I would love nothing more than to sit here and tell you guys the AMD Radeon
challenge has been sunshine so that we could all kick Team Green to
the curb once and for all unfortunately
that's just not how it went luckily none of it was see Sonic'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 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 see Sonic 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 see Sonic'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 em 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 in do
maternal was the loading screens at a glorious 120 frames per second
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 do 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
did before I switched up 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 uh 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 want to 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 installed also changing
out a GP 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 get
yeah however my card's temps were always
reasonable so it 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 pci4 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's still it still happens 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 Blues 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 I've
never experienced anything like that before and a restart would always fix it
but shouldn't your PC just not just do that like ah 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 I
work 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 I
think I'm Gonna Keep the card it's actually that much better I I've had one
totally random crash when I was playing uh 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 oh so that 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 yeah yeah and 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 battle bit 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 it's
stable with the Titan RTX okay stable through everything else and when the
drivers crashes it's it's specifically a GPU driver crash every single time okay
PCIe signaling 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 f123 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 going to 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 ah 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 Star field 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
steampunk there was a thought it's like he's playing Borderlands what
Borderlands one yes 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 rev 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 a good thing yeah yeah 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 to say another issue I'm not really able to fix but able to tolerate is just
how mediocre AMD's Hardware accelerated encoder is nvank on team green rocks
amds 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 NVIDIA rocks AMD walks
I mean it's true though it does take forever that's fine I'm at the point
where I'm trying to figure out how to use the 1660 TI that I have in my Nas to
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 LTE store.com Stubby's 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 while 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 8-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
discrete account just to get easy driver updates I also love that it doesn't look
like it's from 2005. it feels moderate just like just like shout out the video
driver panel like not GF 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 2 thousand twenty five hundred dollars 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 yeah 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 anything
okay fine so maybe the power supply wasn't the problem the point is that see
Sonic needs some love again so hey see Sonic 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 see Sonic has a wide range of
products to help get your system performing its best I'm personally
running a prime titanium thousand 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 a specially
competitive compared to Team Green if you're anything like me especially their
last gen 6000 series wow so if you want to 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 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 want to Hardline your break again I'm not going to go Hardline anymore oh
great tubing melted yeah yeah yeah his computer is dead again by the way yeah
yeah