this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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AMD seriously needs to start taking driver support seriously.
Both my dad and myself have (begrudgingly) moved to Nvidia because we both got hit with constant driver timeout crashes. My dad also got rapidly flashing black and green screens countless times. I use my PC for work purposes so that kind of crap is unacceptable; I need absolute reliability that I can depend on.
Myself and so many other customers would love to see better bang-for-buck options in the GPU space like the good old days, but AMD really needs to sort this shit out. Intel has the excuse of being a brand new player that is working entirely from scratch, but AMD has been in the GPU game for decades and should know better. I mean, christ, their CPU division is basically printing money right now so they absolutely have the resources to fix this.
That's been an issue for them in the past, but not recently. Last I heard, the quality of their drivers has improved allot from two generations ago.
I game on an all-AMD Linux (Fedora/KDE) rig, and I haven't had one crash with any game that I play (via Steam/Proton).
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IDK if people over exaggerate but I honestly had more issues with NVIDIA driver on GTX 1080ti and RTX 3060ti than I had with my RX 6800 XT.
All issues could be mostly resolved with workarounds on both AMD and NVIDIA. The NVIDIA issues were actually more annoying as I had issues outside of games.
In conclusion, all GPU vendors have issues. NVIDIA is not the perfect guy, people just learned to ignore their issue or work around them.
You're not wrong (as someone who has owned both cards) but lets be honest here, two generations ago AMD had HORRIBLE drivers/support, like epic-level WTFness bad.
They had a hole they dug themselves into to get out of, and I believe they have, and then some. But they are still battling that negative rep from that time. Some people still see them in that "hole", flailing about, which is what I was initially pushing back against with the OP, to say that AMD is no longer in that hole.
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Same. My 6700XT is solid as a rock playing games through Proton and doing a bit of light AI work on the side.
I hope you’re right. That is good news if true.
I had pretty much no driver issues either with my RX 580, Vega 64 and now 6950XT on Windows. The only issue I had was with audio sometimes being garbled on my Vega 64 in shadow recordings but I had worse issuss with Nvidia causing video corruption back when I was using a GTX 960 and 970 so I'm not sure if it's even a GPU issue.
Well I don't game on Windows, so their Windows drivers could still suck. But I used to on my RX 6800 XT before switching to Linux, and I did not have driver problems with Windows at all.
My son had a 5X00 gen card, and he can't wait to get away from AMD because of driver issues he's having all the time, when playing LoL in Windows. I'm having a hard time convincing him to make his next card AMD because of that, even with all of the current Nvidia shenanigans going on. So, I do get where you're coming from, drivers wise.
But all I can vouch for reliably is that my all AMD rig with a RX 6800 XT card works great, no driver issues/crashes. My biggest headache is sometimes having to select a different version of Proton for when I'm playing a game (thank god for protondb.com).
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I dual boot and can confirm the drivers on Windows are perfectly fine (I have a 7800XT). There is still a jank factor with the included gui and you have to stop windows from auto "updating" (actually a downgrade) the graphics drivers because windows sucks ass.
Can confirm. Have been using AMD since the HD5000 series day, always on Windows, never had an issue with the drivers.
I have had issues with drivers on my 6900XT—either freezes in Fortnite or stutters in Delta Force with the latest drivers. Rolling back to 24.8.1 has largely fixed the issues.
What does that have to do with AMD's driver support? AMD's Linux Vulkan driver (AMDVLK) was so late and bad that Red Hat and Valve had to make their own (RADV), which is the default in Fedora and SteamOS. AMD's first party drivers are still garbage.
FYI, you can run RADV in Windows using an experimental patch: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/29945
As I mentioned in my comment you replied to, I use Linux, and not Windows, so can't speak (today) towards AMD's Windows drivers.
For me, I let Linux worry about the drivers, so I don't have to.
Best decision I've ever made, PC build wise. So nice to get away from NVidia and not worry about graphics drivers.
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You're missing my point. AMD's official Linux drivers are ALSO garbage. Try it. Go install AMDVLK and check how well games work. You're almost certainly using RADV, which was not developed by AMD.
I'm using whichever one Proton/Steam uses. I'm assuming its AMDVLK because its the 'official' one. I think I remember RADV being switched away from in Proton a year or two ago, but don't hold me to that. I checked my enviromental variable "AMD_VULKAN_ICD" but didn't see it set to anything.
Whichever one I'm using, I get 120fps on my 3D games (playing No Man's Sky and/or Baldur's Gate 3 on the second monitor while typing) running them through Steam/Proton without a hiccup. Never a problem.
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The default driver used by Fedora is RADV. Steam/Proton does not choose your Vulkan driver. That's why your games run well - you aren't using the one made by AMD.
Alright. I remembered them switched around, but there was a migration a year or two ago from one to another, default wise.
Help me with >THIS< then?
This suggests that both (most/all??) are bundled, and you could even run one program in one driver and another program with the other driver.
This was mentioned in that post/thread as well ...
Its also mentioned that environmental variables can be set at runtime to switch on the fly (at program startup) which is used. I just don't know if Proton does any of that for you under the covers at startup or if you have to manually add the parameters to the properties for the Steam game to force it to use another one.
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I don't think AMDVLK is even installed by default with Fedora. It can definitely be installed, but there's not much reason to as it's a really bad Vulkan driver.
From that link I sent you it seems like it has to, because it's the low-level driver, and then RADV is a user space one that calls into it.
That's basically what I'm asking you about, if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying it's an either or, but that other comment that I linked you states that they're both needed, one is system level, and the other is user space level.
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No, AMDVLK is also a user space driver. You're confusing it with AMDGPU, which is a kernel module.
Ah, ok. Thanks.
I'm not gonna lie, if you're having continuous driver timeouts that's probably a personal Windows issue. I had some issues with my 7900xtx until I just fresh installed Windows (despite the install only being a month old) and all those problems magically went away.