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Originally posted by aht0
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But no, that's got nothing to do with this. You don't have to look any further than GN - which tested literally *every* 5700XT, for weeks on end - to understand that the problem is the drivers. As is the custom fan curve bug, the various sensor reporting bugs, and so on.
> Ain't that much different from systemd then (network connected, PID1, nice wide attack surface)
Yeah, and I have the same problem with developers being that stupid there too. :P
Unfortunately, nobody ever learns, because either marketing demands a stupid gimmick or the devs are so arrogant that all the previous 500 exploits were just because "THOSE guys weren't smart enough. I'M perfect though, so it won't happen with MY code". sigh. (And then being too stupid and arrogant to admit they were wrong when theirs gets pwned too, instead saying "okay, yeah, but it was just this ONE tiny mistake in the code, and we've fixed that, so now it's perfect"...)
> Nvidia's performance sure is better, I had recently chance to use Nvidia and Radeon simultaneously and I think latter offered better picture quality tho. Comments?
There's a lot you can do to affect both of those on a driver level. Automatic texture mipping is historically the biggest one, but these days shader replacement is so commonplace that it might even have the crown now.
Texture stuff will be exposed in the driver controls, with "Quality" generally meaning "just leave the goddam textures alone", "Standard" generally meaning "screw around with texture compression and/or mipping, POSSIBLY somewhat-intelligently but probably not", and "Performance" generally meaning "compress everything, and potentially quarter it all too".
One way to check that USED to work well for the second form, and probably still does, is to just rename the binary. If you can see a difference when you do that, the driver is replacing shaders to make itself look better in benchmarks. (Or, you know, "To ensure that our users get the best possible gaming experience", if you're a bit less cynical about it. :P)
> After recent Radeon-loaner, I am considering buying new RX590 or 580 for myself (new because I don't want cards whored by cryptominers).
Just FYI, miners tend to treat their cards BETTER than average. After all, if it thermal-throttles, you make less $. Mining generally also doesn't benefit from GPU OC (but VRAM OC instead, though it depends on the coin), so they won't have been driven to the wall for years.
The 5xx series are a very good buy right now in terms of Perf/$. HOWEVER, AMD is ALREADY not supporting them properly in their drivers, just a year after release, and it's important to be aware of that if there's some specific piece of functionality you want from the driver.
Depending on what you can get a 580/590 for, it might be worth stepping up to a 1660S. That's literally the ONLY card worth mentioning between the 5xx series and the $350 price point of the 2060 non-S and 5700 non-XT, but it's a VERY good card for the money if you can stretch to one.
> Can you be more specific about the issues you've had?
No different to anyone else's really: all of this is extremely commonplace. Fan control doesn't work reliably, fan curves likewise; the Radeon Settings app (on Windows, at least) crashes constantly, has visual artifacts, etc (note that this is WITHOUT overclocking).
The fan issue can be a huge pain, since if a hard reset is the only way to resolve it you may be stuck with a loud fan it until you're in a good position TO reboot. (Note that the bug only seems to occur when REDUCING fan speed: you can INcrease it just fine).
The best approach used to be to get the "core" driver - which was ONLY a driver, without all the gimmicks - and use Afterburner for OCing etc. (Which, since it's a much better tool for the job meant you'd be using that anyway).
> Nvidia drivers are also telemetry-enabled (sending routinely data out).
On Windows, they all are. sigh. I haven't Wiresharked the AMD ones lately, but at the very least the fact that it's constantly insisting that I update to a newer version - and let's be very clear here: this is without me EVER checking for updates from within the driver panel - means it's phoning home, and there's no way to turn that off. IOW, AMD gives exactly as many f**ks about your privacy as nvidia does, and is happy to treat you with the same total lack of respect.
ON LINUX, I'm okay with the AMD driver, as long as you don't expect a lot of the core functionality to work. I consider that sort of a fair trade for the better Perf/$ of the 5700XT over the 2060S. And if OSS drivers are important to you, AMD is realistically your only option.
(Note that AMD completely missed the ball with the 5500 though: you shouldn't be buying that under any circumstances, unless you're a die-hard AMD fanboy).
ON LINUX, the issues that *nvidia* has wrt to things like reclocking, passthrough, etc, means your options are realistically "No OSS driver, or no nvidia". If that matters to you, AMD is your only choice regardless of the problems their drivers have. The nvidia binary driver though, all the tirades about Freedom aside, is still very very good.
ON WINDOWS - which matters if you're using KVM and passthrough too - the AMD driver is garbage. But to be fair, MOST of it is MOSTLY functional, MOST of the time. It's "good enough, maybe". It's "fine for typical use". Sort of.
ON WINDOWS, the nvidia driver is unquestionably king. If you dualboot for gaming (or have a Windows VM with passthrough, "Error 43" notwithstanding), nvidia is where you want to be. There's very little bad that can be said about it. Obviously we'd all prefer for them to not be such total dicks wrt Linux, but that doesn't change how good the Windows driver is.
HTH
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