AMD Confirms new 7nm Radeon GPUs launching in 2018
33 replies, posted
Having owned a 5870, 6870, R9 280(non-x) and a slew of other lower end ATI/AMD cards. AMD drivers have definitely gotten worse, especially for their older products. The 5870 had multiple bad drivers pushed for it around the GTA V launch and they finished off support by pushing a broken, gimped Radeon Control Center. Linux drivers straight up don't exist for the R9 280 either despite supporting the 7950(Tahti Pro) just fine. The new control center still isn't nearly as functional as CCC, they have removed menus and features because they feel like it or still haven't moved other features to the new menus.
As far as recently bad drivers, most of the reason I even bought a GTX 1080 is because I was so tired of the R9 280 and AMD literally pushing driver updates for whatever game I bought even down to the day to crash said game. Played the Sea of Thieves beta, two days after release whatever very recent driver update caused it to crash. Soon as I got tired of losing hours of progress on that game, I grabbed Destiny 2 on Humble Bundle. Literally the day I bought it they pushed a driver that apparently fixed Sea of Thieves they pushed one that broke Destiny 2. Few days after that, I went to finally enjoy Sea of Thieves again since it didn't crash. When I got back to Destiny like a week later that was now randomly crashing. Supposedly they fixed Destiny 2 crashing which broke Sea of Thieves again and at that point I just straight gave up playing anything other than like CS:GO because crashing to desktop multiple times an hour isn't fun.
I've heard Polaris drivers are massively improved which I'd really hope they are but with every modern AMD card currently being either crazy underpowered for modern games, insanely bad value or near unobtainium. I wouldn't know how they are to deal with. With how poor their track record is with legacy drivers, I really hope GCN doesn't turn into an entirely broken mess since they just stopped selling them like a year and Polaris being spun down for Vega/Navi.
I do really hope AMD comes through and punishes Nvidia for still leaning on their Pascal line up, unless the 2060 and 2050 are competitively priced AMD has the chance to take back some serious market share with their 7nm everything while everyone is still behind. I've been waiting patiently for Zen 2 as I chose to be a X58 holdout instead of going 1st gen Ryzen since the price to performance just wasn't there at all thanks to DDR4.
I've owned a similar lineup: HD 4870, HD 6850, R9 290, R9 Fury, and RX Vega 64.
TeraScale hasn't been supported since basically the R* 2XX series, it's (unfortunately) P dead, and you really shouldn't be trying to play modern games on it. You'd probably run into the same issue trying to play modern games with a Tesla GPU.
I don't know much about the R9 280 Linux drivers, I know support for some of those ranges is a bit weird, but that's also because AMD is pretty rapidly iterating on their Linux stack RN.
As for weird game-breaking updates, both vendors do it plenty, at the same time AMD was crashing for specific Destiny 2 levels, Nvidia cards couldn't even launch the game; in these cases you're basically just trading one problem for another.
Polaris, Vega, and Navi are all GCN lineage cards (Like, they're literally GCN with some tweaks), so expect support for them (especially since they're actively doing enterprise segments cards) to be around for the foreseeable future.
I hope AMD can pull it together, but I think that ship has sailed for the raster space, GCN just isn't a great uarch for modern rendering, it has a huge front-end and ROP bottleneck compared to Nvidia, which wouldn't be so bad if they could push clock, but the GCN shader core is just so fucking fat that they can't do it.
Maybe they can pull shit together with a creative chiplet design for super cheap massive-scale raytracing, but that would require AMD's GPU and CPU division to be doing good at the same time, which never happens.
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