GPU Driver stability

[Lefungus]

For what's it's worth, I bought a gigabyte 5600 xt to go along my new ryzen pc. I wanted to try full amd cpu & gpu and eventually enjoy the native linux amd gpu support.
I got it all, black screens & reboots, 100% reproducible crashes during sleep wakeup and even the windows login screen that froze like 80%. Meanwhile, it was stable under linux, but I still need windows.
I endured it for almost two weeks, changing mobo bios, changing gpu bios, changing drivers, testing combinations... Eventually, I found that linux was stable, and windows was stable as long as I was using the generic driver (aka no 3d acceleration).
I lost patience, returned the gpu & switched to the competition. Everything is working now, and I'm relieved because I thought it could be something else, like the mobo or the power.
Anyway, maybe this specific card was a lemon, I don't know, end result I returned it and I'll be very very skeptical to try it again...
It's sad because nvidia is price gouging and i wanted to to vote with my wallet.

 

[Davros]

It's sad because nvidia is price gouging and i wanted to to vote with my wallet.

That's a practice I despise, thank you for at least trying not to reward nvidia for this behaviour.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Argh, well that just sucks if AMD's drivers have regressed. I'm still likely to go AMD for my next card just because NV's drivers keep getting worse and worse.

The latest issue? Once my PC has been on long enough at some point the NV driver will just plain crash when the displays come out of sleep and Windows will revert to the default display driver stack. #%@#$@. It was bad enough that I had to deal with the NV HDMI problems for multiple months before figuring out what the newest NV drivers were fucking up, but now this?

At least it doesn't take down the entire PC. I at least have time to save my work before rebooting but that also means losing work that is in progress and interrupting my work flow. Basically choose between letting a process finish (which could be hours) and suffering greatly reduced workflow (the NV driver crash also somehow makes Windows no longer see my secondary monitor, yay?) or ending the process so I can reboot my computer to continue with my workflow but have to restart the other process. Ugh.

Holy carpe is the 1070 proving to be far more annoying than beneficial at this point since I have so little time to play games. After this the only way I'm coming back to NV is if AMD's drivers prove to be just as bad. At this point I'm so frustrated that I don't even care if the best AMD card is 50% slower than the best NV card.

I've been hoping to hold out until RDNA 2 cards are out but NV's drivers are definitely testing my patience at this point. I'll be super pissed though if AMD's driver's aren't as good as when I still had my R9 290.

Regards,
SB

 

[Kaotik]

I've faced the black screen issue on my 5700 XT so rarely I'm not suffering from it much, but there are couple annoying bugs.
First is that after my monitor goes to sleep for extended period and wakes up, every time I skip ahead in a video or switch the playback rate (many tech videos are much nicer at 1.5x speed) my monitor does mode switch. Can be fixed by starting a game that goes to real (exclusive? For example overwatch works for this, Warcraft 3 Reforged doesn't even though it's se to Fullscreen too) Fullscreen and then exiting it.
Another is that sometimes when a video is playing and you scroll the webpage so part or all of the video disappears, and then you scroll back, part of the video sometimes ends up being green garbled mess
Oh, and something has a memory leak, since every now and then Overwatch crashes reporting video card running out of memory (maybe once a week or so)

 

[pharma]

Another is that sometimes when a video is playing and you scroll the webpage so part or all of the video disappears, and then you scroll back, part of the video sometimes ends up being green garbled mess

Does it happen with all browsers?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Another is that sometimes when a video is playing and you scroll the webpage so part or all of the video disappears, and then you scroll back, part of the video sometimes ends up being green garbled mess

I think this is either an artifact of HTML5 or the video codec that video was encoded with as I get similar behavior at times with my 1070. Albeit more things trigger it than just scrolling down and back up again. YouTube is the worst offender for me WRT this problem. Sometimes it'll do it just opening a YT video in a new tab. Happens in both Chrome and Edge (even before they switched the browser engine to Chromium).

YT makes me think it's the video codec. Older YT videos that haven't yet been re-encoded to the newer codec that Google uses don't seem to exhibit this behavior.

Regards,
SB

 

[Kaotik]

Does it happen with all browsers?

Hard to say since it happens at random and I only use other browsers in rare cases where something isn't working right on Edge (the EdgeHTML version, and yes, I'm holding on to this browser for my dear life as long as MS allows me to, I hate Chromium if for nothing else, for the fact that no-one seems to be able to make nice GUI on top of it, including MS with their new Chromium-Edge. And for the fact that I often have gazillion tabs open and my 16GB can only take so much, Chromium is terrible memory hog)

 

[pharma]

@Kaotik
Might other factors causing the green video artifacts, but have not yet encountered this issue using MS Edge with a 1080. Testing other browsers was likely first on your list so that might not be a solution, but using default driver settings (or reinstalling much older drivers) might be viable tests. Problem with AMD drivers is no installation choice so you get all additional bloatware ... don't know if something you don't use is causing the problem.

Edit: I don't think it's related to drivers but sometimes solutions require looking at them. At times I've had problems and the only solution was to keep restoring from my many Acronis backups until the issue disappeared, then searching to see differences between my current system. It's a PIA, but finding the culprit sometimes out-weights the trouble.

 

[BRiT]

Why no issues brought up about Intel GPU Drivers? Are their integrated GPU drivers absolutely perfect?

 

[orangpelupa]

Why no issues brought up about Intel GPU Drivers? Are their integrated GPU drivers absolutely perfect?

Their driver got 10+ years old bug but they finally fixed it in late 2018 IIRC.

Not all people got that bug, but because I'm a magnet for bugs, glitches, etc with electronic.. Sure, I'm one of the fortunate to got the bug.


The bug: you can't disable CABL despite it wqs disabled in Intel cpanel. To disable it you must replug the power adapter.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Why no issues brought up about Intel GPU Drivers? Are their integrated GPU drivers absolutely perfect?

Don't know if I'd call it perfect as I don't game on my Intel GPU, but it doesn't exhibit any of the general Windows bugs that I get with the 1070. That HDMI cable that started exhibiting problems after a NV driver update? Works perfectly fine with the exact same display with the Intel GPU.

Despite my Intel notebook only ever being rebooted when Microsoft forces a reset to install a critical update, it has yet to crash the display driver when bringing the display out of sleep. Same with various slowdowns, browser irregularities and other things that I deal with on the 1070 depending on driver version. So damn frustrating.

Hell, if I could, I'd use an Intel GPU as the main display driver on my main PC and then have an alternate GPU for gaming, kind of like how the Surface Book 2 handles it. But I'm not about to go out and buy an Intel CPU just for that when I'm quite happy with my Ryzen 3700X.

Also, I'm not sure if the Intel integrated GPU has the resources available to it to drive 2x 4k external displays. The Surface Book 2 can only drive a single external display at 4k due to the limitations of the USB-C connector.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

The only complaints I have about my NV hardware is I eventually had to get two Pascal cards replaced due to some kind of hardware failure that was causing driver crashes. Conjures up thoughts of bumpgate. The replacement cards have been solid for years now though.

Intel stuff serves me fine for what I do with it. That's just desktop usage / video playback. I do occasionally see if they can run games and am usually satisfied with what it can do with older titles. Even ancient games usually work. Like Unreal Engine 1 and LIthtech oldies.

 

[WhiningKhan]

Don't know if I'd call it perfect as I don't game on my Intel GPU, but it doesn't exhibit any of the general Windows bugs that I get with the 1070. That HDMI cable that started exhibiting problems after a NV driver update? Works perfectly fine with the exact same display with the Intel GPU.

Sounds familiar. Our office laptops in general have Intel built-in GPU hardware and haven't had any problems connecting to external displays. Last year we needed a couple of a bit more 3D-capable laptops, different brands but both had an additional 1050GTX. Both have problems working with external displays, sometimes another cable and/or lower refresh rate works. NV HDMI signaling seems really erratic.

 

[swaaye]

Sounds familiar. Our office laptops in general have Intel built-in GPU hardware and haven't had any problems connecting to external displays. Last year we needed a couple of a bit more 3D-capable laptops, different brands but both had an additional 1050GTX. Both have problems working with external displays, sometimes another cable and/or lower refresh rate works. NV HDMI signaling seems really erratic.

Notebook connectivity is usually built by the notebook manufacturer. It's part of the motherboard. Nvidia may not have any influence over the quality of it.

 

[Davros]

Hell, if I could, I'd use an Intel GPU as the main display driver on my main PC and then have an alternate GPU for gaming

I had no luck with Lucid VIRTU under windows 10