It's been just under a year since I upgraded my GPU from an RTX 3080 to an RX 9070 XT. It's the first time I've gone with a discrete Red Team GPU in my main workstation, and in terms of its raw performance, I've been thoroughly impressed. The Sapphire NITRO+ card I chose isn't just a pretty face, either; the temperatures are rock solid, and it has handled my jump to 4K well, all things considered.
But despite that, I can't shake this feeling that I miss my RTX GPU. You might think it's because of its ray-tracing performance, the juiced-up OC BIOS with a ridiculous power limit from EVGA, or its DLSS bells and whistles, but it's got little to do with any of those things. The driver stack for AMD is by far the weakest part of their GPUs, and while it doesn't make the card unusable, it certainly makes me miss my old, stable, and safe Nvidia drivers.
For the most part, my Radeon experience has been positive
Great performance for the price
When looking at performance numbers, my jump from the RTX 3080 to the RX 9070 XT has been worth it, especially after I made the switch to 4K from 1440p. I wasn't struggling for frames with my old card, but the boost in VRAM and extra raster headroom certainly helped performance stay stable.
The initial install of drivers and software was smooth, and unremarkable, and for all its faults (which I'll get to later, don't worry), the Adrenalin software is generally fine to work with. The tuning controls are a little deeper than surface level, allowing you to tune power limit, fan curve, and voltage offset easily, but don't allow for any deeper tweaking. The per-game configurations work as expected, and while I don't use them in any meaningful capacity, the overlays are easy enough to read and use.
The driver issues are becoming difficult to ignore
Adrenalin hard to live with
While everything was generally fine for a few months, I started experiencing very odd issues with the Adrenalin software after some period of use. At first, it was just small, annoying things, like having my tuning settings reset upon every restart. This is well documented on forums and Reddit, and doesn't seem to have a solid fix I could truly nail down. Not a big deal, though.
Then, I began experiencing full driver timeout crashes when I put my system under any kind of load, and it would happen at random. Suboptimal, but running at defaults instead of with an undervolt seemed to help the issue in the interim. This driver timeout issue is also well documented through multiple generations of cards, and even when I tried to investigate the cause through logs, I hit dead-ends everywhere.
And now we've arrived at the present day, where these driver timeouts seem to occur no matter which settings or driver version I try. They happen without warning, regardless of type or amount of load, and provide no meaningful logs to troubleshoot. The only solution I've found is to install the driver without the Adrenalin software attached, and that leaves me without the ability to properly tweak my card.
I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Nvidia's drivers
I can't remember if I ever had a driver timeout on the Green Team
Upon the launch of the RTX 50 series, Nvidia's drivers were an absolute mess. Black screen issues and crashes plagued the launch drivers, but those issues have been mostly solved to this point. On my RTX 3080, which is currently in my HTPC, everything runs rock solid, even with a pretty significant undervolt. The EVGA FTW3 card is well-built and likely binned well for this, but the NITRO+ AMD card should also be.
I honestly can't remember having a single driver timeout or crash during the time I owned my RTX 3080, and if I did, it was likely that rolling back to a previous, known-good driver version would solve the issue. The same cannot be said for my Radeon card, which seems to have issues regardless of driver version.
Additional features like DLSS 4.5 also strike me with FOMO
It has more to do with availability of FSR 4 more than anything
While they're not the primary reason for missing my RTX card, missing out on things like DLSS 4.5 features also have me feeling FOMO. FSR 4 is great, but the actual list of games its supported in is still pretty small. DLSS 4.5 has hundreds of games available for it, and even though my GPU wouldn't be able to harness all the features of the new version, the upscaler itself is functional on my older card.
I'm still satisfied with my Radeon GPU
Don't get me wrong, I'm still happy with my purchase of an AMD GPU, but I'd be lying if I said there weren't things I missed about owning an RTX card. The drivers are squarely at the top of that list, despite it being a sore spot at the launch of RTX 50 series. I wouldn't be as upset if these issues were relatively new, but judging by forum posts and Reddit threads, my problems are not unique, and have been around through a couple of generations of Radeon hardware.
