On Linux all the drivers are included with the kernel. No software to manage either, it just works. Nvidia drivers need to be installed separately on Linux and are generally very low quality with performance and technical issues.
Idk about Windows though, never used an AMD GPU on it personally. My Nvidia GPU has always worked perfectly on Windows.
So I guess it’s just your OS choice really.
That’s bizarre, I have the opposite experience ha. Nvidia drivers with my 1660 produced buggy video output nearly 100% of the time, even idling on desktop would randomly cause black bars to appear every few frames. I tried 3 different driver versions but each one broke something different. Both X11 and Wayland sucked. On the Nvidia forums the devs were basically apologizing and saying it would be fixed later in these huge threads of people documenting similar issues. To my knowledge a lot of my issues still exist with my hardware.
My 5700 worked flawlessly OOTB without any tinkering. Open-source MESA drivers were packaged with my Debian 12 install and they have never stuttered or bugged out on me. I literally do not even think about my GPU setup anymore, it just works and required 0 configuration on my end.
Did you just have a different hardware setup? Was this a brand new release of an AMD GPU that just didn’t have good driver support on your distro yet?
Sounds like they probably last used AMD devices shortly after the ATI acquisition, and yeah for awhile the drivers were absolutely shyte (as they were with ATI).
The second possibility it’s - as you mentioned -, running bleeding-edge (i.e. trying to run a video device just released). I got a 6900XT early when they came out and drivers were a bit finicky for maybe the first 1-2mo. I think I had to manually download the firmware files to get it running. However, I’ve had the same issues - or worse - with other vendors in that regard.
Apart from that, then anything in the last half decade shouldn’t require any driver installs and minimum to no tinkering. It’s all
Nah. Nothing weird or wrong about my setup.
Everything worked fine with my Nvidia 660ti. When I switched to an RX 580, I had issues with refresh rates and Freesync (that I can remember, it’s been awhile and I don’t care to keep all this recorded.) Some versions of drivers would fix issues but cause others. Some versions required certain configurations to fix issues but cause others. It was a mess.
Switched back to the 660ti, no issues. Bought a used 1070, no issues.
Haven’t gone back to AMD since that horrendous experience, but maybe they’ve improved.
I think it’s sad how few people here are willing to acknowledge that AMD’s drivers may not have been adequate for most users even if they worked for them. I bought AMD listening to ya’ll, and was horribly disappointed.
I guess that’s part of why theory is no substitute for experience.
