Why AMD/Radeon is Increasingly Dead To Me

Historically, I've been a fan of AMD. They make good, cheap processors. Their motherboard chipsets are pretty solid. In 2006, AMD bought out ATI technologies, and started selling graphics cards.

When I built my latest system, I dropped a nice efficient Radeon R7 in there. I've had persistent problems with the machine, even after changing the motherboard, PSU, hard drives, OS, and cooling. The machine stability seems to wax and wane with the release of the AMD Catalyst drivers.

I thought it was just me, but a friend recently put together a machine with the latest and greatest in AMD/Radeon R9 tech to drive a pair of 4K monitors, and her problems are even worse. There was a time it was stable, but drivers changed, and now the machine won't stay up for more than 20 minutes. Trying to run Elite Dangerous is an instant hard crash now. Maximizing the browser window will crash the machine 50% of the time.

And it's not just us. The anger-boards are filled with similar stories. There are rumors several Games companies threatened to write their own Radeon driver set, because their customers were having so much trouble.

The core problem has been ATI's historic secrecy, born from a time when graphics cards could be nice and proprietary, so long as you'd done the driver deal with Microsoft. Patent litigation abounded, as everyone tried to produce a 'better' anti-aliasing or MIP-mapping algorithm and sued everyone else for pushing pixels in near-identical ways. It was toxic.

Since then, graphics cards have become commodity items. No-one cares, or even wants, non-standard bells and whistles.  What we really, really need is direct access to the inside guts of the graphics card so we can use it for 'GPU compute' operations, to blat textured polygons onto the screen as fast as possible, and to write "shader programs" in a generic way that works on all computers.

No-one wants "Tesselation" or "PhysX" because those are over-specific features that only do one thing, aren't standard, and can be replicated (often better) with general compute.

NVIDIA has been a leader here with their 'CUDA' architecture. For years, they've allowed people to get up all inside their GPU and know exactly how all the blocks fit together, with no surprises. They figured out that in order for people to get best use out of your product, they have to know how it works.

AMD Graphics also seems to use the necessity to install their OS drivers as a way to get "shovelware" onto the users machine. That's a dangerous trend, because it means they're now also in the business of selling their customers. Not just selling _to_ them. That creates a tension, that leads to 300-400 megabyte "driver downloads" filled with all kinds of crap.

300Mb for a graphics card driver? 

You cannot be serious.

Not only that, it's pretty obvious that AMD Graphics are doing deals with the publishers of software and games to "tune" the performance of their applications.

How do I know this? My graphics card crashed again this morning, (not the whole machine, just the card dropped and re-installed) and because I hunt down the causes of these things, I noticed the system log entry

Process C:\Windows\System32\SET645.tmp (process ID:3660) reset policy scheme from [hex block]

Since I'm not fond of anonymous ".tmp" executables changing my system settings, I had a look at the files. (There were several) They contain strings like:

"http://www.amd.com/us/driverxml ReleaseVersion  Catalyst_Version"
"AMD PMP-PE CB Code Signer v201504130"

...so I'm guessing they're automatic updates downloaded by Catalyst. If you look carefully at some of the files, you notice lists of executable names for games and other programs. Some games I've never had installed on my system. Some apps (like DirectX and Chrome) we all have.

I'll include just a small sample of that list: (sorry about the UTF16 spaces)

5 C O D   -   B l a c k   O p s   B l a c k O p s . e x e         B l a c k O p s M P . e x e     S k y r i m     T E S V . e x e         S t a r C r a f t   2   S C 2 * . e x e         3 D M a r k   N E X T   3 D M a r k I C F D e m o . e x e       3 D M a r k I C F W o r k l o a d . e x e       3 D M a r k . e x e     3 D M a r k C m d . e x e       M a s s E f f e c t   3         M a s s E f f e c t 3 * . e x e         W h i t e   L i s t   A p p     U n i g i n e . e x e   S a n c t u a r y . e x e       L e o _ D 3 D 1 1 . e x e       M e c h a _ D 3 D 1 1 . e x e   L a d y b u g _ D 3 D 1 1 . e x e       C o r e T e c h 2 _ X 6 4 _ 1 0 . e x e         C o r e T e c h 2 _ X 6 4 _ 1 1 . e x e         C o r e T e c h 2 _ X 8 6 _ 1 0 . e x e         C o r e T e c h 2 _ X 8 6 _ 1 1 . e x e         B a t m a n A C . e x e         h n g . e x e   R e n e g a d e O p s . e x e   S a i n t s R o w T h e T h i r d _ D X 1 1 . e x e     G a m e C l i e n t . e x e     A n n o 4 . e x e       f c 3 _ b l o o d d r a g o n _ d 3 d 1 1 . e x e       f c 3 _ b l o o d d r a g o n _ p _ d 3 d 1 1 . e x e   f c 3 _ b l o o d d r a g o n _ r _ d 3 d 1 1 . e x e   f c 3 _ b l o o d d r a g o n _ r t _ d 3 d 1 1 . e x e         N Z A . e x e   a r m a 3 . e x e       z a t . e x e   M a d M a x . e x e     3 D M a r k   S k y D i v e r   3 D M a r k S k y D i v e r . e x e     T a l o s . e x e       T a l o s _ U n r e s t r i c t e d . e x e     T a l o _ D e m o . e x e       M u r d e r e d   S o u l   S u s p e c t       F a t e G a m e - W i n 6 4 - T e s t . e x e   M u r d e r e d . e x e         H i t m a n   A b s o l u t i o n       H M A . e x e   F i f a   O n l i n e   2       F F 2 C l i e n t . e x e       D i a b l o   I I I     D i a b l o   I I I . e x e     D i r t   S h o w d o w n       s h o w d o w n . e x e         s h o w d o w n _ a v x . e x e         s h o w d o w n _ d e m o . e x e       s h o w d o w n _ d e m o _ a v x . e x e       K r a t e r     K r a t e r . e x e     M a x   P a y n e   3   M a x P a y n e 3 . e x e       T J 3   T J 3 . e x e

You'll note they have special detection of the 3DMark _benchmarks_. That's a worry by itself. How do you trust a video card driver that auto-detects benchmark software? (and presumably switches on specific settings just for that case)

What's more concerning - if getting an entry like this is how you gain 'top performance' for your software (because apparently the basic video card drivers aren't up to the job by themselves) then how exactly does your company gets its optimal settings into this list? Does monetary compensation change hands? How much? Can Indie developers afford it?

I'm sure there are nice excuses for this behavior, (like enabling new graphics modes for legacy games) but it also enables a whole class of dodgy practices for AMD and un-obvious behavior for the user. The AMD graphics drivers don't really do what you ask... they do it "better!", according to the latest update.

What's amusing is - if the auto-update system didn't keep crashing and properly cleaned up it's temp files, I might never have seen this list in such obvious plain-text.

So, I'm sick of this crap. For my next graphics cards, I'm going back to NVIDIA, to get me some of that sweet CUDA lovin' and stability. If that means changing the rest of my machine to Intel, well, so be it.