I think AMD GPUs are crap; at least their windows drivers. I recently built a gaming PC (MSI RX-580 GPU) for my son, and never had so many frustrating crashes, black screens, etc. Waited for a month for their 5.18 driver release, and no improvement.
What a piece of shit. Sold it on eBay in 30 seconds for $40 more than I paid for it, and bought an Nvidia 1060; works flawlessly. The guy I sold it to said the RX-580 is working fine for mining. He got a card for $300 and I got rid of a headache.
How many years ago was this? The latest AMD Adrenalin drivers are at 18.1.1. Oh and on Linux the open-source AMDGPU drivers (made by AMD themselves) are now part of the kernel since not too long ago, so any recent cards will work out of the box on a distro with a recent kernel.
I think your unnecessarily caustic words are reason enough for your downvotes. That kind of language isn't really welcome in ycombinator. This isn't Reddit: there's an expectation for a higher-class of discussion.
With that being said: the 17.12 update, aka Adrenaline December 2017, on Windows, broke DirectX9 and also broke a few OpenGL games. AMD suffered a major PR hit over the winter-break when a few forum moderators said things they shouldn't have said about this issue (which was eventually fixed when the executives returned to work after the New Year and performed PR Damage Control). So there's a lot of latent anger in the gamer community around AMD Drivers right now.
With that said: it isn't too difficult to roll back to an earlier update in these cases, but AMD did release a DirectX9 fix by the next month (January 2018). The OpenGL issues seem to still be a known issue, and that's why a number of people are remaining on 17.7.
I had good PSU, MB, mostly clean OS install and no overclock and my AMD card run like clockwork, with zero issues over 3 or 4 years. Literally zero crashes while running almost 24/7 and gaming regularly. Don't skimp on important PC parts and install crapware and you see that both manufacturers produce pretty decent software (putting shady marketing practices aside, like internet account requirement to update geforce driver or raptr-craptr on amd, just from pure tech point of view).
What a piece of shit. Sold it on eBay in 30 seconds for $40 more than I paid for it, and bought an Nvidia 1060; works flawlessly. The guy I sold it to said the RX-580 is working fine for mining. He got a card for $300 and I got rid of a headache.