I would love nothing more than to sit here and tell you guys
the AMD Radeon challenge has been sunshine and rainbows
so that we could all keep Team Green to the curb
once and for all.
Unfortunately, that's just not how it went.
Luckily, none of it was Seasonic's fault
who sponsored this video, but from hard crashes
to FPS drops to graphical bugs, Luke, Jake, and I
have each run into our share of issues.
But in spite of that, I am not going back
to Team Green, at least not yet, and neither is Jake.
Luke, on the other hand.
Yeah, I went back right after the initial 30 days.
It was a huge problem for me.
But I will say, I retested it fairly recently
and things did improve quite a bit.
I mean, in fairness to AMD, maybe if you'd
had a second Seasonic power supply in your janky setup
instead of that crusty Antec thing,
you wouldn't have had a problem?
I don't think that that was it.
Yeah, neither do I.
But I needed an excuse to shout out Seasonic's quality products
and outstanding warranty terms before we jump
right into my experience.
Unlike Luke, my Radeon issues could either be explained away
by bugs in other software or they were just minor overall.
Like my in-game Steam overlay being transparent here
for some reason, or the graphical bugs
that I encountered playing Tears of the Kingdom
via Vulcan in the Yuzu Switch-Up.
Relax, guys.
I know you can just switch to OpenGL and relax Nintendo.
I did buy a copy.
However, these kinds of small issues are subjective
and an inconvenience for me could be a game breaker for you.
For instance, back in April, I was working on a review
of the ROG Ally at home where I happened to have
a 100% AMD ecosystem at the time.
Threadripper and the 7900 XTX in my desktop
and the AMD Z1 Extreme APU in my handheld.
And while my overall experience with the Ally was great,
I gave it a very positive review,
one of the coolest use cases that I could imagine
for its 120 hertz display was using the power
of my desktop to stream to it, overcoming the limitations
of its mobile hardware.
And as an extra bonus, it dramatically reduces the latency
that normally makes streaming feel less responsive.
It's something that Nvidia has put a lot of development
into over the years with their encoder.
And generally with my Nvidia setup using Steam Remote Play,
it worked really seamlessly.
But then on my all AMD setup, all I could see
and Doom Eternal was the loading screens
at a glorious 120 frames per second, woo!
Now that particular game is working now
and it really is as awesome as it sounds
because it significantly boosts both game performance
and battery life compared to what a mobile device
can do on its own.
But these issues still crop up from time to time.
A month ago, I was having issues where Halo Infinite
would crash almost every time I launched it.
But before it would crash, I was seeing that same problem
where it would stream a black screen instead of,
you know, the game.
And it gets even better or worse,
depending on who you're cheering for
or if you're able to detect sarcasm.
I don't remember the last time that I saw a driver timeout
while taking a screenshot and this blue screen of death,
did you guys see this?
That I got while I was video chatting with my sister-in-law
is possibly the wildest one that I have ever seen
in all my years of doing this.
Once again, this could have just been Windows
or WhatsApp being poo-poo, but on the other hand,
these are simple day-to-day tasks that should just work
on basically any remotely modern PC hardware configuration.
And they did before I switched out my GPU.
Also, you guys saw at the end of the last video
that I'm one of the few remaining Halo Infinite players
and the good news is that it ran great for the most part,
including over the optical cables to my home theater
that gave me trouble during the Intel Arc Challenge.
But then, this is kind of rough timing,
just a month ago, it started giving me random game crashes.
Actually, I shouldn't say random.
They're pretty predictable.
If I launch the game, it crashes.
It's probably the big update that Microsoft pushed out,
but at the end of the day,
the average gamer doesn't care who's causing the issue.
They just don't wanna see it.
Another super cool feature that Nvidia figured out
a while back is allowing you to seamlessly update
your GPU drivers without restarting your system.
They do recommend that you do it anyway,
but I never bother and I haven't had an issue with it
in years.
With AMD on the other hand, I mean, this is a sample size
of like three updates that I installed
throughout the challenge, but that one failure was a doozy.
Considering who I am though, a serial tinkerer,
and the fact that my experience with Nvidia
isn't perfect either,
I don't think I'm gonna be going back.
Not because AMD is better, but because it's fine
and I could probably solve at least a handful
of my problems with a fresh Windows install.
Also, changing out a GPU with hardline tubing
is a royal pain in the butt.
Even if somebody else does it for you.
Speaking of pain in the butt, like Linus,
I also had some driver timeouts and crashes,
but unlike Linus, mine were constant
and I was also having full system shutdown.
Without notice, so I suspected
that it might be power supply related.
Since I am running my GPU outside of my case anyways,
I hooked up a secondary power supply for the Radeon card.
This did improve things, it was still crashing,
but a little bit less, so that's a win I guess, yeah.
However, my card's temps were always reasonable,
so felt like super weird behavior at the time.
After I added an additional power supply
for just the GPU itself and a driver update,
the crashes went down from every two to three hours
to about once a day, which honestly felt downright
functional compared to what I was originally dealing with.
In fairness to AMD though, you're running on a riser,
who does that?
Yeah, that's fair, there's even some issues
with like PCIe 4 cards on risers and stuff,
but I tried two different risers,
it was fine on the Titan RTX,
and I would like to be able to run the card on a riser.
When I wasn't crashing though,
I was still running into various hurdles.
Frames in Tarkov would sometimes go from like 80 FPS
to 20 rapidly, making it an unplayable puke fest.
YouTube videos would randomly just stop
on a particular frame while the audio kept going.
A refresh would fix this every time,
but then it would just happen again like 20 seconds later.
And even just screen sharing and like teams for work
would cause the system to become completely unresponsive
or like a five FPS slideshow,
making everything super laggy and hard to interact with.
As soon as I stopped screen sharing,
boom, it was back to normal.
I'd like to think that that's just Teams
being a piece of garbage or AMD's less mature encoder,
but it still-
It still happened, right?
So I don't know.
I even ran into issues where it would sometimes
just feel like my entire computer was just halting
every two to three seconds.
Restart would fix that too.
Even just typing with Bloons TD6 open was a challenge,
and that's not a demanding game.
Speaking of halting, I also had some sleep issues.
Well, I always have those,
but I mean my computer had some sleep issues.
There seemed to be a random chance after waking up
where it acted like my monitor was set
to like five Hertz or something.
Super weird.
Never experienced anything like that before.
And a restart would always fix it,
but shouldn't your PC just not do that?
Like struggling through frames just to save something,
or if I just really needed to use the computer really quickly
became hyper annoying chores.
Awesome.
Real cool launch experience.
I've worked from home a lot
and needed to actually use my computer during this challenge.
So I went back to the Titan RTX.
However, after a few months, once LTX was over
and we were finally getting around to shooting this video,
I decided it probably made sense to give it another shot.
And I have to say, while it's still not perfect,
I'm at the point now where honestly,
I think it's here to stay.
Like I'm gonna keep the card.
It's actually that much better.
I've had one totally random crash
when I was playing a WoW Classic hardcore with my brother.
That was weird.
It's kind of felt on its own.
And then two in Starfield, technically three,
but one of them is entirely my fault.
I didn't install the launch day driver.
So that one's on me.
I don't count that one.
This is a good thing, but it's also a bad thing
because if you're on the same card you were using before,
it means it wasn't just defective.
Yeah.
Like now I've had it in my system for a month
and there's like two legitimate crashes
and they both happen to be in the same game.
Starfield's been great for me.
Yeah, like I'm not really sure
how to justify my thoughts on this just yet,
but most of my recent crashes don't feel
like they're entirely the GPU's fault like they did before.
Like I've played actually a lot more Baldur's Gate 3
and Battlebit on it since the reinstall than Starfield
and it's never crashed in those games.
And oddly enough, every time a crash happens,
Discord closes and it takes the longest
to recover out of everything.
So I'm just not sure.
I'm not saying that the card is innocent here,
but it feels more complicated than that this time.
I will mention you do have that super sketchy CPU.
Yeah.
Did you forget about that?
No, no, no.
It's stable with the Titan RTX.
It's been stable through everything else.
And when the drivers crashes,
it's specifically a GPU driver crash every single time.
PCIe signaling?
I don't know.
Last of all, I've got a even weirder sleep issue
where my computer is just restarting itself sometimes
when it goes to bed.
All of my apps have some kind of auto saving feature.
So it's honestly not the worst thing for me ever.
But if you're the kind of person
who leaves a bunch of unsaved notepads
all over your desktop, then your mileage may vary.
So it was a really rocky start.
And if I'd purchased this card myself,
honestly, I probably would have returned it,
but I didn't, and now it's mostly stable
and it pumps some serious performance.
So I'm keeping it.
However, you said this yourself,
if you had purchased the card, you would have returned it.
And while Jake's experience was relatively positive,
okay, we'll get to you in a second, Jake, I promise,
we can't excuse these terrible launches, right?
We just reviewed the new 7800 XT.
And while the card seems like a decent buy
in terms of price to performance,
the lab also had issues during testing with the press driver.
Most notably, F1 23 kept crashing
and Cyberpunk had some really bad shadows popping in and out.
So maybe AMD just needs to leave these cards in the oven
for another month or two,
because the software side of things coming out half baked,
and this is based on your own experience,
and our testing is gonna leave a sour taste
in a lot of people's mouths.
Okay, Jake, your turn.
You're done? Yes.
To counter that point, I love having competition
against Nvidia, so it's so hard to be anti-AMD,
but he's right.
Aside from having to employ a drill
to even get the card into my computer, thanks Linus,
this went relatively smoothly for me.
All of the modern games I play,
like Modern Warfare 2, Starfield, and Overwatch,
are a joy when running AMD.
But going back in time to the original Borderlands,
it was a bit of a mess.
Wait, I saw that on my steampop.
There was a the-
It's like, he's playing Borderlands what?
Borderlands 1, yeah. It's Diablo.
Yeah, yeah. Why?
Nostalgia, I guess.
I didn't quite remember
that there's basically no story in that one.
To AMD's credit, the enhanced game of the year version
is not really known for stability,
so I really can't blame Team Red directly.
But while I was crashing, my friends on Team Green weren't,
and I wasn't able to reproduce the issue on my 3080.
The other major issue I ran into during this challenge
actually had to do with FreeSync.
Now, I didn't go out of my way to use FreeSync.
It's on by default, which I guess makes sense.
That's a good thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's a good thing.
People should use it.
But it was my second monitor.
Oh.
So turning it off did seemingly fix
the random blue screens I was getting.
But, ah, it's just, it hurts my brain.
And you shouldn't have to do that kind of troubleshooting
just to play video games.
Exactly.
People shouldn't have to find random Guru 3D and Reddit posts
just to figure issues like this out.
I don't know if it's been fixed in the newer drivers,
but I'm not exactly hurting
for a tear-free experience in Discord.
So it's just gonna stay the same.
Another issue I'm not really able to fix,
but able to tolerate,
is just how mediocre AMD's hardware-accelerated encoder is.
NVENC on Team Green rocks.
AMD's, eh.
So I've gone back to my CPU for all the media encoding I do,
which is annoying because while the quality is there,
I'm sure as floatplane knows, it takes forever.
At the point where, sorry, that was kind of a dig.
Invidia rocks, AMD walks.
Oh.
Yeah, I mean, it's true though.
It does take forever.
It's fine.
I don't know where I'm trying to figure out
how to use the 1660 Ti that I have in my NAS
to do this work instead.
But if you're a streamer, this could be a real issue.
AV1 should help level this playing field,
but nobody really supports it yet.
YouTube? Exactly.
Nobody.
And until then, I guess Nvidia has the leg up here.
One thing I can't fix though, is the high idle power draw.
I was personally seeing a hundred plus,
even 150 Watts while idling, which is a lot,
especially as someone who likes to leave their PC running.
Luckily, we don't pay much for electricity in Vancouver.
It's all hydroelectric.
But if you lived in Europe and you're paying like 50 cents
a kilowatt, that's 400 to $700 per year
in idle power draw alone, not even gaming.
That's a lot of money you could use instead
to buy merch from lttstore.com.
Stubby screwdriver.
Yeah.
Finally in stock.
Yeah.
There have been some recent updates
that apparently have fixed that issue for other people,
but I'm still affected.
I just checked yesterday, 91 Watts at idle.
So sick.
Buyer beware.
Well, my experience was overall far from perfect.
I just want to clarify that overall I'm pretty satisfied.
I wouldn't have been returning mine.
Being able to use the same eight pin power cables was great.
And even though the 16 pin issues
are mostly isolated incidents,
I had zero fear of my cable melting
and burning my computer to the ground.
AMD Radeon software has also been nice to use.
It's a bit cluttered, but still easy to navigate.
And I love that I don't have to register for
and then sign into a discreet account
just to get easy driver updates.
I also love that it doesn't look like it's from 2005.
Yeah.
It feels modern.
Just like, just like shout out video driver panel.
Like not GFE.
Even GFE looks old.
It does shame you for how much you play video games
right on the home screen.
Yeah.
As someone who actually buys their graphics card,
I'm going to continue with AMD this generation.
I just can't justify spending like 2000, $2,500 Canadian
to get an upgrade with team green this generation,
especially when these AMD cards exist.
But I can understand if you chose the opposite.
So I think it's fair to describe the challenge
this time around as a mixed bag.
Jake's experience was quirky, but fine.
Luke's was terrible until he did some tweaks
and then got a driver update
that pretty much made it also fine.
And then mine was also fine.
Okay. It's a less mixed bag than we thought.
And in fairness to AMD,
some of us are running pretty odd configurations
and we should have all done fresh installs.
Yeah, but who does that?
Well, that's a good question.
Not everybody who buys a new GPU does that
and they don't want to.
I mean, running DDU, which we all did,
and then installing new drivers
should be enough to get you up and running
without random driver crashes and timeouts.
Although maybe that's something that could be improved
by making sure you have a proper power supply, Luke.
I have a Seasonic power supply in the system
and I'm running an external power supply.
And I've swapped that out even for like unrelated issues,
but that never actually changed any.
Okay, fine.
So maybe the power supply wasn't the problem.
The point is that Seasonic needs some love again.
So hey Seasonic, and it's true.
Having a good quality power supply
really does make a huge difference to system stability.
If you're having an issue that otherwise
cannot be explained through mortal means,
it's either RAM or it's your power supply.
And Seasonic has a wide range of products
to help get your system performing its best.
I'm personally running a Prime Titanium 1000 watt these days
and it is dead quiet and super efficient.
Coming around then to the performance side
of the AMD challenge.
I was more than happy with the 7900 XTX.
I don't really care that much about ray tracing.
Nothing that I play uses it.
In fact, I play either online shooters,
mostly Halo Infinite, or like casual pixel art games.
Absolutely nothing in between.
And right now, not only is the high end really performant,
but AMD's mid range is especially competitive
compared to Team Green, if you're anything like me,
especially their last gen 6000 series, wow.
So if you wanna give it a shot,
I'm willing to say, come on, give them a chance.
There's jelly beans.
Yeah, it might be some minor issues,
but there's a lot of benefits.
Look, if you're buying AMD,
just buy it like two months after it comes out
and you'll probably be fine.
That's a good advice.
We'll have a variety of well-priced Radeon GPUs
links down below, and also some power supplies
that we consider to be excellent matches for them
from our sponsor, Seasonic.
If you guys enjoyed this video, thank you for watching,
and make sure to check out the Intel Arc Challenge
for even more hilarious shenanigans.
Another thing that's improved over time.
I think you need to do a follow-up.
On Arc?
Yeah.
I don't wanna do it.
I don't wanna hardline your rig again.
I'm not gonna go hardline anymore.
Oh, great.
Tubing melted.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm gonna have that conversation.
His computer's dead again, by the way.
Yeah.