Ha! I do believe they cleaned up the drivers roughly around that time. I got my 5600XT in April 2020 and have not had any issues with it. Of course there's luck of the draw, too, but I read a lot of early adopters of the 5600/5700 cards had some issues with drivers.
Looking on eBay, it looks like I could sell that $290 card for about $500...
A 5500 XT bought in June, so not old at all. I've heard the opposing argument, that since it's a relatively new card (out since Dec 2019?) I should expect some bugs, which is insane one year later. It's actually unusable, I have to log into my machine via SSH to restart it, or force reboot. It might break after 30 minutes or 3 days, when idle or busy.
AMD developers in that thread are chasing their tails and still haven't figured out why so many cards are having issues, and why other aren't, but as a consumer, that's really not inspiring at all.
I got really burned by AMD GPUs, had a 5700 XT for myself and rx 580 and 570 for my kids. None of them reset properly, had to build special kernel, and even sometimes then they just froze the host. Sold them all, got NVidia cards, never had issues since (7+ months).
My considered opinion (from the industry) is that its really shocking how under-invested-in the drivers are.
If a fraction of the effort that went into making the card went into making the drivers and maintaining and fixing them, we'd all be massively better off.
Well “in that regard” meaning the notion that you posed about the drivers having “caught up”. I can’t speak to the VR situation. So maybe the drivers haven’t caught up in every sense.
I will say I recently threw away an RX 580 because it couldn’t stay under 100C. I repasted it, and tried setting the fans to 100%, which was quite loud. It was an XFX model too… usually they’re on top of QC. It’s worth like $75 if I found the screws for the fan shroud (took off to try to get better temps via water cooling) but it’s easier to just throw it in the trash can. eBay takes around 12% and then I have to pack and ship the thing. Not worth it.
I just bought an RTX 3090 with a broken power connector notch because it was the only GPU I could find for under $1000 that had more than 20GB of VRAM (for future proofing/model training). It’s just a shit time to need a GPU.
What shocked people was how bad they were at drivers given they've been making GPUs for decades. The cards performed significantly worse than a 1070, which is a mid-tier GPU from 2016, and the drivers had such terrible and inconsistent performance (not to mention all the crashes) that the cards were useless.
They also sometimes do GPU BIOS modifications, which is a fun thing to discover once the card ends up on the second-hand market and you happen to buy one. Luckily the fix is to reflash the BIOS using a matching one from TechPowerUp GPU database, but this assumes that you even know that this is something to pay attention to.
Source: happened with an RX 560 that I bought second-hand. Driver installation failed in Windows 10 due to the modified GPU BIOS. Was fixed with a reflash of a stock GPU BIOS using atiflash.
The overheating and crashing issues are fixed; I’m running a W5700 completely stable.
With the drivers sorted they aren’t significantly behind the 6000 (RDNA2) cards that superseded them. Maybe 5%, equivalent cards compared. Makes for a good deal in today’s market.
Yeah, Nvidia rather sucks at cleaning up after themselves, for whatever reason.
The main reason I'm not buying another card from them is their stance towards Linux in general and their stance towards PCI virtualization in particular.
I'm currently not upgrading drivers due to the latter; they're trying to disable the capabilities (dedicating a card to a VM) that are the reason I bought a second card in the first place.
I can usually deal with either lazy or greedy, but both in conjunction is infuriating. Screw those guys.
If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver that gets released is going to require days to make work properly.
What card could you have bought that lost support months later? I can't think of any new card you could have bought that'd lose support that quickly as far back as 2016
Including me. The artifacting and crashing has become progressively worse with just a few weeks of sporadic usage. Heavy loads tend to accelerate the deterioration.
The RMA process looks bleak with so many users having received defective replacement cards, some multiple times.
Their 1080 launch was botched with improper RAM cooling and ensuing RMAs/having to send out replacement memory thermal pad kits. I went through 2 cards that died on day 1 myself.
I seem to recall their 3080 launch also being a bit bumpy...
In my case they aren't paying for cards to be sent back and fixed, and so far there's no concrete evidence it's a small/limited batch of cards affected.
Honestly, outside of those who actually benchmark their cards, most people would probably just live with slightly reduced performance and very noisy fans (none the wiser), so it's hard to tell how widespread the problem actually is.
Mine appears to be finally giving up the ghost, starting to get weird artifacts on my screen.
It’s a testament to how good of a card it was though - up until LLM’s hit us, I never felt the urge to look for something else. It would drive my 49in monitor and run anything I cared to play at good settings.
Tbh at this point, I consider it a bit of hostile meme remaining from ATI times.
Driver support/reliability isn't something one could quantify in any meaningful way, as both companies have had plenty of botched driver releases [0] over the decades of their existence.
I bought one after the big stability update and it was causing random hard reboots while sitting on the desktop (so not a power issue). May have been a hardware issue with the card. This was on a Windows system which previously had an Nvidia card which anecdotally seemed to cause issues, though I did run Display Driver Uninstaller in safe mode, etc. That being said it's hard to tell how many people actually had issues given how vocal people are when they do. I'd expect the vast majority of people had no issues.
Also the previous generation RX 580 cards were very stable.
Looking on eBay, it looks like I could sell that $290 card for about $500...
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