people say that but much of the time AMD has excluded themselves from consideration for other reasons. 5000 series, 7000/200 series, and 480/Vega series all saw major cryptomining booms that raised prices far beyond those of the equivalent NVIDIA cards, so for much of the time they were simply not priced competitively. Like, for almost a year you would have to pay $1000+ for a Vega that barely matched a 1080 while you could get a 1080 Ti for $800 or so.
Also, there's been constant driver problems literally since the ATI days, just recently drivers basically crippled Navi for the entire duration of the product generation, drivers crippled Vega previously, Fiji was a driver mess, Hawaii and Tahiti were not problem free either (the famous "company A vs B vs C" article [0] notes that "company B's drivers are bad and are on a downtrend" and that was during the heyday of GCN, in 2014, those were the "stable drivers" that everyone rhapsodizes about in comparison to the mess that is Navi/Vega). Terascale was a fucking mess too.
AMD products often have weaker feature sets. It took them years to catch up with G-Sync (offering low-quality products with poor quality control for years until NVIDIA cleaned things up with GSync Compatible certification). NVENC is far better than AMD's equivalent (Navi's H264 encoder is still broken entirely as far as I know, it provides less than realtime encoding speed and extremely poor quality), so if you want to stream with AMD you have to use your CPU and crush your framerate, or purchase a much more expensive CPU. AMD has no answer for DLSS, and is just implementing their first generation RTX support with the next generation.
This is what I refer to as the "NVIDIA mind control field" theory. That consumers are just so wowed by the NVIDIA brand that they can't help themselves. The reality is AMD simply has not been that compelling an offering for that much of the time. There has been a lot of poor execution over the years from the Radeon team and prices have often not been as good as people remember them to be.
And a few good products don't change that either. Like, it took something like 8 years of AMD slacking off (Raja mentioned in a presentation that around 2012 thatAMD management thought "discrete GPUs were going away" [1] and pulled the plug on R&D - certainly a very attractive idea given their budgetary problems at the time) for NVIDIA to reach their current level of dominance. AMD has never led the market for 8 years at a time. Maybe a year tops, usually NVIDIA has responded pretty quickly with price cuts and new products. NVIDIA has never let off the pedal the way AMD did (and yes money was the reason but that doesn't matter to consumers, they're buying products not giving to charity).
I've heard everyone complain about drivers for amd, and (though I realize anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all) in my experience those people are full of crap.
I used the Fury(Fiji) and the VII(Vega 20) on linux and windows, and haven't expereinced any of the crazy shit people have claimed. Such as....
>(Navi's H264 encoder is still broken entirely as far as I know, it provides less than realtime encoding speed and extremely poor quality), so if you want to stream with AMD you have to use your CPU and crush your framerate
Where did you hear that? Not even slightly true. I used GPU encoding on both cards (@1080p, 60fps, 5500kbps, 1 second keyframe interval, 'quality' preset, full deblocking filters, and pre-pass turned off because I'm not insane) with zero issues. I would have liked to see more of an improvement in the VII's quality vs the Fury, but I wouldn't go as far as calling it non-functional.
I don't know who managed to get any of those to encode at less than realtime. I've done 1440 at 15500kbps to another machine for re-encoding and I can still play star citizen on High@60 fps with the same pc that's encoding.
And for the record, I also have a GTX 1660, 1080, and had a 770 before the Fury. I'm not fanboying, just relaying my experience.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying Navi is good to go. I'm refuting the general statement "if you want to stream with AMD you have to use your CPU and crush your framerate"
edit3 (lol): I 100% have no way to refute anything navi related. Looks like they completely changed the encoding engine in navi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Coding_Engine#GPUs. Equally so, that chart incorrectly lists the VII as having version 4.0 instead of 4.1, so it may not be that trustworthy. I can't say until I have a Navi card to play with.
I had a 5770 and a 290x and both had periods (2013 for the 5770, 2018 for the 290x) of about a year where the latest drivers would randomly bsod on windows if you played a game on one monitor and watched a hardware accelerated video on the other.
It turns out anecdotes are different for everyone, that doesn't make them full of crap.
> I've heard everyone complain about drivers for amd, and (though I realize anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all) in my experience those people are full of crap.
> I used the Fury(Fiji) and the VII(Vega 20) on linux and windows, and haven't expereinced any of the crazy shit people have claimed. Such as....
I don't know what kind of reply you're expecting. You've managed to use two AMD cards and not have driver crashes? Uh, good for you, but that doesn't mean the rest of us are "full of crap". I've also owned two AMD cards, and for both of them the drivers were flaky, on Linux and Windows. I'm sure they're not broken for everyone, but they were broken for me. Maybe if I bought another AMD card I'd get lucky this time around, but I'm not going to take the risk.
That was an intro to the second half of the comment which exclusively focuses on video encode capability. I Didn't directly refute that driver quality sucks. From the original:
>I'm refuting the general statement "if you want to stream with AMD you have to use your CPU and crush your framerate"
"those people are full of crap" is a pretty direct insult. You shouldn't make that kind of accusation when you're not able to substantiate it or even willing to stand by it.
Also, there's been constant driver problems literally since the ATI days, just recently drivers basically crippled Navi for the entire duration of the product generation, drivers crippled Vega previously, Fiji was a driver mess, Hawaii and Tahiti were not problem free either (the famous "company A vs B vs C" article [0] notes that "company B's drivers are bad and are on a downtrend" and that was during the heyday of GCN, in 2014, those were the "stable drivers" that everyone rhapsodizes about in comparison to the mess that is Navi/Vega). Terascale was a fucking mess too.
AMD products often have weaker feature sets. It took them years to catch up with G-Sync (offering low-quality products with poor quality control for years until NVIDIA cleaned things up with GSync Compatible certification). NVENC is far better than AMD's equivalent (Navi's H264 encoder is still broken entirely as far as I know, it provides less than realtime encoding speed and extremely poor quality), so if you want to stream with AMD you have to use your CPU and crush your framerate, or purchase a much more expensive CPU. AMD has no answer for DLSS, and is just implementing their first generation RTX support with the next generation.
This is what I refer to as the "NVIDIA mind control field" theory. That consumers are just so wowed by the NVIDIA brand that they can't help themselves. The reality is AMD simply has not been that compelling an offering for that much of the time. There has been a lot of poor execution over the years from the Radeon team and prices have often not been as good as people remember them to be.
And a few good products don't change that either. Like, it took something like 8 years of AMD slacking off (Raja mentioned in a presentation that around 2012 thatAMD management thought "discrete GPUs were going away" [1] and pulled the plug on R&D - certainly a very attractive idea given their budgetary problems at the time) for NVIDIA to reach their current level of dominance. AMD has never led the market for 8 years at a time. Maybe a year tops, usually NVIDIA has responded pretty quickly with price cuts and new products. NVIDIA has never let off the pedal the way AMD did (and yes money was the reason but that doesn't matter to consumers, they're buying products not giving to charity).
[0] http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driv...
[1] https://youtu.be/590h3XIUfHg?t=1956