Do you know if the problem was in the driver or in the game, there are some games that worked by accident and years later will fail to work in newer driver/windows versions. I had such a bug with Oblivion,Nvidia and Win7 but for some reason I could play the game under wine in Linux.
not the person you were responding to, but most of AMD's gpu troubles come down to the windows driver being hot garbage. They opened the linux driver enough that others can do a lot of the work for them. Things that don't work under the windows driver usually work great under linux.
Radeon Tech Group's in-house software support has always been abysmal since the days they were called ATI. It's been a chronic problem for both their drivers and their GPGPU ecosystem, NVIDIA can afford more engineers and better engineers to develop libraries that support the ecosystem and to make sure that everything works properly on their hardware. AMD's greatest successes have been when they get the open-source community to maintain and develop something for them.
Yes, AMD is operating on a much smaller budget but in the end it doesn't matter too much to the consumer when they can't play Overwatch for 9 months because AMD has a driver bug that causes "render target lost" errors leading to competitive bans for repeated disconnects, or... whatever the fuck happened with Navi.
Part of what you are paying for when you buy a graphics card is the ongoing software support, and AMD has always fallen flat on their face into a dumpster of rusty used syringe needles in that department.
> but most of AMD's gpu troubles come down to the windows driver being hot garbage.
That definitely needs some evidence to back it up. In my experience, most game rendering code is hot garbage that has been hammered just enough to work on the tested platforms (read: mostly nVidia).
> They opened the linux driver enough that others can do a lot of the work for them.
While there are outside contributions, most work on radeonsi (OpenGL) and the amdgpu kernel driver is done by AMD employees. The AMD Linux driver is better because it has less legacy code, can share more work with other drivers, can benefit from users who are more used to filing detailed bug reports and test development builds, and yes because users and other interested parties (Valve, Red Hat, ...) can contribute fixes for their pet issues - but it is still AMD doing most of the work.
For Vulkan on Linux with AMD graphics the most popular driver is entirely community developed. But AMD's Vulkan driver also works from what I hear.
The need for good drivers was something NVidia 'figured out' really early on in the game.
Oddly, while I agree that ATI/AMD's 3d drivers have ranged from 'ok' to 'dumpster fire', I remember a time when their AIO (i.e. VIVO/Tuner/3d) boards just plain worked (aside from not very good 3d performance.) Perhaps their driver team couldn't adapt.
It was a bug in their Windows driver right after the game was released on Windows, when every other non-AMD and some AMD users (depending on your card) were playing it just fine.
How do you know it was a driver bug though and not a game bug that was only affecting that driver? Even if it was "fixed" by a driver bug that doesn't mean the game didn't grossly violate the D3D/OpenGL/whatever API spec and just happened to work everywhere else.
