No wonder, nv is rubbish lately.

I don't even remember the last time my drivers crashed... maybe in PUBG? But that game is just badly made

And yet I bet people will continue to bash AMD for having bad drivers, LOL. If I had a dollar every time someone said they preferred Nvidia because AMD's drivers suck, I'd be a very rich man.

Pretty much why I am red team now, nvidia makes good hardware but their drivers were always jank to me. You'd think with all the money nvidia has rolling in, they would upgrade their horribly outdated NT based Nvidia Control Panel to the 21st century?

holler:

Pretty much why I am red team now, nvidia makes good hardware but their drivers were always jank to me.

lol

D3M1G0D:

And yet I bet people will continue to bash AMD for having bad drivers, LOL. If I had a dollar every time someone said they preferred Nvidia because AMD's drivers suck, I'd be a very rich man.

Mind share is a horrible thing... once you realize their drivers install faster, react faster and just a better, all inclusive experience. its a no brainer.

deusex:

Good news. So now they need a GPU that is at least as good as 1080Ti.

Oh do they now? You know that the 1080ti is a halo-product that has less than 1% of the total market share, right? Time to wake up, come out of that bubble of yours and see reality for what it is.

holler:

Mind share is a horrible thing... once you realize their drivers install faster, react faster and just a better, all inclusive experience. its a no brainer.

Mindshare probably plays a role but for some of us it's just history. I personally had a X800 Pro and a 4770X2 or whatever the model was for the dual card of that series and the reason why I stopped using AMD cards was because how bad the ATI/AMD drivers were at the time. I swapped to Nvidia and I can't honestly say I've had a problem since. I acknowledge that AMD has obviously made improvements and I'll even go as far as saying that AMD's control panel design is significantly better than Nvidia's at the moment.. but I spend about 5 minutes a month in the GPU control panel, if that.. so simply having a better design isn't going to pull me from the ~20%+ performance I get with my Ti. As for this audit it's interesting but I think people should know it was commissioned by AMD and they only tested Microsoft's HLK "CRASH" benchmark. Whether or not that's a good test of video game stability is up for debate. Personally it kind of reminds me of the old internet "compatibility" web tests where browser vendors would purposely optimize only for the test and not actual website implementation. How do I know AMD didn't go out of their way to fix issues specifically for this test then commission the company to test it? If they had done it with various video game titles than I think it would have been more useful.

D3M1G0D:

And yet I bet people will continue to bash AMD for having bad drivers, LOL. If I had a dollar every time someone said they preferred Nvidia because AMD's drivers suck, I'd be a very rich man.

People cling onto first/old impressions for their life. Usually, once you make a bad impression, you'll never recover from it, no matter how much you do right. Also to be fair, Vega (FE) had legitimately bad drivers - that GPU would've been more positively received if it weren't for the drivers. Exceptions aside, AMD's drivers, though stable, tend to be poorly optimized at release day. By the time they're refined enough, it's kind of too late - reviewers have already made their impression. Meanwhile, Nvidia is almost the exact opposite.

Guess it depends on the hardware used, my R9 290 was rock solid stable in Windows 10 zero issues, then changed to the GTX1070 which was unstable in Windows 10 to the point i was scared to even upgrade the drivers because they introduced even more bugs and issues with every release and relied on this site for peoples opinions on the drivers, but over time they have became pretty stable. However my Ryzen 2500U laptop was horrific to the point in over 30 years i have NEVER seen anything so broken and unstable in all my life to the point the thing would BSOD on ANYTHING that used GPU acceleration on the desktop in windows, games was fine however and have used about a dozen different drivers some fixed stuff while breaking others but the last drivers released 18.7.1 which is not official for the mobile platform have been excellent except one bug. When booting from sleep you get screen tearing a reboot will fix it or if you hibernate then turn back on it is also fine, but it has taken 10 months to bring a stable driver out which in honesty was about how long it took Nvidia to sort their drivers out for Windows 10.

i'm not terribly surprised. but since i made the monitor upgrade to wqhd (2 years ago) i've been on Nvidia as the RX480 (at the time) wasn't quite enough and the Fury cards were unavailable. but the worm has turned, the Vega 56 / freesync is extremely compelling, especially as i want HDR... and the old monitor is perfect for my bedroom lol.

When it comes to stability, I've never had problems with ATi/AMD drivers at all throughout my entire history of owning ATi/AMD cards X800XL, X1950Pro, HD3850, 6850, R9 285 and R9 Fury however, in terms of driver experience from AMD, the 285 was the worst for me, limited driver features, game support was really low - Elite Dangerous in supercruise was broken for a year due to a bug. The only time stability has been an issue is simply though external means such as using 3rd party enhancements or overclocking (or in the rare instance that there is a faulty driver, usually a beta driver, often gets hotfixed rather quickly). @Denial I'm surprised you had a rough time with your X800 Pro, I remember the rendering options that were available in the drivers (with the render preview of the red car or later the water fountain) back with my X800 XL (I wish the render preview wasn't removed from catalyst driver suite later on in it's life during the latter part of Terascale's life) - just stuck everything on highest quality in the drivers and promptly left the drivers alone, no problems at all but your 4770X2 stability is understandable (dual chip cards haven't often been well known for stability and reliability). Sadly though my limited experience with nVidia wasn't good when it came to drivers, I owned a 9600gt in between the 3850 and 6850 - Vista and Windows 7 was incredibly difficult to use with it and not only that but new driver releases often broke support with older titles ending up into a driver recovery (or full restart which was more often the case). Often it was a case of install one driver for one game, install a different driver for another game. Now no doubt it is a different story with modern cards and drivers but it's the experience we gain from owning hardware that will colour our impressions and future purchases.

AMD the drivers are good but the cards not so great. Nvidia cards are good, drivers not so great. Although saying that i've not had a driver crash in like years. So whatever.

Reddoguk:

AMD the drivers are good but the cards not so great. Nvidia cards are good, drivers not so great. Although saying that i've not had a driver crash in like years. So whatever.

AMD cards tend perform a lot better in Linux than they do in Windows* (which says a lot, considering Linux doesn't have application-specific optimization profiles). There's a lot of performance potential in them, we're just not getting any of it. * Assuming the game is ported properly.

Did testers ever mentioned why they ve not included Linux ? If I am not getting wrong It is something like 20 years that ATI/amd has snobbed the penguin os ...It is only now that the trend is starting to change and It is so thanks to the community support

Michal Turlik 21:

Did testers ever mentioned why they ve not included Linux ? If I am not getting wrong It is something like 20 years that ATI/amd has snobbed the penguin os ...It is only now that the trend is starting to change and It is so thanks to the community support

https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/graphics-driver-quality.pdf Here is the link to the report. Here is what they tested: "We define graphics driver stability as a resistance to Blue Screens (BSODs), application crashes, hangs, and otherwise unexpected behavior in the presence of stressful test vectors over a period of time. We used Microsoft’s Windows HLK as a source of graphics test vectors. Windows HLK is a test framework designed to help hardware manufacturers deliver a quality product to users running Windows operating systems. Within Windows HLK, we used the 64-bit variant of CRASH to stress the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). CRASH is a GPU stress test tool that spans 4 hours in length and captures test cases covering S3, display resolution changes, display orientation changes, content protection, and rendering. While 4 hours of stress testing is a good indicator of prominent quality issues, it does not suffice in capturing intermittent stability failures or glitches. Therefore, we ran this test back-to-back around the clock for 12 days for each GPU. This accounts for 288 hours of non-stop stress in a test designed to make the GPU driver fail." They didn't test any games - just the HLK "CRASH" test. Which I'd assume being a Microsoft test isn't available on Linux.

I had AMD, than NVIDIA, then AMD again. Since I have the RX480 I don't remember a single crash caused by the gpu. Maybe in some beta versions of some games that I was testing, but were buggy games, so I can't blame the gpu.Every time I had system or a game crash, it was caused by the operative system (windows 10 64 bit professional). It's easy to check this, looking at the windows event registry after the restart. Finally I decided to install windows 10 2016 LTSB version, that basically turn off all the crap that comes with the regular versions of windows and magically I never had a crash anymore. If some of you are having trouble with the operative system or the gpu I suggest to try this version of windows for a bit. It's the most stable one. I used the regular version for about two or three years and every major update was breaking something.

Recent years have not had an issue with either Nvidia or AMD. I will say this though, though not needed much anymore as a priority I do wish AMD's OpenGL support was better...

vbetts:

Recent years have not had an issue with either Nvidia or AMD. I will say this though, though not needed much anymore as a priority I do wish AMD's OpenGL support was better...

I think they more or less abandonded their proprietary OpenGL driver to focus on open source, and the open source driver on Linux is really great, sometimes performing twice as good as the proprietary driver.

Very simple explanation: they just don`t know how to mess with extended profiles settings for AMD drivers/cards.