AMD driver issues – Do They Suck? – TechteamGB

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As mentioned in my recent 5700XT vs 2070 Super comparison, a regular topic on our weekly livestream Q&A’s is which of those GPUs should you buy – and normally before I can get a word in, the chat is filled with “AMD DRIVERS SUCK” comments. This has been progressively getting worse over the last month or so, as more users, and more content creators, are reporting issues with AMD’s drivers. Since AMD recently WHQL certified their latest 20.2.2 driver, lets take a look and see if they actually suck, or not.

Let’s give you a little background first – the main issue that was reported among mostly RX 5700 and 5700XT owners was a black screen issue, where when launching a game, the whole display would go black. The system didn’t reboot or crash, it’s just the display output that stops working. There are a few variations, a few workaround temporary fixes, but that’s the main one. 

Now, I cannot claim to have experienced that issue on an AMD card – ironically I have experienced it on an NVIDIA card but that’s specifically with Battlefield 5 at 1080p and I believe is more a game bug than a driver one. In fact, throughout my testing I’ve had practically no issues with drivers on either the 5700 or 5700XT, nor the newer 5600XT either, so I can only cover issues others are reporting. 

Now, AMD acknowledged the black screen issue in their “Known Issues” list on the 20.1.3 release notes but in statements they said – much like my own experiences actually – they found it hard to replicate the issues and therefore couldn’t easily determine the cause. One of the causes they had found was that when the graphics core performed a mode change (ie going from idle to a “gaming” mode) it could crash the driver and therefore stop display output. In most cases, the best fix for the issue is to boot into safe mode and use DDU to remove the driver, then reboot and fresh install the latest driver. 

With that said, the latest 20.2.2 driver has a massive list of black screen issues listed as fixed, and we are seeing reports of users who previously had issues saying the new driver fixed it. Now, it’s not perfect, and there will be some users with issues still, but considering how – relatively anyway – little people are actually having issues with their AMD cards, it’s good to see AMD taking action to fix every problem they can find. 

On that front, AMD has started the “AMD Vanguard” program, where if you want to, you can go sign up and beta test their GPU drivers and root out any potential issues before they actually publish a driver update. This is a good step, as it shows they aren’t planning on using everyday people are beta testers anymore, instead a more dedicated group of enthusiasts, who, more importantly, have actually signed up for it, rather than just buying a graphics card and being stuck with a load of issues.

One saving grace for AMD’s drivers is that they actually offer a lot of pretty decent features now, the majority of them you might actually use too. There’s ones that I’ve covered before like Radeon Anti-Lag, a basically free way to get lower input lag, Radeon Chill, a way to reduce power usage and keep temps low while doing it’s best to not impact your gaming experience, and their ReLive suite for recording and streaming your gameplay – including what looks like a copy of OBS built into the driver to add your webcam and even change scenes – and their in game overlay too.

So, with all that, and at least with the 5700XT vs 2070 super, a convincing price to performance lead, is it worth going with an AMD GPU? I think so. I think it’s easy to see this, lets face it, relatively isolated issue and say that AMD GPUs are worthless, but unless you really think they will be that bad, it’s much better to save your money, get similar performance, and potentially better features with an AMD card. Of course, that’s my opinion, and I’d love to hear yours.