AMD has been great and all buy their prices are NOT affordable. They’ve been jaking up their prices like everyone else in the last years. Don’t paint them as the heroes.
My rig is full AMD (5800x/5700xt), but that's purely because they happened to be the better value at the time. The second they get a lead in the consumer GPU market (which they likely will since nvidia simply doesn't care about it vs the ML market now) prices are going to rise again.
And don't pretend that these prices are anything resembling affordable. That would be when you could get a legitimately mid-range card for ~$150 (rx580).
Correct. But AMD is doing things that benefit FOSS and Linux, where as nVidia is a menace. Intel is also doing pretty decent, they just need to catch up in terms of driver features.
Man, I could use another $200 MSRP mid-range card. I’m also running RX5700XT (for $430!) and it’s probably going to be the first card I will use until it dies, unless there’s a reasonably priced mid-range coming out soon.
I have that card too but i think it was closer to 500 when i bought it. I felt like i got a terrible price but it was better than what folks after me had to deal with. Itcs still a great card and i hope it outlasts this crazy price gouging.
Mine was literally the last in stock before prices went wild when covid started. I was using rx480 and didn’t really need to upgrade until Gamers Nexus published a video about GPU shortage.
My hope right now is for AMD to keep improving on FSR so this card can stay viable for more years.
Yep. I’m running a Ryzen CPU for the first time as of late last year because the 5950X was on sale and Intel had no competing options anywhere near the same price. It was 16c/32t AMD for like $220 or the same core and thread count for $560 from Intel.
Have I just had bad luck with my AMD products?
I’ve had four Nvidia GPU/Intel CPU computers with no issues.
I’ve had three AMD GPU/AMD CPU computers and they all have been loud and hot and slightly unstable. A bit cheaper sure, but I rather have a silent and stable experience.
This has made me see amd as the inferior lowbudget crap. But maybe I have just bought from the wrong manufacturer or something.
Maybe, because cpu wise amd should be doing better than intel on heat and power consumption. Loud would have to do with the cooler you choose and wouldn’t be a function of the cpu itself. Aftermarket coolers are often better than stock and not that pricey, but will want to look into reviews for a quiet one. Amd had been cleaning intel’s clock the past few generations in cpu performance. Intel has finally caught up again and is slightly ahead in power this gen, though amd still winning a lot in efficiency and power consumption/heat and still has the best gaming cpu. Good summary here.
In terms of gpu that’s gonna vary widely depending on what specific gpu and what configuration of that gpu you’re buying. Before buying I would look into specific reviews of that manufacturer if you can and not just the stock gpu itself, because every one is going to have a different configuration and fan/cooler setup for the gpu. Unfortunately gpus from both amd and Nvidia are becoming more and more power hungry giant heat generating monsters over time.
This is the general trend in my roughly two decades of having my own PCs, so your mileage may well vary, especially since some series of both CPUs and GPUs were just better/more compatible with each other than now or the other way around.
In case anyone’s curious, my current combo is Ryzen 7 3800X and RTX 3060.
You have almost the same setup as I do right now.
3900x and a 3080.
Took me four cpu fan switches until I could stand being in the same room. Stock fan, sounded like a drying cabinet. BeQuiet, loud. Noctua, less loud but still loud. Im using a radiator now with silentwing fans and it’s still slightly too loud for my taste (and louder than any Intel I’ve ever had).
Temps seem to be in normal range though.
I went with idiotproof watercooling for the CPU and a mid-range quiet-type cabinet and it’s whisper-quiet and well within optimal temperature range even at high load.
Ive only ever used amd gpus and intel cpu, and the only hardware issue ive had is one gigabyte card having a firmware bug that killed it. amd always worked great on windows for me, but on linux they suffer from crashing quite often.
You have just been unlucky. I’ve never had any such issue. Were you using stock CPU cooler? I’ll admit the CPU cooler that comes in the box with AMD is atrocious.
I could not even be in the same room when using the stock cooler on my 3900x that I have now.
Had to use a radiator with silentwing fans to get it acceptable.
I can’t speak of older stuff, but my Ryzen 5 5600x and RX 6800 have been great. I’ve had this pc for a year now, and only have had the GPU drivers crash twice. That is about on par with my older gtx 1070
I like AMD but they’re still overpriced, nothing compelling in the $200-300 range since 5600 XT and RX 580, and I keep hearing stories about unoptimized drivers (can’t confirm myself cause I’m still on 5600 XT with mostly older games). They’re the lesser of two evils, but they’re far from chad-doge behavior at this point.
As far as I searched what is free software is the Vulkan implementation that runs on top of the intrinsic GPU and drivers (that have DRM and no source code).
The intrinsic GPU drivers on the kernel are still close source. So basically AMD and NVIDIA are the same. They both have source for some engines implementation but both kernel drivers are close source.
To be honest, I only get the driver crash at the absolute worst times now. After I did the switch to AMD from Intel and Nvidia, I did do a fresh windows install and have only had to reinstall the AMD graphics drivers about 4 times in the last couple of months. (While true, the last paragraph is not as bad as it sounds. Annoying, yes. End of the world, no.)
There is a pattern to the madness though. If I go from gaming to other GPU intensive apps used across different screens, it’s probably going to hang the driver. Not fatally, but I reboot anyway when it happens.
AMD is on the right track though. I think I have been through three different GPU drivers versions since I built the system and it is slowly getting better. I get a driver crash about once a week instead of once a day now.
Sleep mode is rough, for sure. It’s also one of the reasons why I did a completely fresh installation of Windows. (Sleep mode was suicide.) Also, I had heard an obscure rumor that AMD chipset drivers could be picky for old windows installations. (Like, not enabling the 3D cache on the CPU kind of picky.)
But yeah, you aren’t alone with the sleep mode woes.
It’s possible your gpu voltages are too high, aka unstable, even at stock. I was having similar problems with the 6800xt, although they were rare. Undervolted it with MorePowerTool, and haven’t had any issues since.
I have been thinking about that, actually. Adrenaline does have an undervolt option, so I’ll give that a go first. If that doesn’t work, I’ll absolutely try More PowerTool.
TBH, higher voltages and clocks with the 7900XTX are only good for benchmarks and real world performance gains are not that noticable. (I could only get between 100-200 point gains on Kombustor) Undervolting is probably going to be good for the longevity of the card anyway.
Four times in 2 months? Hangs every time when switching from gaming to other GPU centric apps? Jeezuz, how are people finding that acceptable? You’re paying premium money for these products, demand better from these fucks. And the comment below you isn’t any better, crashing any time when waking from sleep mode is craziness.
Stop making excuses for AMD. They’re just another soulless corporation like any other, including Nvidia’s greedy asses.
Yeah, the GPU drivers haven’t been stable. Hell, one time they just stopped working completely and failed to recognize the card. Wut?
I mainly bounce between Diablo IV, War Thunder, Fusion360, PrusaSlicer and sometimes Blender. It doesn’t always hang, but when it does, it’s because I have been moving the apps back and forth between monitors. Multi-monitor support is buggy and that is absolutely a combination of the GPU drivers and the apps.
Yeah, I paid some coin, that is for sure. It is frustrating in that regard but I knew what I was getting into with AMD drivers. The first few generations of drivers are almost always garbage with new cards and they are showing improvements over the last few iterations of drivers.
Also, yes. I am tempted to give my 7900XTX to my daughter when the NVIDIA 5000 series drops. For now, I am just tolerating the issues. (I rarely had an issue with my 3070.)
No excuses here! The CPU is gold but the GPU drivers are shite. I am an extremely patient person though, so that helps.
I commend you on your zen master level of patience, haha. I’m only patient up to a degree and then it all goes out the window, heh.
I’m guessing you have the hotkey combination for rebooting the graphics drivers without having to reboot your PC? When I had a 5700 XT, that hotkey combo was a lifesaver (drivers on that would constantly hang for me as well).
The current gen consoles having pretty weak raytracing will play for AMD quite a bit here. It means that games can’t demand anything higher than a PS5 can do, and since AMD provide that then their stuff will still do for modern PC games.
The frame generation is a red herring in my book. A quick look at a few videos shows similar artifacts to what my 4K TV made if you leave the awful motion smoothing settings on. 40-50fps with VRR is a much better “make the poorly optimised game playable” goal.
My problem when buying my last GPU is that AMD’s answer to CUDA, ROCm, was just miles behind and not really supported on their consumer GPUs. From what I se now that has changed for the better, but it’s still hard to trust when CUDA is so dominant and mature. I don’t want to reward NVIDIA, but I want to use my GPU for some deep learning projects too and don’t really have a choice at the moment.
I’ve become more and more convinced that considerations like yours, which I do not understand since I don’t rely on GPUs professionally, have been the main driver of Nvidia’s market share. It makes sense.
The online gamer talk is that people just buy Nvidia for no good reason, it’s just internet guys refusing to do any real research because they only want a reason to stroke their own egos. This gamer-based GPU market is a loud minority whose video games don’t seem to rely too heavily on any card features for decent performance, or especially compatibility, with what they’re doing. Thus, the constant idea that people “buy Nvidia for no good reason except marketing”.
But if AMD cards can’t really handle things like machine learning, then obviously that is a HUGE deficiency. The public probably isn’t certain of its needs when it spends $400 on a graphics card, it just notices that serious users choose Nvidia for some reason. The public buys Nvidia, just in case. Maybe they want to do something they haven’t thought of yet. I guess they’re right. The card also plays games pretty well, if that’s all they ever do.
If you KNOW for certain that you just want to play games, then yeah, the AMD card offers a lot of bang for your buck. People aren’t that certain when they assemble a system, though, or when they buy a pre-built. I would venture that the average shopper at least entertains the idea that they might do some light video editing, the use case feels inevitable for the modern PC owner. So already they’re worrying about maybe some sort of compatibility issue with software they haven’t bought, yet. I’ve heard a lot of stories like yours, and so have they. I’ve never heard the reverse. I’ve never heard somebody say they’d like to try Nvidia but they need AMD. Never. So everyone tends to buy Nvidia.
The people dropping the ball are the reviewers, who should be putting a LOT more emphasis on use cases like yours. People are putting a lot of money into labs for exhaustive testing of cooling fans for fuck’s sake, but just running the same old gaming benchmarks like that’s the only thing anyone will ever do with the most expensive component in the modern PC.
I’ve also heard of some software that just does not work without CUDA. Those differences between cards should be tested and the results made public. The hardware journalism scene needs to stop focusing so hard on damned video games and start focusing on all the software where Nvidia vs AMD really does make a difference, maybe it would force AMD to step up its game. At the very least, the gamebros would stop acting like people buy Nvidia cards for no reason except some sort of weird flex.
No, dummy, AMD can’t run a lot of important shit that you don’t care about. There’s more to this than the FPS count on Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Well the counterpoint is that NVIDIA’s Linux drivers are famously garbage, which also pisses off professionals. From what I see from AMD now with ROCm, it seems like they’ve gone the right way. Maybe they can convince me next time I’m on the lookout for a GPU.
But overall you’re right yeah. My feeling is that AMD is competitive with NVIDIA regarding price/performance, but NVIDIA has broader feature support. This is both in games and in professional use cases. I do feel like AMD is steadily improving in the past years though. In the gaming world FSR seems almost as ubiquitous (or maybe even more ) as DLSS, and ROCm support seems to have grown rapidly as well. Hopefully they keep going, so I’ll have a choice for my next GPU.
It’s a shame there’s not really an equivalent comparison to the CUDA cores on AMD cards, being able to offload rendering to the GPU and getting instant feedback is so important when sculpting (without having to fall back to using eevee)
I’ve been a Linux only user for over twenty years now and Nvidia is the fucking devil. Their drivers range in quality anywhere from “ugh” to “wtf!” and my current Nvidia card (it’s a loan) gives me continuous screen artifacts and kwin (screen manager) crashes. AMD drivers just work.
Yeah agree the high range for amd is meh, if you’re just looking for the best out there money is no object, fine with >$1000 gpus, Nvidia has no competition there. The 7900s are more competitive with the Nvidia 4080s and undercut those on price too, 4080s are $1200. So they should really be looked at as a 4080 alternative not 4090 which has no real alternative. Amd offers nothing nearly as expensive as a 4090.
Im very interested in the 7800xt which is a 4070 competitor. If it’s outperforming the 4070 in most respects like the amd numbers suggests I think it’ll be a great value since it’s $100 cheaper. The 4070 only having 12 gb of vram is pretty disappointing too for future proofing, especially for the price. Would like to wait on the reviews of the 7800xt of course first, we only have company provided numbers so far. Also interested in their progress on ray tracing and fsr, which they’ve clearly been behind Nvidia on for a number of years. But getting enough fps and achieving the resolution you want should still be priority number one over something more niche and game dependent like ray tracing when you’re picking out a card I think.
Again, amd does undercut nvidia but not by a lot. There’s no reason for pricing their gpus so high other than pure greed. A 1000 usd is pretty damn expensive for something that does nothing by itself.
Oh didn’t mean to imply they’re not greedy, it’s a company. Nvidia would be far greedier though then unless you value their extra features with otherwise worse performance by that much more money. And without competition Nvidia would have free reign to get even more absurd in their pricing. Some competition is better than none. Maybe Intel gpus will start getting good and we can really get some competition going to drive prices lower hopefully.
Yeah they ain’t cheap. AMD just follows NVidia’s pricing and just undercuts them by a few hundred. AMD has zero reason to price their GPUs this high. While I sorta get why NVidia does it. There is massive demand for their chips outside the gaming sphere. And these businesses are willing to pay top dollar. I bet most of their production capacity is allocated to produce data center GPUs.
Yeah but the same thing can be said about phones, it’s the new norm and for something that’ll easily last you 4-6 years, it’s a worthwhile investment I feel
Still everyone uses Nvidia and everything has better Nvidia support than AMD. I love AMD but not being able to use my oculus connected to my PC without screen tear is pretty annoying :/
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