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This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why a

This is still so mind-boggling to me. AMD should be in a good financial position now that Zen was such a success, and that their GPUs are catching up too. Why are their drivers still a Clusterfuck across the board after all these years? Why not throw more manpower at the problem? I'm sure even if their GPUs were twice as fast as Nvidia's, everybody would still buy team green because it's better to have a card that works than a broken piece of garbage. We tried to get an MI50 to work reliably at work with KVM, but that thing was a complete dumpster fire. A colleague just bought a 7900XTX for gaming and spent days getting it to work. This included three Windows reinstalls. And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case. It only gets worse from there. Compute on Linux? Lol. Now last time this topic came up, someone claimed that AMD is pretty much at their limits production wise, and there are a few unnamed large companies buying loads of their cards for compute and cloud gaming, and AMD basically has engineers dedicated to making sure things work exactly for their use case, so they don't have to really care about the rest. Sounds pretty wild, but not completely unrealistic...

hedora 3y ago
I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  Yeah, I’ve always bought AMD for this reason since some really bad experiences with Nvidia cards.
- amlib 3y ago
  AMD GPU support in linux is a bit of a flip flop. Some generations seem to get a lot of love and work really damn well (sometimes with better and broader support than the windows drivers) like RDNA2 and most Polaris cards. Others such as Vega and specially now RDNA3 are a shitshow with a lot of things just broken.
  - tyfon 3y ago
    I ran vega 64 in linux for 3-4 years, it was really nice. It also worked without bugs with proton, the 3060 I have now gives me a lot of artifacts like incorrect lightning and even X crashes once in a while. I'm considering switching back to an AMD card due to this.
  - gcoakes 3y ago
    I used a Vega64 for years and just bought a 6000 series. Both work great on my machines. I'm typically running the bleeding edge kernels though, so that might explain it a bit. I would think Ubuntu is probably the most supported if you opt for the OEM kernel.
- aseipp 3y ago
  It really depends on the card. I have an old RDNA workstation card in my server and the driver was a real crapshoot. I eventually started delaying updates to newer kernel releases (which would fix other bugs!) because there would be regressions of various kinds. Graphics under Linux is still a bit painful after all these years. At least Nvidia finally open sourced their driver too, I guess. And Intel is still open source. But it still sucks a bit I think unless you do research.
- izacus 3y ago
  Why are you talking about screensavers in a CUDA thread though? You can't compute on a fancy screensaver animation, you need a working CUDA driver that nVidia provides for that.
  - kbenson 3y ago
    Likely because this subsection of the thread seems more focused on drivers in general and less on CUDA, if the other replies are anything to go by.
derstander 3y ago
> And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case. I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but the best supported case for AMD is gaming via console: AMD provides CPU/GPU for the current generation of both the XBox and PlayStation consoles. Which suggests to me that they shouldn’t have too much problem supporting their hardware on Windows or Linux. But that’s outside of my area of expertise. Maybe they need to spend too much engineer effort and time supporting the consoles at what’s probably a pretty thin profit margin?
- Narishma 3y ago
  The previous generation as well, and the one before for Xbox 360 and Wii, and the one before for Gamecube.
- zamalek 3y ago
  My 6900xt is flawless for gaming on Linux (sans RT support). The big issue is other use cases.
roadbuster 3y ago
> Why not throw more manpower at the problem? Oh, of course.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  No, really. We've worked with Intel, Nvidia and AMD... Well for the latter, at least tried. We're not a big fish, but response time and quality of responses were stellar with Intel and Nvidia. AMD took weeks and even when asking very precise questions with lots of technical background, there was a lot of "hmm dunno have to find someone who'd know" kind of answers, and it would often take one to two weeks for a single reply. And that's not even dev work, it's just tech support for your own damn stuff you're trying to sell. You can't seriously tell me that's not something they could fix.

hedora 3y ago

I've had the opposite experience under Linux. My old nvidia 570's drivers went into severe bitrot. Basic stuff like screensavers and desktops broke badly, and games were flaky. The card is still more than powerful enough for what I used it for. I switched to AMD, with open source drivers. I get windows-level performance on AAA (and indie) games in steam, and zero compatibility issues with the rest of the Linux ecosystem.

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
Yeah, I’ve always bought AMD for this reason since some really bad experiences with Nvidia cards.
amlib 3y ago
AMD GPU support in linux is a bit of a flip flop. Some generations seem to get a lot of love and work really damn well (sometimes with better and broader support than the windows drivers) like RDNA2 and most Polaris cards. Others such as Vega and specially now RDNA3 are a shitshow with a lot of things just broken.
- tyfon 3y ago
  I ran vega 64 in linux for 3-4 years, it was really nice. It also worked without bugs with proton, the 3060 I have now gives me a lot of artifacts like incorrect lightning and even X crashes once in a while. I'm considering switching back to an AMD card due to this.
- gcoakes 3y ago
  I used a Vega64 for years and just bought a 6000 series. Both work great on my machines. I'm typically running the bleeding edge kernels though, so that might explain it a bit. I would think Ubuntu is probably the most supported if you opt for the OEM kernel.
aseipp 3y ago
It really depends on the card. I have an old RDNA workstation card in my server and the driver was a real crapshoot. I eventually started delaying updates to newer kernel releases (which would fix other bugs!) because there would be regressions of various kinds. Graphics under Linux is still a bit painful after all these years. At least Nvidia finally open sourced their driver too, I guess. And Intel is still open source. But it still sucks a bit I think unless you do research.
izacus 3y ago
Why are you talking about screensavers in a CUDA thread though? You can't compute on a fancy screensaver animation, you need a working CUDA driver that nVidia provides for that.
- kbenson 3y ago
  Likely because this subsection of the thread seems more focused on drivers in general and less on CUDA, if the other replies are anything to go by.

derstander 3y ago

> And that use case is gaming on Windows, which supposedly is the best supported case. I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but the best supported case for AMD is gaming via console: AMD provides CPU/GPU for the current generation of both the XBox and PlayStation consoles. Which suggests to me that they shouldn’t have too much problem supporting their hardware on Windows or Linux. But that’s outside of my area of expertise. Maybe they need to spend too much engineer effort and time supporting the consoles at what’s probably a pretty thin profit margin?

Narishma 3y ago
The previous generation as well, and the one before for Xbox 360 and Wii, and the one before for Gamecube.
zamalek 3y ago
My 6900xt is flawless for gaming on Linux (sans RT support). The big issue is other use cases.

roadbuster 3y ago

> Why not throw more manpower at the problem? Oh, of course.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
No, really. We've worked with Intel, Nvidia and AMD... Well for the latter, at least tried. We're not a big fish, but response time and quality of responses were stellar with Intel and Nvidia. AMD took weeks and even when asking very precise questions with lots of technical background, there was a lot of "hmm dunno have to find someone who'd know" kind of answers, and it would often take one to two weeks for a single reply. And that's not even dev work, it's just tech support for your own damn stuff you're trying to sell. You can't seriously tell me that's not something they could fix.