AMD commits to better support for Ryzen Mobile graphics drivers in 2019, hands off responsibility to OEMs

[Redaktion]

AMD posted a response to a common complaint from Ryzen-based laptop users on Reddit earlier this week, stating that the company would better support graphics drivers for Ryzen laptops starting in 2019. However, AMD plans to work with laptop OEMs and depend on them to release device-specific graphics drivers twice a year. The response garnered further criticisms of what many see as a lazy blame-shifting solution.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-commits-to-better-support-for-Ryzen-Mobile-graphics-drivers-in-2019-hands-off-responsibility-to-OEMs.366931.0.html

[Lucas]

That's why it's hard for me to trust AMD in any hardware. I've been through this when I had a laptop with X1400 and driver updates were neglected, to say the least, contrary to Nvidia.

[jeremy]

That's why it's hard for me to trust AMD in any hardware. I've been through this when I had a laptop with X1400 and driver updates were neglected, to say the least, contrary to Nvidia.

I had the same issue, with the HD6630M GPU in my Sony Vaio S 13". Sony only released three drivers for Win7, and one for Win8.0. Towards the end, a number of us on the NBR forums were INF modding and force installing newer AMD Radeon drivers, but those started being incompatible pretty quickly. I then made the mistake of winning a Nvidia GTX570, which broke ~10 years of my ATi Radeon continuity. I was going to sell the card, but I decided to give it a try.

With the Nvidia card, games didn't CTD when exiting, random game glitches (lazy game devs, amirite?) didn't occur, BSODs were no longer commonplace. I had long believed the old adage "Nvidia drivers are no better than ATi/AMD drivers, anything you hear is Nvidiot fanboi nonesense," but I then realized I was the fanboi idiot. I had drunk the "Team Red" KoolAid for almost a decade, and believed it.

I ditched my Crossfire desktop setup (2x HD5870s - technically faster than a single GTX570. Technically faster) and have never, ever purchased an AMD laptop since.




To me, this is more of the same from AMD. Blaming the OEMs for not doing AMD's work. I remember Nvidia trying a pilot program to deploy Nvidia reference drivers, now, its commonplace to just get Nvidia drivers from Nvidia, bypassing any OEM interference. Intel's website to this day, has instructions on how to bypass OEM restrictions when installing Intel IGP drivers. AMD? We, the fans and consumers, were left out to dry. It seems like nothing has changed in the past 7 years.

A classmate purchased an Acer AMD Ryzen laptop 1.5 months ago, installed Fedora, and quickly found there were no Ryzen APU drivers that worked well in Fedora (also a number of other distros he tried). This was almost a year after Ryzen APU launch. I haven't kept up with him, but I know he reverted back to Windows 10, just to get working drivers.

I'm willing to put up with a lot, but nothing I've seen has been able to draw me back to AMD.

[Ale]

@jeremy and @Lucus - I don't think anyone thinks AMD drivers are ideal (though they have gotten a ton better ever since they dumped catalyst). That said, before you go spouting how Nvidia is better, how about my counter experience.

I bought 3 laptops with Nvidia graphics in them, all 3 different models. (On for myself, one for a relative and one as a gift). About 1 year later, all 3 died within 2 months of 1 year warranty ending.

It was later revealed that Nvidia knew that their laptop GPUs were defective. They then told the OEMs to set fan speed beyond 100%(shortening fan lifespan) and that they would pay the OEMs for any laptop that failed within warranty.

We ended up in a class action lawsuit and we "won". I put that in quotes because Nvidia teamed up with our class action lawyer against us. We were suppose to get our laptops exchanged with equivalent or better laptops as per the settlement. And Nvidia set aside 200 million fund to cover it and lawyers got 13 million out of it.

Sounds good at first, but then they released that they will be replacing out 1000+ dollar laptops with NETBOOKS! We complained and our lawyers took Nvidia's side. So we filed an appeal using another lawyer. Nvidia and our old lawyer brought in this expert who told the tech illiterate judge "these old computers are old single or dual cores, this netbook has a new dual core, so this netbook is actually better! See this benchmark of microsoft word(I kid you not) at how much better the netbook is!" and judge bought that BS and declined our appeal. It ended up with everyone combined only taking 10 million dollars worth. (Of course nvidia bragged how they care about their consumers setting aside so much money and our old lawyer was humble enough to say they only took 5% of the money! How nice of them when in reality they took more than everyone combined!)

But sure Nvidia is a decent option if you plan to replace your laptop every year(They'll find some way to make it work during warranty). After that, be ready to bend down and be screwed. Because when your laptop does fail, and you "win" that class action. Your lawyer WILL betray you.

/end rant

[Lucas]

Are you talking about the 8400/8600 geforce series? I'vechad a Dell affected by those chips and since I don't live in the US I ,,only" got an extended warranty. After a replacement the XPS is still running. Even though Nvidia is not perfect, like most companies which care about revenue, it has better long term support and until AMD fixes theirs, I will not consider them as a viable option.

[Ale]

@Lucas - The Geforce 8 series was part of the issues, but as they were newer, their issues were not as bad. I had an earlier Geforce 6 series. Which had much more severe.

In the case of Dell, they did their own warranty replacement out of their pocket which was independent of the settlement.

Speaking of Dell, I did also have an XPS13 at work which used either Geforce 8 series or 9. It gave me a lot of issues with BSODs. They did a board replacement which helped a lot but it still happened from time to time. But later drivers did fix most of it about 3 years later.

And as for who gives better long term support, I'd say AMD does. If you look at benchmarks over time. AMD cards improve much better over long term  Nvidia cards.

BTW, I still buy Nvidia for desktop if I get a really good deal (My ban is on laptops, for Desktops I like eVGA a lot). But all else equal, I prefer AMD mostly because I don't want to give Nvidia a monopoly (we all lose then). And Nvidia does a lot of crappy proproietary things such as the expensive G-Sync instead of the cheap FreeSync. CUDA over OpenCL. GamerReady and etc. Competition is the only way to insure that consumers get the best for the best prices. (I'm in no delusion AMD would act the same if they were in Nvidia's position, but NVidia's position is a bit too big at this point and that isn't good at all)

One thing I did hate about AMD was Catalyst drivers, but with Catalyst gone, I have no complaints.

[Lucas]

I agree on the monopoly topic, but I would stay with Nvidia since I use laptops mostly and AMD uses a lot more power and thus heat. As fir the performance boists U want my GPU to performtonit's fullest fron launch, not years later as there is magic button to enhance it, just unoptimized drivers. As for G-sync vs Free Sync, the first performs better ob lower franerates while the other us disabled entirely so that answearsbthevquestikn why one rewuired more r&d and is more expensive. AMD did a great job with Ryzen but they are again going for the ,,more cores is better" approach with which I do not agree, at least for gaming, programming and general use. We'll see what the future brings.

[Ale]

@Lucas - Looking around, I don't see anything that shows AMD GPU laptops use more energy than Nvidia. And looking at a few random laptops, the AMD ones seem to be cooler (though part of that may be due to the flexibility AMD gives to OEMs). I do know that Intel CPUs have better battery life than Ryzen due to drivers needing more optimization. But on the GPU front, I see no such issue.

As for optimization for GPU drivers, yes and no. One part is that Nvidia like Intel has been known for forcing developers onto their platform that optimizes their own hardware out of box while slowing down competitor hardware.(again, a product of their monopoly position). That said, it is easier for AMD to support their hardware long term due to GCN architecture. In comparison, Nvidia stops optimizing older GPUs because they have a new architecture every generation which makes it harder to support fully.

GSync does not perform better than FreeSync, the reason why Gsync is more expensive is because it has proporietary components from Nvidia while FreeSync follows the VESA standard. While it is true that LFC is not included in all FreeSync monitors but is included in GSync monitors.  But you can still buy a FreeSync monitor with LFC for cheaper if you want to or you can not buy it if you don't care about it. You also have much more flexibility with FreeSync as it can be used over VGA, DVI and do adaptive sync over HDMI.

For gaming, as of Vulkan and DX12, more cores are better. For productivity,  unfortunately since most programming languages have  been made with single core or 2 cores in mind (many old programming modules are linear). But new code that uses Promises would be able to scale multicore performance much better. And  now web browsers are also taking much better advantage of multiple cores with their recent updates like FireFox Quantum.

[Lucas]

Good arguments, I have some rrading to catch up on it seems. Intel and nvidia will be my first choice for laptops but I will certainly consider AMD for desktop builds.

[Dan6erbond]

Really sickening that not a single tech news outlet decided to credit the people that actually triggered the response. As you said on your own: AMD did absolutely nothing with this response, they just tried to sooth the community. At least link to one of the threads that triggered AMD's response...