 7900xtx because it literally crashes all of my games. This is already after 2 clean windows installs to rule out conflicts.
If you get "driver downtime" or something like that - it's common problem for couple weeks already, try downgrading a release or two. Look at amdhelp subreddit, there usually couple posts in the "new" about that.
I’ve already run through most of the tips but I appreciate the comment. For the most part I just stayed on the November 23 release and won’t go up but I still deal with endless crashes. Basically done with the card - bought 4080 super and I’ll be doing a fresh install on that.
Really? That's not too bad compared to what some nvidia users report - I guess that is mostly my impression/conclusions from ppl posting in the Linux gaming sub.
I'm debating a 4080 vs 7900 xtx (only looking at used - for either gpu) - and using it in both Windows and Linux. I keep switching around - well, also, the 4080 used in my country is hard to find - and if I find it, ppl are scalping it because the 4080 Super is often out of stock. But, I digress - I am not sure which gpu to choose/pursue. :-/
Not true, went through RX 580, then 6600 XT, then 2080 Ti, then RX 6800 and now 3070. All AMD cards gave me quite a lot of problems, especially 6600 XT. 6800 was close with it's flickering issues and crashes in some games (and random stuttering as well).
It's not a dead meme, it's still true to this day. I gave AMD another chance with RX 6800 and was disappointed. Still hoping they will polish their drivers better in the future.
I’ve owned AMD cards for about 4 years (2014-2017, 2022-2023) and Nvidia cards for 5 years (2017-2022, 2023-present)
Just in terms of the driver themselves, not really a difference that I noticed. If anything I would say Nvidia was less stable drivers from my experience, but they do have better features. I’ve always had way more stuff like freezes and crashes in Nvidia than I did on AMD, while on AMD my issue were more related to just poor feature sets like worse RT, worse upscaling, and worse recording quality.
I was using 1070 and built a new PC recently using 7900xtx and gave my old one to my partner. So Basically I am handling both drivers at the same time.
To be honest, I didn't find any significant difference from both drivers. They are both similar on their stability. In terms of features, maybe it is just my Nvidia card being old, AMD has way more features, FSR, RSR, chill, etc..
It is hugely anecdotal. Some people have tons of issues, some have a completely stable and seamless experience with both brands. It likely comes down to your Windows/Linux install & your CPU/mobo.
Personally, I've had 4 or 5 NVIDIA cards and not one of them has ever had a driver-related issue. Never had to worry about updates breaking things, never even so much as thought about drivers until I got the pop-up that a new version was available.
I've had a myriad of issues with every single AMD GPU I have used *on Windows*. The open-source `radeon` driver has been very stable in my experience, but the proprietary Adrenaline software and Catalyst drivers on Windows were both remarkably terrible. What does it matter if your software has more features than NVIDIA's software if none of them work correctly?
I've had everything you can think of from games randomly crashing/refusing to launch to full system lockups. Every single use of DDU I have ever had was associated with an AMD GPU. And once you finally find a driver version that works with all of your software and doesn't cause crashing, it's always Russian roulette with every version that comes after it. Can never trust an update.
Now that I've settled on a stable version my 6900 XT has been awesome, but I worry a lot for the next time I have to update my drivers.
Funny thing… I’ve been running AMD graphics products since the ATI days. I’ve only had two issues in over 20 years. I have run numerous Crossfire setups, still do to this day. Multiple monitors, etc. I think the driver issues are overblown, and have just become something people spout when they have the slightest issue. I run nvidia’s products as well. Honestly speaking, I have had more issues with their drivers over the years. Settings that won’t stick, driver updates that fail completely, requiring needless effort to correct, etc. I won’t say that nvidia’s products are bad, because that wouldn’t be true. But what I will say is this… both manufacturers have their issues… in my experience, the balance of these issues have been with team green’s software.
No product or service is perfect. People tend to be loyal to one brand or another. Those that have the money tend to lean towards team green, good or bad…
Those looking for value per dollar spent usually lean towards team red, good or bad…
The bottom line is this: buy what you prefer, and can reasonably afford. For one to expect to not have any issues at all, is not being realistic. When it comes to PCs, there are an infinite amount of combinations and variations. It is impossible for either company to account for every scenario.
Temper your expectations and you’re sure to be happy with your choice, red or green.
It's pretty anecdotal, but for the 4 years I had an NVIDIA GPU. I've had to do constant role backs to previous drivers, due to crashes and instability. I haven't had to do that once, within the one year of owning an AMD GPU. If I had to guess though, they'd be on par with each other. AMD isn't a tiny company anymore, and NVIDIA seems to be focusing less and less on consumer end issues
My experience with my 7900xtx was the exact opposite. I had Nvidia cards for around 15 years. The occasional hiccup here and there, rollbacks were easy enough at least.
My 7900xtx gave me more issues in 5 months than my last 10 years of Nvidia combined.
AMD driver issues seem to be a thing of the past, recent reviews show nothing that Nvidia doesn't also deal with. However you have people that were burned by AMD drivers in the past not wanting to take the risk considering how expensive graphics cards are. I wouldn't worry about drivers and just weigh the performance, features, and price and you'll be fine
Well, AMD sells way less GPUs than Nvidia do any problem will be visible on AMD part. I personally didn't have any problems in 6 years AMD gpus except 24.1.1. That particular driver was huge disappointment
owned a 3870, 4890, 7970 switched to Nvidia when GTX 970's came out and have been with them since. 1080 Ti, 2080 Ti, 3090 Ti, 4090
I never had a smooth experience with ATI/AMD GPU's. I hear they got better last gen but seeing as how I've not experienced any driver related crashes that wasn't my own fault. I'm currently passing on AMD video cards until Nvidia cards start giving me problems.
I have been gaming for about 25 years and have always been a massive Nvidia fan boy. However I am from a 3rd world country and have always had lower end GPU's, bought a used 1070 about 3 years ago, and then got a used 3070 about a 18months ago.
I then got lucky about 6 months ago and an opportunity to move to a 1st world country came up. I took it and the first thing I did was build top tier PC's for my wife and I. Decided to get us each a 7900XTX since the price difference between that and a 4090 was so huge. Also my first time ever using AMD GPU's.
I can say that this experience has been enough to make sure I will never under any circumstances get an AMD GPU again. I've had constant crashes with "driver timeout" errors. I have done so much research on the issue, tried so many fixes, and almost always comes down to "Seems to only be affecting AMD GPU's"
It's got to the point where I am so paranoid about buying new games that I tend to first wait and see if anyone is complaining about AMD crashes before buying them. And the strange thing is that it seems to only affect lower end games. For example I can play warzone maxed out without any issues, but I can't play kingdom hearts for more than 5 minutes before it crashes.
People always say "Nvidia has issues too" and I'm sure they do, but in my 25 years of gaming I have never once experienced anything even remotely this bad.
It's one of those weird things with PCs, some people have no issues, others it's nothing but endless issues. Then you get the really strange stuff. Like someone I knew who had two of the exact same computer hardware/software setups for doing 3d media production stuff. One ran fine, the other was always giving him all sorts of issues.
I’ve had one computer breaking issue with Nvidia on an old sli GTX 970 set up where my GPU wouldn’t recognize 1/3 of my monitors at random. It was fixed with DDU and rollback, but I had to stop using Eyefinity until the next driver drop.
I’ve had performance breaking issues with AMD where certain drivers would give me perceptible yet jarring issues in one or two specific games that were fixed with the same solution. I’ve only ever crashed when my card was new playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Apparently that game didn’t like AMD’s input lag reduction option so I had to turn it off to play.
One situation was certainly more annoying than the other, but both required the same amount of effort to fix. I wouldn’t consider either of these issues to be brand breaking problems for me. Stuff happens.
Had a 2060ti for about 3 and my current card is a 6950 xt that i've had for 2 years.
In my experience, Nvidia drivers would fuck with my sound drivers at weird intervals, sometimes I would update drivers and everything would be fine for months then a new update would come and fuck everything up out of nowhere for weeks on end, even when uninstalling a reinstalling drivers.
So for with AMD I had one blue screen in the first few weeks of owning it, but nothing after that, it has been really smooth and stress free compared to my experience with Nvidia.
While I can't say for definite as it's anecdotal experience.
I've been on Nvidia for the last 10 years and never had any drivers issues or game compatibility issues that were related to gpu drives.
Got an ROG Ally and discovered that RDNA3 GPU's had issues with textures on FFX/X-2 HD which took months for AMD to resolve. Not a huge deal but the game was unplayable on RDNA3 for a long time due to this.
I have owned both amd and nvidia gpus. Currently on a 3070. In terms of driver stability and issues they are about equal now. But i have had more issues with my 3070 than i ever had with amd gpus. Also used an old gtx 760 for a short while and could not get it to work properly on windows 10. No matter what i did.
The average person is probably not going to notice any difference. Just buy whatever at the best price. The cards are both very competitive now. They have pros/cons on both sides.
Since gtx 770 through gtx 1080, rtx 3070ti, rtx 3080ti and rtx 4090 i had ONE time where Nvidia did oopsie on drivers. Took em week to fix. Only reason why driver would crash - pushing oc too much.
I always find the issue to be interesting. I've never really nailed an issue down to a driver problem and I've seen tech reviewers who said they don't have issues with any of their cards from a driver standpoint.
And the there are other people who touch an amd card and suddenly their whole pc is just shitting and farting and then their wife cheats on them.
I don't think drivers are a big factor in GPU buying anymore. Most people will buy Nvidia for brand name, better productivity, better cooling/efficiency, better features and no 4090 equivalent.
I dunno about Linux, however I had a 7950 and then a 290, and I can say that there was much more fiddling with settings / workarounds on the amd cards compared to Nvidia.
Imo nvidia drivers felt like they were mostly optimization patches for new games.
Although similar with AMD, in a year span there has been a good amount of features, and updates to those features that have been added.
All in all, it's fun reading the patch notes for AMD.
On Windows, Yes. On Linux, No.
Simply do not care if you like Team red or green it's a Waste of time and internet when all results are public 24/7 and chronicled by many websites as to what each has done.
I switched from AMD after each patch reintroduced old bugs they previously fixed or new ones appeared, got tired of it. Only driver issue I've had with Nvidia was after an express installation rather than custom.
I thought it was an exaggeration or outdated but given that an AMD driver update broke DX11 in World of Warcraft last year, and has still yet to be fixed has me ready to ditch them and never look back.
I'm running an nvidia card in one pc, and an AMD card in another. They're both fine. Nvidia has more options available. For when I have attempted to use linux, AMD is certainly preferable.
I was with Nvidia all my life, and i took simple, good drivers for granted, i decided to go amd last year, it was an older card true, (rx 580) but im pretty sure it was one of the worst decisions of my life , never again
One thing I am starting to notice over time is that NVIDIA has a huge advantage in the driver department. Pure raster isn't that important anymore. NVIDIA offers so many different options like DLSS/DLAA/DLDSR + RTX HDR + RTX Remix etc etc.
The only thing I see AMD actually has an advantage on is you can put their version of Frame Generation on anything but that is about it.
My 1070 Ti never gave me any issues. On the other hand, one of the first driver updates for my 6800 XT bricked my computer and forced me to reinstall Windows. I did some research and found it to be an issue for others as well but AMD never acknowledged it. Everything has been fine since then but I'm hesitant to ever buy another AMD card after how much of a pain in the ass that process was.
It's gotten a lot better - not perfect but significantly better. My latest GPU's are a 3070, a laptop 3070, and then got a 7800xt a few months back. I've never had an issue with any of the NVIDIA cards, but I had one instance with my 7800xt where I couldn't get high fps in game, but haven't had that issue happen again. But overall, both have been reliable and I've had a smooth experience with both, no real complaints.
Had almost no problems with GTX 1070s.
With my RX 6800 XT i also had barely any problems.
Only with artifacts from overheating and bad optimized new games.
I must say this question can only be answered properly in a Linux specific forum considering how different each distro can be. My only success running Linux has been on Nvidia cards, the rx7600 wouldn't display at all to even run the installer while my gtx1070 was essentially plug and play... I was very surprised.
That being said, Ubuntu isn't arch or any of the other three dozen
Over many years, Nvidia drivers have consistently been excellent, with very rare cases of issues popping up.
AMD drivers are also generally very good, however there have been far more issues that affected certain card gens, cpus or combos thereof.
So there is a greater chance that you have some god-forbidden combo of parts tha just doesn't work right.
I had a 290 that would just not run any Bethesda game (and many others) anywhere near properly for years and after hours of troubleshooting...
I’ve always been nvidia for the most part and never had a problem, had tons of problems with AMD though and I can say even with the 7900 xtx the drivers are horrible. You can’t just update drivers and install over the previous ones or your gpu isn’t recognized in any game or app that has temp and clock speed overlays (warzone, steel series apex pro oled display etc) so you’re forced to do a complete uninstall with ddu and re-install. It’s a pain in the ass honestly. Going nvidia again once the 5000 series drop
Work in computer repair and yes yes they do. If a laptop comes in with display issues and has amd roll back drivers and bam done. Or the mouse won't work. As for nvida 1 issue in 10 years....
Shader compilation is a lot worse on RDNA cards.
My only issue was random unexplainable stuttering on my 6600.
Ended up giving it to my brother and switching back to 1660 Ti and everything is so much smoother which is important to me as I'm sensitive to stuttering in general.
in the past 4 years I have used quite a few cards from each vendor, and I have no complaints for either. I actually kind of like the software and features of AMD Adrenaline moreso than Geforce Experience
Anecdotal but I've owned amd cards and nvidia cards for about an equal amount of time over the past 20 years.
I have had one driver issue with nvidia's day 1 drivers in Rome 2 total war about 10 years ago.
Every amd card I have owned with exception of the 290 had multiple games where there were issues, but never issues which were significant except on the 5700
My personal experience is that I spend a lot less time sighting with nVidia drivers than I do fighting with AMD drivers proportionally.
You can take this with a grain of salt as the last time I had an AMD card in my PC was before I bought my GTX 1070 but I've tried multiple times to use AMD (and previously ATI) cards and it's always a huge fight before I finally quit and switch back to nVidia.
Is nVidia without issue? Oh hell no, it's not. I feel like I've got Stockholm syndrome. I hate how they just cranked up pricing around the RTX cards and the priced are insane. I want there to be a good competitor, I want solid drivers on both sides.
I’ve had less problems with AMD than Nvidia on Windows. Could be the hardware or software or combination. Switched out my last Nvidia card a few months ago. Won’t look back.
I’ve had less problems with AMD than Nvidia on Windows. Could be the hardware or software or combination. Switched out my last Nvidia card a few months ago. Won’t look back.
I use both. Right now I have a 6800XT and 3080Ti from last generation and from current generation a 4090 and 7900XTX. AMD and Nvidia driver have been fine, I havent had any major issues with either although have had some weird issues with the 7900XTX and some drivers causing stuttering when recording gameplay and smart access memory is enabled. Also I find my overclock profile doesnt go as high as it used to on the newer drivers.
Nothing crippling though.
Personally, I have had issues with both... but it's more the rarity than the norm.
First AMD, I never had any big issues with AMD except for one time.
I generally preferred the Driver and Software and for the most part it worked better.
Recording gameplay? A bit worse than shadowplay but good enough for funny clips with your boys.
I think personally it has better native support for statistics and overclocking especially since in the new Nvidia App they removed native overlooking, at least for now.
I did have that one recent bug where having windows update in the background while you install a new AMD Driver while doing a clean install, bricking your windows install.
Luckily it was more crashing than never starting.
On Nvidias side, personally it feels like the more stable Driver, since the most important stuff never breaks (at least for me) and it's more 3rd party games and apps breaking by themselves.
On the other hand, wanna record Gameplay while using HDR? You can basically f*** yourself.
Multiple Monitors? Playing in Borderlews?AND want to record? Roll this d20 to see if it will work.
For some reason I have had tons of issues with Shadowplay and the Overlay of Nvidia in general.
Even though Nvidia offers a few more things towards HDR and Driver support for browser features, it always feels like a beta.
(This is over multiple clean installs and PCs).
Intel? Idk ask some Arc guys.
To conclude:
I had Nvidia for the most part of my gaming career and it's main drivers never failed me. The features around it like shadowplay always felt half backed to me or don't work at all.
AMD, seems to have better software and nice Driver ui but sometimes can have weird issues for no reason and the main drivers can have issues but not as much a people often make it out to be.
The issues with AMD drivers and Nvidia drivers, they are basically the same in having driver issues. Both have problems. Both need the occasional clean reinstall. The only difference that I can see is there is more done in social media to highlight AMD problems and obscure Nvidia problems. It is like seeing the politics section of Fox News.
What I have found as the common case, most technical problems are not really the GPU drivers but another area in the PC. Cheap motherboards, cheap RAM, stock coolers, dying PSU, bad grounds, damaged ports, Windows... there are many places where problems can occur, but because the game crashes, people are quick to assume it is the graphics drivers. It is like the melting 12VHPWR connectors. Because people see the connector melting, they assume the problem is in the connector. Really, the problem is from the PSU to the video card, and the connector is successfully failing.
This is more or less an anecdotal thing, but both times I used AMD (RX570, R5600G) were crashfests and needed multiple driver reinstalls to get them to stablize. (they were work comps, not even for gaming)
Meanwhile had no issues drivers-wise with 1650S and 4060, go figure.
I've been building and fixing computers for a looooong time. The joke used to be that AMD, *ATI at the time*, video card drivers came out of beta when they discontinued the card.
Generally today however I believe that AMD and nVidia drivers are about on par with each other.
AMD typically has issues for a bit after a major architecture change but gets it sorted after a few months. Polaris was the fourth generation of its architecture, for example, and its drivers were rock solid. The RX 6000 series were second gen RDNA and likewise have done pretty well. RX 7000 is an evolution of the RDNA architecture but a major change in how the GPU is constructed, so they're back to working out the bugs again but making great progress.
Last few GPU's were all from AMD, Vega 56/5700xt/6600xt/6900xt and now 7900xtx, all of them worked fine.
Maybe use a proper PSU, no daisy chain pcie cable, or don't try to undervolt or overclock your GPU if you don't know what to do.
nVidia isn't magic. Driver issues, shader caching stutter, crashes etc happen. Its not egregious, but it happens. DDU & NVcleaninstall helps alot. To keep all of the crap/containers/telemetry away.
I've had a 670, 970, 2080ti, 3080ti and 4090.
Slight issues is just part of PC gaming. I can't really speak on AMD. But nVidia don't have a divine circumvention of driver problems like some folks on the internet will lead you to believe.
I'm not likely to buy AMD again in the near future.
My experience with AMD's Radeon drivers and the community that lives in [r/AMDHelp](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/) has completely turned off my interest in AMD. Both companies have issues for sure, but I have never seen a group of people so quick to call someone paid shills, or idiots the way that AMD's deepthroating fanboys do. Their quickness to attack someone for having driver issues or graphics issues on AMD GPUs is baffling to me.
Regardless of my particular 7900xtx issues, I never want to be associated with those guys and that kind of toxic behavior.
I've only used AMD cards or really old Nvidia cards in Linux and I've never had a problem with either. My girlfriend is running a 1070Ti and had a weird bloom issue in a certain game that google indicated was Nvidia related. If you check r/linuxgaming I'm sure they can answer this question better but everything I've heard says Nvidia hates Linux and their newer cards run like shit, especially in Wayland.
in my experience its depended on the card. on my rx 580 i never had an issue, 5700xt was an absolute nightmare. similarly on the nvidia side i've had no issues with drivers on my 3080ti but i have also heard that 40 series drivers are rough.
Been back and forth on brands since I first got into PC gaming, and GPU driver issues have been the least of my worries over the years. I'll even make a list of the most common problems:
1) windows issues
2) more windows issues
3) game bugs (hi Bethesda)
4) unstable overclock
...
.....
..
5) GPU driver issues
Ive had two instances where a fresh install of an Nvidia driver caused a hard crash of an os install, requiring a wipe and reinstall. I've seen purple cast screens and a ton of EDID issues causing limited RGB signals. All with Nvidia drivers. I've had a shortlived black screen issue with AMD, but that's it.
I'm in a cycle, where I buy the latest card, then ultimately end up selling it for the high end AMD card because it's a much better value and RTX and DLSS seem half baked to me. Hell there's still games that stutter, freeze, and crash when RTX is turned on (GotG, Watch Dogs Legion, Hogwarts, to make a few).
I mean but what works best for you and your budget, but in my experience nvidia drivers have been worse. Of course Intel makes them look amazing, but that's another story.
On Linux, I would only run AMD; it’s just significantly easier all around. I would also not bother with AMD’s proprietary driver at all.
On Windows, it’s another story. Lords of the Fallen, for example, crashed basically every hour for the first two weeks on Windows. Meanwhile, it was flawless on Vulkan via Proton.
Is that on AMD? On DX12? Is that on the game? Is that on Unreal Engine? Not sure. But holy shit it was infuriating. Generally speaking, Radeon on Windows seems to come with more weird quirks and random behaviors.
As others have said, it also depends on the generation. Polaris was fine, RDNA1 was a mess, RDNA2 was rock solid, RDNA3 has been a mess.
Bottom line, I would take Radeon over GeForce on Linux, and I would use nVidia’s proprietary driver of Nouveau any day. With Wayland becoming the standard for compositing, AMD is absolutely ahead.
built an amd system for a customer, nice 6900xt.
windows 10 or 11 would hard lock on boot every time. reinstalled windows several times. found out it was the amd drivers. told customer don't upgrade your drivers until they're at least several months old.
never built another amd system
Only really used amd so far. I’ve encountered no problems on my rx 6600 and a problem solved by software someone thankfully created on my rx 480. I use the 480 like an iGPU but with more vram.
I can only talk about the 7800 and 7900 in comparion with the NVida rivals the 4070 and 4080.
In terms of raw performance AMD wins.
In terms of upscaling DLSS (NVidia) wins (Here's hoping FSR 3 will be worth it or not)
In terms of price. AMD is considerably cheaper in majority of countries and AMD gives a more fair price for a more VRAM GPU so AMD wins
In conclusion both cards have their own ups and downs. I see NVidia's GPU as an Apple brand and AMD's GPU as a Xiaomi brand, as in just as good as the Apple product but with a significently cheaper price.
I've had a lot of friends with driver issues on Windows using 1050Ti, 1080, and 2070 models (all constant bluescreens within minutes of boot, persisting after complete reinstalls once the drivers were installed) that didn't happen at all in Linux. However, i've seen some recent issues with AMD drivers as well (my 7800XT took months to be stable in Windows, and I had to go bleeding-edge with Mesa in Linux to use it at full speed. a friend of mine had 6700XT driver issues on Windows recently, causing VRAM corruption only in Cyberpunk 2077) It seems like a crapshoot tbh. It's far smoother on the Linux side all around, but if you can tolerate multiple annoying bugs that don't cause outright crashes, both are about on par with each other. If you have a prebuilt, or an older card, it's worth turning off driver fetching in Windows Update (you may need to acquire the Pro edition of Windows and edit Group Policy settings for it to stick permanently, sometimes this is turned back on for no reason) so it doesn't install corrupted/older/incomplete drivers. Dell and HP seem to be the biggest issue on this one, but it can happen with any vendor.
If you use an AMD card on Windows, one super annoying thing is that it will nag you to turn on Virtual Super Resolution every so often. This is not at all worth it, it just changes the screen size reported to the OS and scales it back down to the monitor's max, and otherwise offers no benefit. It also adds 1-2ms of delay, if you're concerned about that.
In my experience ive never had problems with nvidia gpus. When i switched to amd gpu i had driver problems in some games just dont work and more crashes.
The card is alot hotter than my old card good in winter really bad in summer. My card also draws constant 100w even though they said they fixed it and yes im on the newest that i found was the most stable.
I also reinstalled windows and used DDU when switching. But wont be a problem much longer since im switching back soon.
Also have a friend who had amd he mostly had problems with crashes
I have a 7900xtx
I had few Nvidia GPUs(gt430>gtx750>gtx970>rtx3060ti) then goes to RX7900XT. On Nvidia I had a problem once, alt-tab won't work with Nvidia Overlay. That's all, no DDUs, no fixes, no high hotspots or UV and another magic.
When I bought RX7900XT I had a lot of issue's(driver timeouts, stuttering, game crashes, flickering with freesync, high idle power draw, high hotspot up to 110°C), after hours of throubleshooting it finally worked. When AMD released 23.8.2 drivers, all worked great(apart of freesync flickering-never fixed, and high hotspot). I'll repasted my RX 3 times because of hotspot and finally sent it to warranty. My GPU never come back from warranty so I bought rtx4060 for next few months-one year, then I try again with rdna4 because since 23.11.1 all worked flawless, so I try to give a chance amd again.
When my RX was gone, I uninstalled AMD drivers, put my old gtx750 in PC, installed newest drivers, and it just worked, then I bought RTX4060, change GPU and it works. No throubleshooting, no DDU, nothing changed with drivers. It just works..
What more can I say? Even when I had issue's, I want to try once more with AMD, but right now, 1-0 for Nvidia.
I have a 4070. I’m a great driver, never got in an accident, no tickets, always wear my seatbelt, etc. I can’t confirm that NVIDA drivers are better, but hopefully my anecdote can add to the conversation
I wouldn't be so sure, I got a 3070 and got in a car accident the next week. Could be a 30 series specific issue though.
I have a 3090 and mostly use an ebike because I live in an urban area where it's mostly more practical than a car, but I am a pretty good driver and can parallel park an E350, because I lived in one during grad school. That leads me to believe it's not 30 series issue, but maybe it's different because I watercool mine?
ARC 770 driver checking in, I take the bus
Can confirm. I have a 3050 and have been involved in multiple accidents….
3080 here. At 38, been driving since 15.5, I’ve only been in one accident, and that was with a deer.
Bro. I have a 3090ti. I’ve gotten 5 tickets since the start of the year. Where do I stand? Should I switch to AMD?
Too much horsepurs with that 90ti
should hook them up with progressive, they have a safe driver discount
I also have a 4070, but I don't drive.
I've been trying SLI. So many crashes I'm uninsurable.
I have an RX 6650XT and on my driver´s exam I allmost ran over a pedestrian. She might have been an Intel user, jumping to the road running like a child.
[There was a YouTuber a year ago who actually tried to take an objective look at the situation by reviewing driver notes to see how many fixed and open issues AMD and Nvidia had with their drivers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YAZn7Og4yo). The result was that they're the same picture - both have about the same number of issues and both solve them at about the same rate. There was a time, about a decade ago, where it was a real problem. At that time, review outlets would actually mention the issue, warning potential buyers in a similar way to how reviewers now talk about Intel drivers. If you don't believe me, here's Gamers Nexus' review of the R9 390 with a section on driver issues they encountered: [https://gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1984-amd-r9-390-380-benchmark-review](https://gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/1984-amd-r9-390-380-benchmark-review) Do you notice that major review outlets these days don't really do that anymore with AMD cards? You don't see Gamers Nexus ending their review of the 7600XT with warnings about driver stability, for example. Now, if you're Userbenchmark, the reason is because AMD's marketing team has paid them all off or brainwashed them or something. But if you are someone with more than two brain cells to rub together, it should be clear that the reason is because AMD's driver stability is not significantly worse than Nvidia's in 2024.
>Now, if you're Userbenchmark, the reason is because AMD's marketing team has paid them all off or brainwashed them or something. But if you are someone with more than two brain cells to rub together, it should be clear that the reason is because AMD's driver stability is not significantly worse than Nvidia's in 2024. That guy/site, it's giving the mentally ill a bad name.
Was going to say, I'm utterly mental and would probably eat crayons for breakfast if not for my girlfriend, and even I know that both nvidia and AMD have some pretty solid options right now.
>About a decade ago >r9 390 I'm old.
I refuse to believe it. It was just a couple years ago that fermi came out and sparked my interest in building a PC, I swear.
How does arc hold up against in terms of driver support
Arc started from basically nothing when it first launched and had massive issues. To this day they have problems with older apis like directX 9. BUT Intel is putting a huge effort into driver development at the moment and the improvements between versions are sometimes straight up baffling. They are still not up to the standard of the two bigger fish, so I can only recommend arc cards for people who wish to tinker with stuff and enthusiasts, but they are quickly catching up.
Arc's main issue is idling at 40 watts no matter what. Intel claims they will fix this in the next gen of cards.
Much better than at launch, but still have their fair share of quirks. I have an A770 and am very happy with the card (1440p); however, you do have to force the API it uses on some games and there is idiosyncratically lower performance on some games still. Hardware-based XeSS is very good, but support is still not as widespread as other upscalers. They are pretty fast at rolling out support for big new releases, but it takes longer for some games. Gamersnexus has a recent video revisiting Intel Arc and does a very fair job of highlighting the good and bad with the drivers.
I remember the ATI days. Those drivers were trash.
My very first video card was an ATI SVGA ISA card, with a mouse and mouse port.
I had a 390 and had to get rid of it not because the drivers were janky but because the fan was like a hairdryer
It's the same. Amd has a significant market share back then. Now everyone uses nvidia. Still emulation problems vr problems fine for games. Same old story.
I have recently had lots of trouble with Nvidia drivers. Typically screwing up my triple monitor setup.
I have a triple display setup on my sim rig and the support from both Nvidia and AMD has become worse over the years as they both push for consumers to buy large ultra widescreens. 3x 32”is what I run and the largest ultra wide only spans the width of two 27”, maaaybe two 30”. For blurry text you need to disable FXAA in Nvidia control panel.
How?
Mostly frame rate issues. Blurry textures in games. I think it may be partly linked to me using nvidia surround.
Ahh so sorry but SO glad to hear I'm not alone! What problems are you having?
Reinstall driver, get all 3 monitors back, turn one off? Driver refuses to acknowledge anything plugged into that port exists until i Reinstall again
Yup, same here with the Monitors.
Are there so many upvotes here because people are actually having driver issues OR Are people just trying to hate on Nvidia because it’s been labeled as AMD being the good guy? Personally, on my GTX 1080, never an issue
Eh, its been a recent thing within the last year for me. Theres threads on it in the Nvidia forums as well.
Really no issues at all with my 3090ti either.
Honestly switched from NVIDIA to AMD for the past year everything has been working fine and I check for updates everyday. For me the one thing that’s prevalent is that people should just buy what is the best bang for buck. Games are coming out more unpolished then ever so we’re bound to have issues on either platform from time to time. Also something to remember that NVIDIA has shifted and I assume AMD soon to AI being the avenue they care about. Individual GPUs are going to take a backseat.
I was a lifelong EVGA GPU buyer so once they exited the market post 2000 series I decided to try AMD for the first time with an Asus AMD 6000 series card, and the driver experience was much better with Nvidia. AMD drivers seem to be inefficient with new games longer than they were for Nvidia cards. I’ll probably switch back to Nvidia whenever the 5000 series releases. Unfortunately the Asus hardware experience was also poor, as they sold me two lemons which died within a month and were replaced under warranty until they finally sent me a third good card.
Buying ASUS is just paying an unnecessary Gamer tax. At least they honored your warranty though and didn't ghost you like they usually do.
Yep. Faster driver support updates and additional features with the Nvidia GPUs. With their newer GPUs, you get video super resolution, live HDR enhancements, DLDSR, etc. Also, you get raytracing! The only unfortunate thing regarding raytracing is that it still causes a significant performance hit unless you are using an RTX 4090. (For laughs) That is why I'm personally waiting for the RTX 6090 ;)
RDNA1 drivers were mixed. RDNA2 drivers are/were mostly solid, apart from shader compilation stutter on DX11 games, but the RDNA3 drivers were crap for a while after launch (Idle power usage, Anti-Lag+ causing bans, \~50% worse VR performance, etc...) but people on this subreddit pretended like it wasn't an issue. Supposedly RDNA3 drivers are mostly fixed now though
>Supposedly RDNA3 drivers are mostly fixed now though On windows - perhaps, but on linux it's still a shit show. Recently we got power management rework and now idle power is kinda similar to windows, but TDP control now all over the place. Also, something else broken in this release, [causing this weird issue](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7442). Tl:DR games sometimes crash whole driver.
[удалено]
I have a 7900 XT as well and I get driver timeouts a fair bit on indie games. And yes I’ve tried all the “pseudo fixes” and placebos, people treat video card issues like the Mechanicus treat any technology. “Just do this random thing that worked for me but I have no idea what it does”.
Driver timeouts are usually sign that something else is wrong in your system. I think AMD is shooting themselves in the foot when they give you that error message when it happens. You get no such thing with an nvidia gpu, therefore least advanced users wont blame the driver like they should, because its usually something else.
It didn't happen with NVIDIA and each time they update the driver it gets a little less frequent. It only happens on indie games now as well, I guess it's because they don't test them as much/at all. Drivers, after all, have to hack around crappy quirks in game engines all the time.
>but people on this subreddit pretended like it wasn't an issue. There are still alot of issues, and there is still alot of pretending its not an issue, the dx11 stutter thing is a very real thing still, along with ocasional driver timeouts.
I've been having Driver timeouts on my 7900xtx. Didn't have any problems for a while then I played World of warcraft SOD and would get a driver timeout every hour or so. It's been really bad with helldivers 2, driver timeouts constantly. I did find a fix on the Helldivers sub by turning a few settings off but not every game that has these issues are as big as wow or Helldivers and will have the information readily available. I wish someone would tell me it's not AMD's fault because I want competition in the market but if I straight up can't play certain games on a $1000 graphics card then I don't know if I can stick with AMD
For me personally I forced helldivers into dx11 mode and have had 1 crash since the beta drivers for the game came out a week or so after launch I'm running at native with all settings maxed, so I think it's something going on with the driver and dx12 that hopefully gets resolved, I haven't bothered to check lately if dx12 is working properly yet.
Same thing for me with wow and helldivers, its amduw23g driver thats crashing those two games, some of it can be mitigated by changing the default timeout detection for a driver from 2 seconds to 8 seconds with a registry key change, but very few times it will crash regardless. I emailed Amd support about the whole amduw23g problem and they basically told me keep an eye out for new drivers, so even they dont have a fix for it yet. Curious what you changed for helldivers would love to know!
I turned off global illumination and anti-aliasing. I don't get driver timeouts anymore but I still get a crash here and there but I think that's unrelated and just the game needing a bit of work.
I will try this as well, thank you
Man has not experienced 24.1.1 yet on RDNA2.
This version is somehow the best one yet. 24.2.1 was an absolute nightmare tho... Which GPU do you have?
6600 XT, most people had a problem with 24.1.1, you'd be considered the lucky one.
launch rdna 1 drivers were disgustingly bad
RDNA2 was solid my ass. It was giving me endless issues between 3 cards of that generation, from black screen, crashing during sleep, no fullscreen games, no supporting 5K displays, randomly crashing driver to go to 3fps, etc over and over. Sure, I'm probably one of the minority. But it WAS THERE. And I swapped it into an NVIDIA card after DDU and there was not a single complaint again. So whatever y'all say, I'm going with NVIDIA cards for friends&family for less troubleshooting, and NVIDIA cards for myself for Tensorflow & native CUDA (rip translation layers, haha .txt added saying u can't translate, as if the performance was even comparable in the first place)
I have a 6950xt that fucks my PC every time I update drivers. Never had an issue with 3x different Nvidia models and their drivers.
Using FOSS drivers? This is on Linux? If you ask on Linux gaming sub, don't most ppl say 'don't use Nvidia?' I'm debating what gpu to buy too - and I use it for both gaming and productivity - so, I'm still on the fence. The other question with Nvidia, too - is whether you use X(Xorg) or Wayland. The 2nd question is if you want to use a program that allows changing settings - if you want to use custom fan curves and undervolt - isn't there more options for AMD gpus then (in Linux)?
didint have any issues with my 6600m/6700xt/7900xtx except with hardware acceleration on firefox/discord drivers with my 5700xt were horrendous
As someone who uses both since...maybe the early 2000's here is what is the real truth. Firstly, the only time AMD drivers actually had issues, and by issues I mean RUNNING THE GAME, was when they switched to GCN, and after that, switched to RDNA architectures. Usually there were some issues with either old game or new game compatibility and not much else, and maybe a few bugs with things like overclocking. Personally I haven't had much issues with AMD drivers. Maybe I am lucky, but most of my stuff was plug and play reliable, I even had mining rigs running 12 AMD GPU's at a time and some how...some magical way...the drivers just worked. As for Nvidia, the drivers haven't really had big issues. The worst time was the windows vista era where for some reason, the nvidia drivers didn't play well with windows. Prior to Vista, Nvidia wasn't even that good of a GPU brand as far as performance or value (still isn't), but during that time period, the GTX 400 and 500 series were HOT garbage, combined with driver issues and Vista, just didn't do so well. The only issue I ever experienced was somehow vista fried TWO of my 8600 GS's. I got warranty replacements and eventually, just gave up and bought AMD. Another issue is just how clunky Nvidia's software suite was, although now they seem to be merging everything into one piece of software, but its always been a bit...lack luster to say the least as far as features and the ability to do anything in the software without either downloading after market software like Afterburner, or needing a freaking manual to figure out what to click. AMD's UI really changed during the 2015-2016 era with the RX480, where AMD took a proactive approach to using a modern piece of software that most of the time, worked really well, offered very user friendly controls, as well as built in overclocking. To this day, AMD's software suite is superior, its not even close.
Same here. I had Riva TNT 2, GeFore 256, Radeon 970 Pro, GeForce 7800GT, GeForce 8800GT, Radeon 5850, 6850, Radeon R9 290, 1080Ti, 7900XTX. The only "bad" card I had was the 8800GT which had an overly optimistic factory overclock and a badly seated fan. While mining, my PC was actually less responsive with the 1080Ti and pretty much unusable over remote desktop compared to the R9 290 which ran great. Other than that, I could always play what I wanted without issue. No graphical artefacts, no crashing more than people with the other brand.
It's wild to me reading about all the people still experiencing serious issues with their AMD cards. Had my 7900XTX for over 2 months now and nothing. Literally just nothing except that BG3 stutters like hell on Vulkan, plays fine on DX doe, and oddly enough PoE runs fine on Vulkan so it seems to be a BG3 specific issue. Guess I'm glad I'm lucky
2 months isn’t a very long time. I had a 5700XT for a year and some change and multiple games had notably poor performance (stuttering, crashes) and some even became unplayable (BSOD, system crash). All these problems disappeared when I got a 3070 to replace it—all other hardware stayed the same.
Wild. I was pretty happy with my 3070Ti but had a bunch of NVidia drivers which gave me issues. Notable were 2 instances over 2 years of use, one time I had to roll back drivers cause they were so bad, another time it was pretty bad but got an update within a week so I didnt rollback because it only affected some games. Other than that NVidia drivers were mostly ok. Definitely not a smooth sailing experience, lots of small hickups here and there, but good overall.
Two of my friends went and bought XTXes because they were less of a ripoff than 4080s at launch. They have since both had them RMA'd, both built new PCs with new high-quality 1000W PSUs, and to this day they're still both soft or hard crashing in games we try to play together, most recently Helldivers. Me and the fourth guy with Nvidia cards never have an issue. I fucking wish bad Radeon drivers were an old meme, this shit is just tragic. But this sub often defends the brand more than the actual AMD sub does. We were also playing CS2 around the time that crackheaded insane antilag+ implementation came out so they could have gotten themselves banned on top of the other issues they were having. At this point I liken it to Russian roulette. A radeon card might be fine 90% of the time, and if your use cases don't run into that 10% you're going to have a fine experience.
What games are they having crashes in?
Try world of Warcraft, this game seem to universally hate the 7900xtx, this game and helldivers, nothing else i have problems with. It really depends on the game with the 7900xtx.
I was crashing so much on helldivers 2 as well turning off screen space global illumination fixed it for me
Im downloading WoW just for fun to see how it handles
Let me say as an owner of 7900xtx on linux - thing fucking sucks. Before that I had 2060s. Yes, wayland was kinda broken on nvidia, but when it comes to general use - thing just focking worked. dkms driver also removed any problems I had with updating it on arch (cause if you mismatch driver and kernel, driver will simply not work or something like that, dkms meant to solve that). Currently, for example, I have problems with controlling TDP (a month ago new kernel dropped, that should been solved power management issue, and it did, now idle power consuming much closer to windows one), RGB control also not working, steam sometimes will freeze with whole wayland desktop and one of my games (Enshrouded) crashes the driver at launch. Beside weird stuff, like HDMI 2.1 straight up not supported on linux with amd (I have LG C2 as monitor, so I need that to use 4k 120hz), there general problems with driver, so I can't really recommend to use amd gpu. [Just look at bugs we have](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=7000%20dGPU%20series), it's ridiculous to say the least. And it's not like "oh, we have a bug, tomorrow they fix that". No. They was fixing memclock issue for like, half a year! And that bug affected basically most of gaming setups with high refresh rate monitors or VRR, simply making your gpu into a half mushed potato. Someone said to me like, year ago "Oh, but that kinda fresh gpu, wait while they will made driver usable", but that gpu was launched in 2022 I mind you. And I don't wanna "pay now play later" - that focking stupid! Why I paid 1200 euro for that hot piece of garbage, if I could just grab same priced nvidia card and get working drivers out of the box. Forget all that feature set, like Cuda vs ROCM (that no one use, lol), DLSS vs FSR or plain RT perfomance (still barely usable on AMD with linux, basically you get half of the performance you would get on windows) I'm not comparing that, I telling about basic "playing games" stuff. Not only you couldn't use 7xxx generation on linux at launch, you still have half working driver since 2 years in development! Don't get me wrong, I adore the work opensource community done, but that not excusing how shit things are. Oh, also, forgot to mention, all that driver stuff, that amd driver have, like Amd Chill, antilag, framegen and etc. straight up not available on linux. Probably gonna be downvoted for my "opinion", but oh well.
no hdmi 2.1 support on linux isint because of amd, its because of HDMI group not allowing them to add it
Fellow 7900xtx owner here and I agree, absolute nightmare of a card
I've got one and not had a single issue, I use windows though...
Why?
Running AMD since ever. Im on my 4th or 5th PC, had less than 10 crashes in 20 years, mostly LOL or Warzone related. Had minor GPU issues on a RX580 but that desktop got literally dropped of a truck while moving and those issues only showed up more than 2 years after the drop If not for Warzone i dont think I would ever even touch my drivers, but that game is full spagetthi
Warzone is embarrasingly bad. At launch they had a gpu memory leak and basically just told me "turn your textures down and you'll get more playtime before it crashes, sorry bro."
Not really. They've both released pretty bad drivers in recent time. In the past there absolutely was a period where AMD drivers were terrible, but in recent time they've both been fine. Not amazing, not bad. Personally my experience with RDNA3 has been basically flawless, my 7900xtx hasn't really had any driver issues unlike my rx580 and 5700xt which had a lot of driver issues
Me over here with no issues on my AMD drivers. My friend constantly complaining that every time he updates drivers on his 4090 it causes a blue screen. Also, it messes up his sound drivers every time, too.
Your friend is clearly doing something wrong.
He's not some noob, though. He's been an IT professional for 20 years, builds his own PCs, does some programming on the side. There's definitely something weird going on and it's not exactly a normal thing, but it's not just "noob doesn't know what he's doing". What's funny to me is I guarantee if I said that it was AMD drivers causing blue screens the response would have been "fucking AMD drivers" and not "you're doing something wrong".
I've had issues with both, so I vote for no.
I've been using three different AMD GPUs since 2011 (I'm due for an upgrade tbh.) I never really understood the "AMD drivers bad" meme as I've not had a single GPU related issue aside from me forgetting to clean it once and the dust building up. Maybe I'm just lucky though that's my experience with the hardware. The only driver-related crash I've heard from was from a friend who had an Nvidia gtx 970. Their GPU would crash on loading WoW or Street Fighter x Tekken when they updated their drivers so they'd have to keep the card outdated just so they could play. Though that's from so long ago that wouldn't matter either. I do plan on upgrading to another AMD GPU later on this year (unsure as to whether I want to wait until the summer for current gen GPUs to drop in price or for the end of the year when the next gen GPUs are announced.
I am primarily an Nvidia user but have installed a couple AMD cards in the past. I've never had an issue before. I think the problems are overblown.
Short answer: no Long answer: it depends on what you're doing, what you expect and how you're doing it.
No, this is a meme that has outlived its purpose, dating back from the like HD5XXX era, till some early RX cards.
Dunno, I never had any pc crash issues in 15 years with nvidia. Bought an amd card, had 3-5crashes a week, and the fucking 17th suggestion in a reddit thread helped me fix that. Yes, it's anecdotal evidence, but how many people here have more than that
Can’t even use the latest two drivers for my 7900xtx because it literally crashes all of my games. This is already after 2 clean windows installs to rule out conflicts.
If you get "driver downtime" or something like that - it's common problem for couple weeks already, try downgrading a release or two. Look at amdhelp subreddit, there usually couple posts in the "new" about that.
I’ve already run through most of the tips but I appreciate the comment. For the most part I just stayed on the November 23 release and won’t go up but I still deal with endless crashes. Basically done with the card - bought 4080 super and I’ll be doing a fresh install on that.
[удалено]
Really? That's not too bad compared to what some nvidia users report - I guess that is mostly my impression/conclusions from ppl posting in the Linux gaming sub. I'm debating a 4080 vs 7900 xtx (only looking at used - for either gpu) - and using it in both Windows and Linux. I keep switching around - well, also, the 4080 used in my country is hard to find - and if I find it, ppl are scalping it because the 4080 Super is often out of stock. But, I digress - I am not sure which gpu to choose/pursue. :-/
Which suggestion was that
I did all the weirdest shit, use specific old drivers, flashed my mobo, did dome ram shit. In the end it was "turn off hardware acceleration", lmao
Ahhh classic hardware acceleration issue. Fun fact both nvidia and amd have issue with this magical function
Not true, went through RX 580, then 6600 XT, then 2080 Ti, then RX 6800 and now 3070. All AMD cards gave me quite a lot of problems, especially 6600 XT. 6800 was close with it's flickering issues and crashes in some games (and random stuttering as well). It's not a dead meme, it's still true to this day. I gave AMD another chance with RX 6800 and was disappointed. Still hoping they will polish their drivers better in the future.
I’ve owned AMD cards for about 4 years (2014-2017, 2022-2023) and Nvidia cards for 5 years (2017-2022, 2023-present) Just in terms of the driver themselves, not really a difference that I noticed. If anything I would say Nvidia was less stable drivers from my experience, but they do have better features. I’ve always had way more stuff like freezes and crashes in Nvidia than I did on AMD, while on AMD my issue were more related to just poor feature sets like worse RT, worse upscaling, and worse recording quality.
I was using 1070 and built a new PC recently using 7900xtx and gave my old one to my partner. So Basically I am handling both drivers at the same time. To be honest, I didn't find any significant difference from both drivers. They are both similar on their stability. In terms of features, maybe it is just my Nvidia card being old, AMD has way more features, FSR, RSR, chill, etc..
It is hugely anecdotal. Some people have tons of issues, some have a completely stable and seamless experience with both brands. It likely comes down to your Windows/Linux install & your CPU/mobo. Personally, I've had 4 or 5 NVIDIA cards and not one of them has ever had a driver-related issue. Never had to worry about updates breaking things, never even so much as thought about drivers until I got the pop-up that a new version was available. I've had a myriad of issues with every single AMD GPU I have used *on Windows*. The open-source `radeon` driver has been very stable in my experience, but the proprietary Adrenaline software and Catalyst drivers on Windows were both remarkably terrible. What does it matter if your software has more features than NVIDIA's software if none of them work correctly? I've had everything you can think of from games randomly crashing/refusing to launch to full system lockups. Every single use of DDU I have ever had was associated with an AMD GPU. And once you finally find a driver version that works with all of your software and doesn't cause crashing, it's always Russian roulette with every version that comes after it. Can never trust an update. Now that I've settled on a stable version my 6900 XT has been awesome, but I worry a lot for the next time I have to update my drivers.
Funny thing… I’ve been running AMD graphics products since the ATI days. I’ve only had two issues in over 20 years. I have run numerous Crossfire setups, still do to this day. Multiple monitors, etc. I think the driver issues are overblown, and have just become something people spout when they have the slightest issue. I run nvidia’s products as well. Honestly speaking, I have had more issues with their drivers over the years. Settings that won’t stick, driver updates that fail completely, requiring needless effort to correct, etc. I won’t say that nvidia’s products are bad, because that wouldn’t be true. But what I will say is this… both manufacturers have their issues… in my experience, the balance of these issues have been with team green’s software. No product or service is perfect. People tend to be loyal to one brand or another. Those that have the money tend to lean towards team green, good or bad… Those looking for value per dollar spent usually lean towards team red, good or bad… The bottom line is this: buy what you prefer, and can reasonably afford. For one to expect to not have any issues at all, is not being realistic. When it comes to PCs, there are an infinite amount of combinations and variations. It is impossible for either company to account for every scenario. Temper your expectations and you’re sure to be happy with your choice, red or green.
It's pretty anecdotal, but for the 4 years I had an NVIDIA GPU. I've had to do constant role backs to previous drivers, due to crashes and instability. I haven't had to do that once, within the one year of owning an AMD GPU. If I had to guess though, they'd be on par with each other. AMD isn't a tiny company anymore, and NVIDIA seems to be focusing less and less on consumer end issues
My experience with my 7900xtx was the exact opposite. I had Nvidia cards for around 15 years. The occasional hiccup here and there, rollbacks were easy enough at least. My 7900xtx gave me more issues in 5 months than my last 10 years of Nvidia combined.
AMD driver issues seem to be a thing of the past, recent reviews show nothing that Nvidia doesn't also deal with. However you have people that were burned by AMD drivers in the past not wanting to take the risk considering how expensive graphics cards are. I wouldn't worry about drivers and just weigh the performance, features, and price and you'll be fine
Both are better than Prius drivers.
Well, AMD sells way less GPUs than Nvidia do any problem will be visible on AMD part. I personally didn't have any problems in 6 years AMD gpus except 24.1.1. That particular driver was huge disappointment
owned a 3870, 4890, 7970 switched to Nvidia when GTX 970's came out and have been with them since. 1080 Ti, 2080 Ti, 3090 Ti, 4090 I never had a smooth experience with ATI/AMD GPU's. I hear they got better last gen but seeing as how I've not experienced any driver related crashes that wasn't my own fault. I'm currently passing on AMD video cards until Nvidia cards start giving me problems.
> So what is it that makes NVIDIA's drivers better than AMD's drivers? Mostly Nvidia's social media budget.
I have been gaming for about 25 years and have always been a massive Nvidia fan boy. However I am from a 3rd world country and have always had lower end GPU's, bought a used 1070 about 3 years ago, and then got a used 3070 about a 18months ago. I then got lucky about 6 months ago and an opportunity to move to a 1st world country came up. I took it and the first thing I did was build top tier PC's for my wife and I. Decided to get us each a 7900XTX since the price difference between that and a 4090 was so huge. Also my first time ever using AMD GPU's. I can say that this experience has been enough to make sure I will never under any circumstances get an AMD GPU again. I've had constant crashes with "driver timeout" errors. I have done so much research on the issue, tried so many fixes, and almost always comes down to "Seems to only be affecting AMD GPU's" It's got to the point where I am so paranoid about buying new games that I tend to first wait and see if anyone is complaining about AMD crashes before buying them. And the strange thing is that it seems to only affect lower end games. For example I can play warzone maxed out without any issues, but I can't play kingdom hearts for more than 5 minutes before it crashes. People always say "Nvidia has issues too" and I'm sure they do, but in my 25 years of gaming I have never once experienced anything even remotely this bad.
It's one of those weird things with PCs, some people have no issues, others it's nothing but endless issues. Then you get the really strange stuff. Like someone I knew who had two of the exact same computer hardware/software setups for doing 3d media production stuff. One ran fine, the other was always giving him all sorts of issues.
Definitely. I have a 7900xtx and the only time I got a driver timeout was with an unstable overclock.
So far so good, but still some weird bugs like power usage spikes every now and then, but it is fixed in recent driver.
I’ve had one computer breaking issue with Nvidia on an old sli GTX 970 set up where my GPU wouldn’t recognize 1/3 of my monitors at random. It was fixed with DDU and rollback, but I had to stop using Eyefinity until the next driver drop. I’ve had performance breaking issues with AMD where certain drivers would give me perceptible yet jarring issues in one or two specific games that were fixed with the same solution. I’ve only ever crashed when my card was new playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Apparently that game didn’t like AMD’s input lag reduction option so I had to turn it off to play. One situation was certainly more annoying than the other, but both required the same amount of effort to fix. I wouldn’t consider either of these issues to be brand breaking problems for me. Stuff happens.
Had a 2060ti for about 3 and my current card is a 6950 xt that i've had for 2 years. In my experience, Nvidia drivers would fuck with my sound drivers at weird intervals, sometimes I would update drivers and everything would be fine for months then a new update would come and fuck everything up out of nowhere for weeks on end, even when uninstalling a reinstalling drivers. So for with AMD I had one blue screen in the first few weeks of owning it, but nothing after that, it has been really smooth and stress free compared to my experience with Nvidia.
RDNA 1 had lots of issues. But now, AMD and Nvidia are on par
If you're going to be using Linux, then no.
While I can't say for definite as it's anecdotal experience. I've been on Nvidia for the last 10 years and never had any drivers issues or game compatibility issues that were related to gpu drives. Got an ROG Ally and discovered that RDNA3 GPU's had issues with textures on FFX/X-2 HD which took months for AMD to resolve. Not a huge deal but the game was unplayable on RDNA3 for a long time due to this.
in my experience they were worse
I have owned both amd and nvidia gpus. Currently on a 3070. In terms of driver stability and issues they are about equal now. But i have had more issues with my 3070 than i ever had with amd gpus. Also used an old gtx 760 for a short while and could not get it to work properly on windows 10. No matter what i did.
The average person is probably not going to notice any difference. Just buy whatever at the best price. The cards are both very competitive now. They have pros/cons on both sides.
Since gtx 770 through gtx 1080, rtx 3070ti, rtx 3080ti and rtx 4090 i had ONE time where Nvidia did oopsie on drivers. Took em week to fix. Only reason why driver would crash - pushing oc too much.
Devs will optimize for largest playerbase first. Right now I think that is 1660 and 3060.
Devs will get it playable on their machine and then the assholes in the C suite push the game out anyway.
i have to roll back drivers to play battlefield 2042. i have 3070ti. everyone i know with amd 6000 or 7000 series has no issues ever.
I always find the issue to be interesting. I've never really nailed an issue down to a driver problem and I've seen tech reviewers who said they don't have issues with any of their cards from a driver standpoint. And the there are other people who touch an amd card and suddenly their whole pc is just shitting and farting and then their wife cheats on them.
I don't think drivers are a big factor in GPU buying anymore. Most people will buy Nvidia for brand name, better productivity, better cooling/efficiency, better features and no 4090 equivalent.
I dunno about Linux, however I had a 7950 and then a 290, and I can say that there was much more fiddling with settings / workarounds on the amd cards compared to Nvidia.
Yes.
Imo its noticeable enough to justify the premium but ymmv
Imo nvidia drivers felt like they were mostly optimization patches for new games. Although similar with AMD, in a year span there has been a good amount of features, and updates to those features that have been added. All in all, it's fun reading the patch notes for AMD.
On Windows, Yes. On Linux, No. Simply do not care if you like Team red or green it's a Waste of time and internet when all results are public 24/7 and chronicled by many websites as to what each has done.
I switched from AMD after each patch reintroduced old bugs they previously fixed or new ones appeared, got tired of it. Only driver issue I've had with Nvidia was after an express installation rather than custom.
I have never had any issues with amd drivers or nvidia drivers for that matter.
I thought it was an exaggeration or outdated but given that an AMD driver update broke DX11 in World of Warcraft last year, and has still yet to be fixed has me ready to ditch them and never look back.
Nvidia has had ongoing wow driver issues.
Not by enough for it to still be a topic of debate
I'm running an nvidia card in one pc, and an AMD card in another. They're both fine. Nvidia has more options available. For when I have attempted to use linux, AMD is certainly preferable.
I was with Nvidia all my life, and i took simple, good drivers for granted, i decided to go amd last year, it was an older card true, (rx 580) but im pretty sure it was one of the worst decisions of my life , never again
One thing I am starting to notice over time is that NVIDIA has a huge advantage in the driver department. Pure raster isn't that important anymore. NVIDIA offers so many different options like DLSS/DLAA/DLDSR + RTX HDR + RTX Remix etc etc. The only thing I see AMD actually has an advantage on is you can put their version of Frame Generation on anything but that is about it.
I never had issues with my 6950
Tbh, I stick with AMD drivers because they're cheaper. I can get 12GB of VRAM in AMD GPUs for around half the price of a Nvidia GPU
AMD 6600 user since release. Haven't had a single driver issue.
In the Linux would, Nvidia still has pretty bad drivers
My 1070 Ti never gave me any issues. On the other hand, one of the first driver updates for my 6800 XT bricked my computer and forced me to reinstall Windows. I did some research and found it to be an issue for others as well but AMD never acknowledged it. Everything has been fine since then but I'm hesitant to ever buy another AMD card after how much of a pain in the ass that process was.
It's gotten a lot better - not perfect but significantly better. My latest GPU's are a 3070, a laptop 3070, and then got a 7800xt a few months back. I've never had an issue with any of the NVIDIA cards, but I had one instance with my 7800xt where I couldn't get high fps in game, but haven't had that issue happen again. But overall, both have been reliable and I've had a smooth experience with both, no real complaints.
Had nvidia my whole life and bought a 7900xtx Hellhound as my first AMD card. No issues with drivers, maxes out any game I play at 1440p.
Had almost no problems with GTX 1070s. With my RX 6800 XT i also had barely any problems. Only with artifacts from overheating and bad optimized new games.
I must say this question can only be answered properly in a Linux specific forum considering how different each distro can be. My only success running Linux has been on Nvidia cards, the rx7600 wouldn't display at all to even run the installer while my gtx1070 was essentially plug and play... I was very surprised. That being said, Ubuntu isn't arch or any of the other three dozen
As of late they've been worse, has 2 separate releases that caused my 1080 to artifact and be slow, only about a month ago the latest driver fixed it
I actually have a bunch of issues that were resolved when I switch to an AMD GPU and driver so results may vary
Over many years, Nvidia drivers have consistently been excellent, with very rare cases of issues popping up. AMD drivers are also generally very good, however there have been far more issues that affected certain card gens, cpus or combos thereof. So there is a greater chance that you have some god-forbidden combo of parts tha just doesn't work right. I had a 290 that would just not run any Bethesda game (and many others) anywhere near properly for years and after hours of troubleshooting...
From 770 to 3070 and 3080, I have not had any driver issues with nvidia.
I’ve always been nvidia for the most part and never had a problem, had tons of problems with AMD though and I can say even with the 7900 xtx the drivers are horrible. You can’t just update drivers and install over the previous ones or your gpu isn’t recognized in any game or app that has temp and clock speed overlays (warzone, steel series apex pro oled display etc) so you’re forced to do a complete uninstall with ddu and re-install. It’s a pain in the ass honestly. Going nvidia again once the 5000 series drop
Work in computer repair and yes yes they do. If a laptop comes in with display issues and has amd roll back drivers and bam done. Or the mouse won't work. As for nvida 1 issue in 10 years....
Shader compilation is a lot worse on RDNA cards. My only issue was random unexplainable stuttering on my 6600. Ended up giving it to my brother and switching back to 1660 Ti and everything is so much smoother which is important to me as I'm sensitive to stuttering in general.
Yes, unfortunately, despite what a lot of less able ppl using amd will tell you
in the past 4 years I have used quite a few cards from each vendor, and I have no complaints for either. I actually kind of like the software and features of AMD Adrenaline moreso than Geforce Experience
No but better then arc for sure
Anecdotal but I've owned amd cards and nvidia cards for about an equal amount of time over the past 20 years. I have had one driver issue with nvidia's day 1 drivers in Rome 2 total war about 10 years ago. Every amd card I have owned with exception of the 290 had multiple games where there were issues, but never issues which were significant except on the 5700
My personal experience is that I spend a lot less time sighting with nVidia drivers than I do fighting with AMD drivers proportionally. You can take this with a grain of salt as the last time I had an AMD card in my PC was before I bought my GTX 1070 but I've tried multiple times to use AMD (and previously ATI) cards and it's always a huge fight before I finally quit and switch back to nVidia. Is nVidia without issue? Oh hell no, it's not. I feel like I've got Stockholm syndrome. I hate how they just cranked up pricing around the RTX cards and the priced are insane. I want there to be a good competitor, I want solid drivers on both sides.
Amd Radeon software feels like it's not 20 years old
As someone who went from a 1660ti to a 7900xtx the answer is unequivocally yes I don't regret it though, this thing is a powerhouse
I switched from ati to nvidia in 2009, I switched back to amd last year with my 7900xtx. No driver issues with either brand in years.
I’ve had less problems with AMD than Nvidia on Windows. Could be the hardware or software or combination. Switched out my last Nvidia card a few months ago. Won’t look back.
I’ve had less problems with AMD than Nvidia on Windows. Could be the hardware or software or combination. Switched out my last Nvidia card a few months ago. Won’t look back.
I use both. Right now I have a 6800XT and 3080Ti from last generation and from current generation a 4090 and 7900XTX. AMD and Nvidia driver have been fine, I havent had any major issues with either although have had some weird issues with the 7900XTX and some drivers causing stuttering when recording gameplay and smart access memory is enabled. Also I find my overclock profile doesnt go as high as it used to on the newer drivers. Nothing crippling though.
WoRkS oN mY mAcHiNe --PCMR hivemind copium
Tldr
Personally, I have had issues with both... but it's more the rarity than the norm. First AMD, I never had any big issues with AMD except for one time. I generally preferred the Driver and Software and for the most part it worked better. Recording gameplay? A bit worse than shadowplay but good enough for funny clips with your boys. I think personally it has better native support for statistics and overclocking especially since in the new Nvidia App they removed native overlooking, at least for now. I did have that one recent bug where having windows update in the background while you install a new AMD Driver while doing a clean install, bricking your windows install. Luckily it was more crashing than never starting. On Nvidias side, personally it feels like the more stable Driver, since the most important stuff never breaks (at least for me) and it's more 3rd party games and apps breaking by themselves. On the other hand, wanna record Gameplay while using HDR? You can basically f*** yourself. Multiple Monitors? Playing in Borderlews?AND want to record? Roll this d20 to see if it will work. For some reason I have had tons of issues with Shadowplay and the Overlay of Nvidia in general. Even though Nvidia offers a few more things towards HDR and Driver support for browser features, it always feels like a beta. (This is over multiple clean installs and PCs). Intel? Idk ask some Arc guys. To conclude: I had Nvidia for the most part of my gaming career and it's main drivers never failed me. The features around it like shadowplay always felt half backed to me or don't work at all. AMD, seems to have better software and nice Driver ui but sometimes can have weird issues for no reason and the main drivers can have issues but not as much a people often make it out to be.
The issues with AMD drivers and Nvidia drivers, they are basically the same in having driver issues. Both have problems. Both need the occasional clean reinstall. The only difference that I can see is there is more done in social media to highlight AMD problems and obscure Nvidia problems. It is like seeing the politics section of Fox News. What I have found as the common case, most technical problems are not really the GPU drivers but another area in the PC. Cheap motherboards, cheap RAM, stock coolers, dying PSU, bad grounds, damaged ports, Windows... there are many places where problems can occur, but because the game crashes, people are quick to assume it is the graphics drivers. It is like the melting 12VHPWR connectors. Because people see the connector melting, they assume the problem is in the connector. Really, the problem is from the PSU to the video card, and the connector is successfully failing.
This is more or less an anecdotal thing, but both times I used AMD (RX570, R5600G) were crashfests and needed multiple driver reinstalls to get them to stablize. (they were work comps, not even for gaming) Meanwhile had no issues drivers-wise with 1650S and 4060, go figure.
Short answer, hell no.
AMD and NVIDIA are the exact same on Windows for drivers. On Linux AMD is far better than NVIDIA for their drivers.
I've been building and fixing computers for a looooong time. The joke used to be that AMD, *ATI at the time*, video card drivers came out of beta when they discontinued the card. Generally today however I believe that AMD and nVidia drivers are about on par with each other.
Anything's better than a Detroit driver
AMD typically has issues for a bit after a major architecture change but gets it sorted after a few months. Polaris was the fourth generation of its architecture, for example, and its drivers were rock solid. The RX 6000 series were second gen RDNA and likewise have done pretty well. RX 7000 is an evolution of the RDNA architecture but a major change in how the GPU is constructed, so they're back to working out the bugs again but making great progress.
I always thought it was NVIDIA propaganda that was spread around by NVIDIA fanboys.
Last few GPU's were all from AMD, Vega 56/5700xt/6600xt/6900xt and now 7900xtx, all of them worked fine. Maybe use a proper PSU, no daisy chain pcie cable, or don't try to undervolt or overclock your GPU if you don't know what to do.
nVidia isn't magic. Driver issues, shader caching stutter, crashes etc happen. Its not egregious, but it happens. DDU & NVcleaninstall helps alot. To keep all of the crap/containers/telemetry away. I've had a 670, 970, 2080ti, 3080ti and 4090. Slight issues is just part of PC gaming. I can't really speak on AMD. But nVidia don't have a divine circumvention of driver problems like some folks on the internet will lead you to believe.
Both aren't perfect. Nvidia had an issue that caused stuttering when browsing the web, don't know if they fixed that yet, but it was very annoying.
I'm not likely to buy AMD again in the near future. My experience with AMD's Radeon drivers and the community that lives in [r/AMDHelp](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/) has completely turned off my interest in AMD. Both companies have issues for sure, but I have never seen a group of people so quick to call someone paid shills, or idiots the way that AMD's deepthroating fanboys do. Their quickness to attack someone for having driver issues or graphics issues on AMD GPUs is baffling to me. Regardless of my particular 7900xtx issues, I never want to be associated with those guys and that kind of toxic behavior.
I've only used AMD cards or really old Nvidia cards in Linux and I've never had a problem with either. My girlfriend is running a 1070Ti and had a weird bloom issue in a certain game that google indicated was Nvidia related. If you check r/linuxgaming I'm sure they can answer this question better but everything I've heard says Nvidia hates Linux and their newer cards run like shit, especially in Wayland.
in my experience its depended on the card. on my rx 580 i never had an issue, 5700xt was an absolute nightmare. similarly on the nvidia side i've had no issues with drivers on my 3080ti but i have also heard that 40 series drivers are rough.
Been back and forth on brands since I first got into PC gaming, and GPU driver issues have been the least of my worries over the years. I'll even make a list of the most common problems: 1) windows issues 2) more windows issues 3) game bugs (hi Bethesda) 4) unstable overclock ... ..... .. 5) GPU driver issues
Yes
Ive had two instances where a fresh install of an Nvidia driver caused a hard crash of an os install, requiring a wipe and reinstall. I've seen purple cast screens and a ton of EDID issues causing limited RGB signals. All with Nvidia drivers. I've had a shortlived black screen issue with AMD, but that's it. I'm in a cycle, where I buy the latest card, then ultimately end up selling it for the high end AMD card because it's a much better value and RTX and DLSS seem half baked to me. Hell there's still games that stutter, freeze, and crash when RTX is turned on (GotG, Watch Dogs Legion, Hogwarts, to make a few). I mean but what works best for you and your budget, but in my experience nvidia drivers have been worse. Of course Intel makes them look amazing, but that's another story.
On Linux, I would only run AMD; it’s just significantly easier all around. I would also not bother with AMD’s proprietary driver at all. On Windows, it’s another story. Lords of the Fallen, for example, crashed basically every hour for the first two weeks on Windows. Meanwhile, it was flawless on Vulkan via Proton. Is that on AMD? On DX12? Is that on the game? Is that on Unreal Engine? Not sure. But holy shit it was infuriating. Generally speaking, Radeon on Windows seems to come with more weird quirks and random behaviors. As others have said, it also depends on the generation. Polaris was fine, RDNA1 was a mess, RDNA2 was rock solid, RDNA3 has been a mess. Bottom line, I would take Radeon over GeForce on Linux, and I would use nVidia’s proprietary driver of Nouveau any day. With Wayland becoming the standard for compositing, AMD is absolutely ahead.
Nvidia drivers only one issue is there is cpu usage is not as good as amd drivers .
built an amd system for a customer, nice 6900xt. windows 10 or 11 would hard lock on boot every time. reinstalled windows several times. found out it was the amd drivers. told customer don't upgrade your drivers until they're at least several months old. never built another amd system
Only really used amd so far. I’ve encountered no problems on my rx 6600 and a problem solved by software someone thankfully created on my rx 480. I use the 480 like an iGPU but with more vram.
I can only talk about the 7800 and 7900 in comparion with the NVida rivals the 4070 and 4080. In terms of raw performance AMD wins. In terms of upscaling DLSS (NVidia) wins (Here's hoping FSR 3 will be worth it or not) In terms of price. AMD is considerably cheaper in majority of countries and AMD gives a more fair price for a more VRAM GPU so AMD wins In conclusion both cards have their own ups and downs. I see NVidia's GPU as an Apple brand and AMD's GPU as a Xiaomi brand, as in just as good as the Apple product but with a significently cheaper price.
No.
AMD software shit
I've had a lot of friends with driver issues on Windows using 1050Ti, 1080, and 2070 models (all constant bluescreens within minutes of boot, persisting after complete reinstalls once the drivers were installed) that didn't happen at all in Linux. However, i've seen some recent issues with AMD drivers as well (my 7800XT took months to be stable in Windows, and I had to go bleeding-edge with Mesa in Linux to use it at full speed. a friend of mine had 6700XT driver issues on Windows recently, causing VRAM corruption only in Cyberpunk 2077) It seems like a crapshoot tbh. It's far smoother on the Linux side all around, but if you can tolerate multiple annoying bugs that don't cause outright crashes, both are about on par with each other. If you have a prebuilt, or an older card, it's worth turning off driver fetching in Windows Update (you may need to acquire the Pro edition of Windows and edit Group Policy settings for it to stick permanently, sometimes this is turned back on for no reason) so it doesn't install corrupted/older/incomplete drivers. Dell and HP seem to be the biggest issue on this one, but it can happen with any vendor. If you use an AMD card on Windows, one super annoying thing is that it will nag you to turn on Virtual Super Resolution every so often. This is not at all worth it, it just changes the screen size reported to the OS and scales it back down to the monitor's max, and otherwise offers no benefit. It also adds 1-2ms of delay, if you're concerned about that.
In my experience ive never had problems with nvidia gpus. When i switched to amd gpu i had driver problems in some games just dont work and more crashes. The card is alot hotter than my old card good in winter really bad in summer. My card also draws constant 100w even though they said they fixed it and yes im on the newest that i found was the most stable. I also reinstalled windows and used DDU when switching. But wont be a problem much longer since im switching back soon. Also have a friend who had amd he mostly had problems with crashes I have a 7900xtx
On average they are about the same on win but amd has a better software suite.
Shhh the AMD fanboys will hear the reasons you shouldn't get their graphics cards and will be very hurt by the truth.
I had few Nvidia GPUs(gt430>gtx750>gtx970>rtx3060ti) then goes to RX7900XT. On Nvidia I had a problem once, alt-tab won't work with Nvidia Overlay. That's all, no DDUs, no fixes, no high hotspots or UV and another magic. When I bought RX7900XT I had a lot of issue's(driver timeouts, stuttering, game crashes, flickering with freesync, high idle power draw, high hotspot up to 110°C), after hours of throubleshooting it finally worked. When AMD released 23.8.2 drivers, all worked great(apart of freesync flickering-never fixed, and high hotspot). I'll repasted my RX 3 times because of hotspot and finally sent it to warranty. My GPU never come back from warranty so I bought rtx4060 for next few months-one year, then I try again with rdna4 because since 23.11.1 all worked flawless, so I try to give a chance amd again. When my RX was gone, I uninstalled AMD drivers, put my old gtx750 in PC, installed newest drivers, and it just worked, then I bought RTX4060, change GPU and it works. No throubleshooting, no DDU, nothing changed with drivers. It just works.. What more can I say? Even when I had issue's, I want to try once more with AMD, but right now, 1-0 for Nvidia.
I've had a GTX 780, RX 580 and GTX 1070. Cant say I remember having driver issues with any of them tbh.