To be fair, the 580 is price and performance comparable to the 1060. That seems to be the sweet spot for AMD right now.

As to the driver issue, I imagine that was merely a rash response from a forum moderator, and shouldn't be taken is an actual response in regards to AMD's plans. I suspect he thought he was being helpful in saying that AMD was not going to fix or track down a single isolated bug that affects just a single old game. Of course with the issue more widespread, they will be forced to find a fix.

Of course as I say that, with my R9 290 dying a couple weeks ago with artifacting issues which from reports seems to be a common problem with certain AMD cards (my 1st video card to actually die as opposed of becoming obsolete), I've decided to give NVIDIA the nod this time with my new system coming this month. Was planning to upgrade in another year, but a year early isn't too bad. I've always been a bit worried about the power consumption and higher temperatures put out by AMD cards, and question how much this affects their longevity. Guess we'll see with the new system.

they fucking keep inching it farther and farther to the edge on legacy. so what the fuck are you supposed to do with an AMD card if you want to play a DX9 game?

games hardware fucking sucks.

Looks like it's now hit the online media:

https://www.techpowerup.com/240103/amd-unlikely-to-fix-dx9-games-bugged-by-adrenalin-driver

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-adrenalin-driver-has-issues-with-older-dx9-games.html

https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2018/01/amd-unlikely-devote-resources-dx9-titles-dont-work-adrenalin-says-tech-support/48094/

edit: I;m supposed to get a bonus check/ payout and I was debating on new laptop hunting. I;m glad this hit now before i bought something with a video card that would be affected.

Except that people mentioned most of the games that are currently known to be broken in that very thread already.

OK, thanks for the response. I'm thinking of buying a new rig and wouldn't want to lose the ability to play any older games.

Not true. Follow the link. The mod's response was on Dec 21. At that point, the only mentions were C&C 3 + Red Alert 3 (w/ expansions). All from the OP.

The rest of the C&C games discovered to be problematic were mentioned later. And, in fact, only C&C games are mentioned in that particular thread at all.

But the bigger point I'm making is this is just a one line answer from a single support representative. I can't tell you how many times I've had to call support in the past (whether it be cable or phone service - back when people used home phones) and sometimes you get "that guy" who tries to tell you there is nothing they can do about service intermittently cutting out. But then you call again and talk to someone who is actually helpful...could be the same here.

Thank you for your support, and also to those of you submitting more broken games, I'd like to add as many as possible to the reddit post I linked in the beginning of this thread.

We need to drum up as much of a fuss about this as we can to get AMD to sort this out. Looks like we are. Again, thank you because we need AMD to remain competitive in the GPU industry.

Witcher 1 and Battle for Middle Earth were also mentioned. And it doesn't matter if that happened after Dec 21. There's a second response from the same mod on Dec 31 saying: "there is nothing more to add to this thread so it’s locked".
Not: "Sorry, I didn't realize so many games are affected. Of course, that changes everything."

But he didn't. It's just that I don't put a lot of weight into that one person's response unless you can show me where that person has more authority than just forum response duties.

Don't get me wrong. This is a serious issue, and I think it's good that people are pushing the message. I'd be testing various games if my card didn't just die to add to the list.

But I think it is a bit disingenuous to claim one forum mod's response is equivalent to AMD proclaiming they will do nothing about DX9 support.

I never made that claim.

But the OP did and you seemed very eager to correct me for some reason.

Whatever the case the response from the AMD guy was pretty stupid. Any of the typical canned responses about being 'aware of the issue' or similar would be better, you should always avoid implying that you simply don't care as people hate that. The timing is also horrible being over Xmas/ New Years. I'd bet that the issue will get fixed now that there's a decent list of games effected. Shame really, the Adrenaline drivers otherwise have some nice additions, and another decent performance boost as well.

But AMD isn't really aiming for top tier gaming cards and people should get used to that. Top tier graphics cards are a tiny market segment, it's just bragging rights. AMD absolutely wants to do laptop/ console type 'APUs' as an endgame because they're the only company that does both competitive CPU and GPU- and that is where Vega and Navi should shine, especially in the massive laptop sector as it doesn't need expensive HBM or its memory controller. And to be fair to Vega, it was Hynix that failed to provide to spec memory for it which instantly wiped out a lot of its theoretical performance which would have put it well above 1080 and fairly close to 1080Ti (AMD's "poor Volta" comment was in the time frame they were expecting 1000MHz HBM2 instead of 800MHz; before 1080Ti release when Vega would have been the strongest card by around 15%). Instead they have to overvolt to get 1080 level performance and that chokes memory further and drives power efficiency through the floor.

People wishing for AMD to go bankrupt are in for a fair wait though, much as gamers might be disappointed by Vega part of that is that they are never in stock, even at well above MSRP. They're certainly selling as quickly as AMD can make them, and to AMD it doesn't matter whether it's gamers or miners buying them. Plus on the CPU side Ryzen is a ludicrously efficient manufacturing process with near zero waste.

I think GPUs is one of those things where as long as they can pump out ever increasingly performant cards, they can do whatever the heck they want.

Most hardware is pretty plug&play across Windows/Linux and it will just run (mice keyboards, external drives, monitors for the most part, etc).

With GPUs, you got a preferential treatment for Windows with directX, a general lack of driver standardization across GPUs (definitely not plug&play) and a general resistance toward open-sourcing drivers in general.

Then, they keep adding new card-specific features (nice realistic-looking hair and shit) and some game makers make some games tailored to those features (pretty much guaranteed to run like shit on any competing cards).

Also, given that they apparently release new driver-patches to accommodate specific AAA titles (to accomodate for API mis-uses in those games apparently), it's just adds more noise (especially on the open-source driver front).

And don't get me started on that crossfire shit. One of my friends has that and he's always fiddling with it to be able to play this game or that game.

Personally, I'd love to see the progress in GPUs grind to a halt (do we really need nicer graphics at this point???), have more third-party players catch up and get more standards rolling to make GPUs more plug&play like keyboards and mice, because atm, it's a hot mess.

Max Payne 2 doesn't belong on this list. It works fine (even with the latest drivers) if you set affinity to a single core or use UCyborg's patch. This issue has been known for a long time and has a different cause.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=51579&p=569484


Edit: At least you should put a "some users" there.

Thank you for the issue. Moved Max Payne 2 out of the list and mentioned the patch for it.