Why do many people refuse to use AMD, while others claim issues with drivers and roughness?

[mohamed.97]

Can someone tell me what is wrong with their products? I've used even their less acclaimed products like the FX9590 and HD60-something, and the RX480, which wasn't bad at all. I never encountered any issues with them. In fact, I enjoyed AMD's software more than Nvidia's 3060, which feels outdated, and I experienced far fewer blue screens compared to the countless frustrating blue screens with Intel.

[Skkooomer Lord]

I dunno, all I know is my 7900 XTX is awesome.

https://youtu.be/Q3mHa6--♥♥♥?si=c5hGKpWAkcg_jjc5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aS03HTsJY0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efNuEn0iz1k

[Alesta]

I switched to AMD because Nvidia 60 and 60ti cards even in 5000 series has 8gb VRAM

Dlss doesnt matter its actually increases VRAM usage thats why i buyed 7800XT.

[smokerob79]

Im glad im seeing a switch....people i have played with for years and people i have built PC's for years are all switching to AMD GPU's and CPU's.....

one just built a 7800x3d system with a 7900xt after finding a 7800x3d on the shelf at a Walmart in Utah for until retail pricing of 350 bucks

another with a threadripper build just got a 7900xtx to replace a 2080ti

another did a 7800x3d with a 7800xt

2 7700x systems with 7900GRE's from micro center

and a 7600x with a 7700xt to top it off in the last 3 months....

all of them had intel NgreedyA systems.....

[Monk]

AMD gpu's are good value, as long as you don't care about raytracing or the extras, or want very high end.

I guess most simply want all the extras and new tech when buying one product every 5 or 6 years on average.

I hope the new upcoming AMD gpu's catch up with their hardware based raytracing, we might then get some bigger and faster developments if there is an actual alternative to nvidia, I just wish they hadn't dropped out from the high end, though I also fully understand why they did, most expensive to develop with the fewest sales and lowest margin isn't the best option for them.

[Zef]

history (muh bad drivers - no longer relevant)

nvidia's overwhelming market dominance - 70-80% market share

risk averse buyers (my previous gpu was nvidia so why risk muh bad AMD driver card)

misinformation ( "AMD sucks", no real reasons given why, they just know Nvidia is better)


Then there is the absolute minority that needs Nvidia for some application, AI development, production work, but make no mistake these are not the regular customers.

[It's Chase]

Lack of features, shorter driver support, drivers can be a bit hit or miss.

[Monk]

İlk olarak Zef tarafından gönderildi:

history (muh bad drivers - no longer relevant)

nvidia's overwhelming market dominance - 70-80% market share

risk averse buyers (my previous gpu was nvidia so why risk muh bad AMD driver card)

misinformation ( "AMD sucks", no real reasons given why, they just know Nvidia is better)


Then there is the absolute minority that needs Nvidia for some application, AI development, production work, but make no mistake these are not the regular customers.

Those are largely all very valid reasons not to buy a product.

[SHAZBOT]

experiences. ive used amd as early as 1.6 thunderbird, it was my baby, but i have to say intel/nvidia has never given me a sad face personally so i tend to stick with those.

also sales, i like to swim with the other fish

intel is the future

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9gXOHLwQJo

[xDDD]

İlk olarak Zef tarafından gönderildi:

history (muh bad drivers - no longer relevant)

nvidia's overwhelming market dominance - 70-80% market share

risk averse buyers (my previous gpu was nvidia so why risk muh bad AMD driver card)

misinformation ( "AMD sucks", no real reasons given why, they just know Nvidia is better)


Then there is the absolute minority that needs Nvidia for some application, AI development, production work, but make no mistake these are not the regular customers.

Pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Especially the history. I hear "muh drivers" in basically every conversation I ever have about AMD GPUs. The person can never actually point out what is wrong with the drivers, just that they are bad for some reason.

[Lord Flashheart]

İlk olarak mohamed.97 tarafından gönderildi:

Can someone tell me what is wrong with their products? I've used even their less acclaimed products like the FX9590 and HD60-something, and the RX480, which wasn't bad at all. I never encountered any issues with them. In fact, I enjoyed AMD's software more than Nvidia's 3060, which feels outdated, and I experienced far fewer blue screens compared to the countless frustrating blue screens with Intel.

I go for performance & value for money.
If the new AMD cards massively improve ray tracing. could be tempted.

[smokerob79]

İlk olarak Illusion of Progress tarafından gönderildi:

There's a number of reasons.

nullable covered one so I won't list that one.

A big reason is that nVidia has been adopting an Apple-like position, much like Intel had in the CPU space before, and much like Samsung has in the SSD space, and you get the idea. They posit themselves as the "premium" brand and people will spend more for it. When a brand has something good semi-consistently compared to the competition, they can use a flagship or halo product to be better than the competition, and then price their lower stuff higher even if it makes the lower stuff worse.

An analogy is imagine two car makers. One has a faster sports car. The same brand has slower or more expensive sedan. The masses will flock to that sedan because of brand. Same thing actually happens in tech. A good example is Samsung SATA SSDs. They're all often poorer choices than their competition these days, but people pay for it for "reliability" FUD, despite the fact Samsung has consistently had issues with its offerings.

Another reason is that AMD has had legitimate times of poor competitiveness. So at times, they simply didn't offer enough to make consumers choose them.

==========

CPUs:

AMD's CPUs lost preference during the late 2000s and especially early 2010s when they just fell so far behind Intel. Ryzen laid the foundation to start turning that around, and with Zen 2 (3000 series) it really came of age and AMD was back. Zen 3 (5000 series) took the performance spot even, and AMD suddenly raised pricing and didn't even put out value offerings in the 5000 series until late in its life cycle. They left the 3000 series to that role. In that time, Intel cut pricing on the 10th generation (a rarity), making it a serious budget winner, which they needed since they fumbled the 11th generation, and then came out with the 12th generation which was their largest gen-on-gen uplift in a long time. AMD brought out v-cache tech and a new generation, Intel also brought out a new generation (and then a refresh of it). In other words, they've been competitive. And it's great. Unless you're stuck in the mid 2010s, there's no excuse to think AMD's CPUs are bad anymore. But people think it because *see nullable's answer*. They're not always better for every budget and what every user wants to do, but they're trading back and forth. Consumer have many options here.

GPUs:

Radeon though? That's one more of a mystery to me. Apparently the best they ever matched nVidia was during the early 2010s (when the CPU division was doing poorly), and then they started losing market share and... it just kept happening. I couldn't tell you why, exactly. One thing I heard (but this may not be true) is AMD gained a lot of that market share precisely by having such high value and low prices... but despite gaining market share, they were losing profit. So that might explain why they seem to merely follow nVidia's pricing lead lately.

==========

My experiences with AMD:

I personally preferred nVidia back then, at least after AMD bought them, but I used them as ATI, and I used them as AMD Radeon in budget roles, but I went nVidia since the late 2000s for my own primary PC so I can't tell you what happened with Radeon. I do recall one game I played had a lot of AMD GPU users claiming crashes due to it. They seemed to cede market share especially during the Maxwell and Pascal era and just never made it back.

I went with Radeon for my last purchase because I used to buy at the x60 range, and watching nVidia cut their product stack down was disappointing. Maybe not a big deal if you're buying an x80, but the x60 fell below an acceptable point due to it in my mind. It become a joke when it used to be one of the legendary all around price/performance options that still had enough performance and specs. Horizon Forbidden West (which is a good port, so the "poor port" excuse doesn't apply here) is being rough on 8 GB cards even at 1080p, and at 1440p even the 10 GB RTX 3080 has issues. It's not the end of the world for them becuase you can lower settings, but that's the crux of the issue, and seven years after my Pascal, I was looking at the RTX 4060 situation and wondering what the heck happened. 2 GB more VRAM than my GTX 1060 had, or a serious price hike on the 16 GB model that just encourages you to spend up more to the x70 instead?

Ironically, I did spend up to that amount, but I went with a 7800 XT since it still had more performance, more VRAM, and a lower price than the RTX 4070. Admittedly... it's been mixed. The performance and specs for the price were unbeatable, but I suffered from the infamous "Black screen" issue with it. If you're unaware, it's the display losing signal, the PC initiating a machine check exception (this tends to be a hardware issue), and restarting. Spent two months trying to rule out other causes in my system to no avail. Did an RMA and the new one had different issues at first... (TDR crash in one game, coincidentally the same game mentioned above that people used to complain about crashes in with AMD, and strange performance in another), until I found out it was the drivers. So I go back one version... and it's good then, right? I was in a "time will tell" spot and it was looking good after months with no issues, but I've had that Black Screen crash again now. It happened with a change in use pattern so there's a chance that the new use did something the drivers don't like... or this one has a hardware flaw too, and I didn't trip it until now because it's far less severe. It's seemingly not an uncommon issue on the 7800 XT, and I'm finding it's not uncommon on new GPUs of many types, but the 7800 XT seems especially prone to having it. I'm pretty miffed I spent extra for a premium brand and model, spent a lot to send it back to RMA insured, and might be looking at doing that again.

So yeah that might be a hardware issue rather than something with AMD itself... but if it's happening more on AMD (I don't know if it is, for reference), it will hurt their image. A lot of people on nVidia's side never tried AMD so they take those experiences to heart rather than risk it. I have an internal saying of "I'll try anything twice" but not a lot of people will do that. A lot of people tend to prefer familiarity when it comes to spending money, and with the sky high pricing of GPUs in particular... I don't blame them entirely.

If these crashes are the hardware and not the drivers though, then I have no complaints with the supposedly bad AMD drivers. More the opposite. Adrenalin is a heck of a lot better than the nVidia control panel was, and if you reject GeForce Experience like many nVidia users do, you're outright missing features Adrenalin just gives and need a whole software suite to match it. I'm excited to see the nVidia App bring nVidia's driver ecosystem out of the Windows XP era. My next purchase, which hopefully doesn't come soon if this one is problematic enough to force a change early, will be whoever has the better price/performance/spec/feature ratio for my uses at the time. I'm not married to brands, even if I have preferences, but an issue with one will make me temporarily avoid it at least. The only next purchase I'm pretty certain of is the CPU will be AMD, because I'm eyeing the 9800X3D. But if Intel's 15th generation comes earlier and has a better offering when the 9800X3D launches (not just in raw performance but in price/performance), I may change that plan.

==========

TL:DR; People are probably stuck in 2014 on AMD's CPUs, and as for AMD's GPUs, nVidia is an Apple-like company that people seem willing to pay a premium for, or stick with out of familiarity/lack of experience with AMD. But they do see the horror stories on AMD. Many of which are real experiences, mind you, but nVidia has its own issues.

mom still uses my AMD 955 from 2010 but my 4670k system has been dead for 5 years.....intel was garbage even back then....FYI without a overclock the 4670k bit the dust as the motherboard is still working with a 4770k on it.....

[Monk]

Such great evidence.

The phenom 2 chips were great, the FX were awful, early ryzen was very slow and buggy, new ryzen is very good, still suffers from dips though, but not anything like older versions.

I don't think nvidia ais anything like apple.

Apple offers nothing really extra or unique for the cost, meanwhile nvidia, has extras and better performance, you are paying for the capabilities AMD simply doesn't have as of now.

As for old cpu's, well, my old 3570k I replaced my 965 black edition phenom 2 with is still going strong for daily computing needs, for the majority of chips, if they die, it's just bad luck.

Even 13th gen is safe if you set it up correctly.

[HIVEmind]

The tables have turned ati I mean and used to have the best pictures. But ever since ada lovelace Nvidia have the best performance, picture quality and physics card all in one. As charlie sheen would say. Winning.

[Mabi]

As a rule, PCs with Intel are more numerous and in various formats and sizes. to buy AMD you had to be specific.

Most of the time even on AMD laptops it doesn't put much effort into it and you often only find its processors even accompanied by Nvidia.

The more serious question, why is Windows 10 still widely used today? or 11?

[Mabi]

Between pros and cons, AMD graphics cards may consume less energy but heat more than Nvidia. In AMD laptops it would struggle for this, we'll see for the 9070.

The ddr5... They brought about their arrival several serious crises for processor competitiveness.
AMD has created super stoves especially with the Ryzen 7000 series, Intel... it's history within a disaster, it can be saved with quantum processors 😏