Searching for reviews regarding the behavior of AMD 7000 series graphics cards (7800xt 7900xt 7900xtx) in Second Life

[kyte Lanley]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for opinions from owners of 7800xt 7900xt 7900xtx to know how their AMD cards behave in Second Life.

I would like to know if they are stable and if the performance is worth that of nvidia in Second Life only.

Thank you for your answers.

[Aishagain]

@kyte Lanley it is as simple as this; Nvidia uses OpenGL 4.6 coding, AMD employs OpenGL 4.2 plus some clever enhancements to give a performance "approaching" 4.6.

In SecondLife for now Nvidia is simply the better option.  Once SL moves to the Vulkan render code NVidia's ascendancy will be much diminished, and the AMD "bang for buck" advantage that they enjoy in many non-OpenGL games will be eliminated (I assume).  The advent of physically based rendering in SL will  make the posession of large amounts of VRAM a distinct advantage but if cost is not your limiting parameter a high-end Nvidia card is best for SL.

Wiser heads than mine can give you the metrics.

[kyte Lanley]

Thank you for your answer Aicha, but I have the impression that there is no owner of 7000 who plays Second Life

Edited September 11, 2023 by kyte Lanley

[Alwin Alcott]

11 hours ago, kyte Lanley said:

Thank you for your answer Aicha, but I have the impression that there is no owner of 7000 who plays Second Life

i think that's not to expect
It's just that nobody with that graphics has seen your post here, the majority of SL players never visit the forums, and a lot less respond.
(and give it some time, your post is still new)

[JeromFranzic]

Bump...

Maybe we'll hear from people who create videos. That would be a great metric for anyone who uses these GPUs for SL. At this point, Nvidia still has the edge but it really shouldn't be an issue anymore if you prefer AMD. 

If you're doing other stuff besides SL, just buy whichever GPU suits your overall usage.

That said... this Nvidia user is listening. If and when I upgrade... I'm really looking at an all AMD setup* (CPU and GPU, still want the CPU to have integrated graphics for low power moments).

*Better support in Linux for sure!

[Rachel1206]

The performance of the new AMD 7xxx GPU looks promising, see for example Sapphire Radeon RX 7800 XT Nitro+ review - API Performance: Vulkan vs OpenGL vs DirectX12

The charts show are for Vulcan, DirectX and last OpenGL. If those artificial tests hold RL and for like Second Life, I cannot say.

But it is a good indication that AMD have improved their drivers and of course the brute force of those high end GPU.

All new games use Vulcan and DirectX, have this in mind, when investing in an expensive GPU.

 

[kyte Lanley]

I put this graph in my other post and it's what made me take an interest in AMD's 7000 series because until then the performance under Open GL was catastrophic on AMD.

The only problem is that this graph concerns version 4.5 of open GL, what about version 4.6 ?

I am still waiting for the feelings of a 7000 series owner on their experience on Second Life only because on other games I know that the AMD 7000 series is superior to Nvidia in terms of performance/price

 

 

Edited September 12, 2023 by kyte Lanley

[JeromFranzic]

1 hour ago, Rachel1206 said:

The performance of the new AMD 7xxx GPU looks promising, see for example Sapphire Radeon RX 7800 XT Nitro+ review - API Performance: Vulkan vs OpenGL vs DirectX12

The charts show are for Vulcan, DirectX and last OpenGL. If those artificial tests hold RL and for like Second Life, I cannot say.

But it is a good indication that AMD have improved their drivers and of course the brute force of those high end GPU.

All new games use Vulcan and DirectX, have this in mind, when investing in an expensive GPU.

 

I couldn't say... but those OpenGL scores look great for the newer 7xxx GPUs.

If I could I'd go ahead and buy a card or laptop with the 7xxx GPU. Especially if I wanted to play Starfield and never leave my cubbyhole lol... that game's apparently well optimized for AMD, GPU and CPU.

[AmeliaJ08]

I think there's a need in general for AMD GPU users in general (not just 7000 series) to report their experience in SL because it does seem to be an area where there's little concrete information. On paper the cards should perform well and reportedly the OpenGL driver issues that plagued AMD GPU's in the past are no longer a thing but there isn't a whole lot of real-world experience out there.

A hardware survey by LL and third-party developers would be useful, not self-reporting but Steam style and done by the viewer. Suspect there are more people using AMD GPU's than we may think but who really knows.

[AmeliaJ08]

22 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

I couldn't say... but those OpenGL scores look great for the newer 7xxx GPUs.

If I could I'd go ahead and buy a card or laptop with the 7xxx GPU. Especially if I wanted to play Starfield and never leave my cubbyhole lol... that game's apparently well optimized for AMD, GPU and CPU.

AMD dGPU's in laptops are so rare now though! it's a shame, they used to be vaguely competitive with their mobile chips, a long time ago now.

I heard the new Framework 16" with the GPU upgrade option will be AMD based at first though, that's pretty neat.

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

I don't have a current-gen Nvidia card to directly compare with, but the XTX runs SL perfectly well.

AMD just has a whole lot of other problems that are unrelated to SL or general performance.

Edited September 13, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[kyte Lanley]

Ah finally an owner of 7900 XTX if I understood correctly.

Could you give me your feelings:

Is this GPU stable on Second Life?

Do you have any crashes?

Do the textures load well?

In short, everything you can say about his behavior on Second Life.

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by kyte Lanley

[Wulfie Reanimator]

13 hours ago, kyte Lanley said:

Is this GPU stable on Second Life?

Do you have any crashes?

Do the textures load well?

When it works, it's very stable. I haven't had any SL related crashes with the 7900 XTX. I can say the same about my previous RX 6600.

The GPU doesn't really matter for texture loading speed, since that's done by the processor. It has more than enough memory to hold as many textures as you need, though.

 

AMD's general driver stability isn't great though. I've had problems with most driver versions in random games, with both the 6600 and 7900. When the driver crashing starts in a specific game, it crashes reliably at the same spot. It's fine if you find a driver that is stable and stay on that version, like 23.7.2 (released 2023-07-20) is very stable.

If you can afford the 7900 XTX, buy it. The value-for-money is really hard to compete with.

That said, these cards have been more of an experiment and I'm not confident enough to buy AMD a third time. Nvidia's pricing is terrible now though, so pick your poison.

Edited September 14, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[kyte Lanley]

Thank you for your testimony,

I see that you are still not very satisfied with the 7900 XTX because of the instability of these drivers in certain games. Clearly AMD still has drivers as bad as they were a few years ago. It's really not easy to make a choice, between Nvidia whose drivers are very stable overall which offer DLSS (when will it be on Second Life) but which are much too expensive and which have less memory and AMD which is more efficient by 5 to 8% overall which are much cheaper (100 € in France) but whose drivers according to your testimony are too unstable.

Will your next graphics card be an AMD or will you go back to Nvidia?

Just a wish but that won't happen given Nvidia's policy it would be a 4070 super 16 GB of RAM and a 256 bit bus at €650 (we can dream, right?)

Continue to post testimonials regarding AMD cards, I'm interested in having several opinions

 

Edited September 14, 2023 by kyte Lanley

[Kathrine Jansma]

10 hours ago, kyte Lanley said:

Clearly AMD still has drivers as bad as they were a few years ago.

The drivers are much much better than they were a few years ago. They are still worse than NVIDIAs in a lot of cases.

They do crash in some games. Part of the reason for that is crappy games only testing heavily with the NVIDIA drivers. Part is buggy drivers.

Basically, especially with Vulcan and modern DirectX the driver has a much more hands off approach and lets the developer micromanage a lot of details for speed. But those APIs also remove the security net and verification OpenGL provided (that slows things down). So if your game developer/engine designer makes a mistake, it leads to hard crashes now. And as NVIDIA usually gets more resources in testing due to market structure (e.g. on Steam Hardware Surveys https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ ), so more bugs get squashed.

 

 

 

 

[gwynchisholm]

On 9/11/2023 at 12:45 PM, Aishagain said:

it is as simple as this; Nvidia uses OpenGL 4.6 coding, AMD employs OpenGL 4.2 plus some clever enhancements to give a performance "approaching" 4.6.

You’re referring the HD7800 series, AMD has had OpenGL 4.6 support since Polaris. SL also doesn’t use OpenGL 4.6 anyway.

[kyte Lanley]

7 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

You’re referring the HD7800 series, AMD has had OpenGL 4.6 support since Polaris. SL also doesn’t use OpenGL 4.6 anyway.

Oh well I didn't know that and what does Second Life use today?

What AMD or Nvidia card do you have and what are your feelings?

[Henri Beauchamp]

10 hours ago, gwynchisholm said:

SL also doesn’t use OpenGL 4.6 anyway.

Yes it does !

[Rachel1206]

According to the official System Requirements: For PC with Windows or UNIX, OpenGL 4.6 supported, for Mac OpenGL 4.1 supported.

 

 

[Aishagain]

@gwynchisholm Henri gave a definitive answer...sorry but I knew I was correct.  as to AMD, while they do emulate 4.6, the native adapter code is 4.2.  The result of that is that while it is much better than it was (and it was truly dreadful) AMD support and operation under OpenGL is still poorer that Nvidia's (though the latter are seemingly trying hard to negate their advantage with some fairly nasty bugs for folks with moderately complex monitor set ups (sets up?).

[gwynchisholm]

25 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

as to AMD, while they do emulate 4.6, the native adapter code is 4.2.

They have not done this since the HD 7800 series, ie a Hd 7870 circa 2012. They did that with retroactive driver updates so it would be vaguely compatible with newer OpenGL titles as by 2017 while the HD7800 series wasn’t super relevant, it was still in use. 
When Polaris launched in 2016 they had support for 4.5 entirely and then with the refresh and 4.6 coming around, the rx 500 series had full 4.6 support.

This isn’t something exclusive to amd either, nvidia did the same thing giving cards down to fermi OpenGL 4.6 support. 
If this was in any way a limiting factor this game wouldn’t run on anything older than pascal/Polaris but this game runs on basically any gpu made since 2003.

I would not be too concerned about OpenGL support in general but it’s definitely not the case that an amd card by any means has worse OpenGL support.

[kyte Lanley]

gwynchisholm you haven’t answered me yet what card do you have?

So if I understand correctly Second Life uses Open GL 4.6 contrary to what you said.

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, kyte Lanley said:

So if I understand correctly Second Life uses Open GL 4.6 contrary to what you said.

The viewer will use the highest possible Open GL version available from your drivers. The higher the better (better optimized, faster, more features).

The viewer currently does not need features specifically introduced in latest OpenGL versions (this might change ”soon”: the PBR viewer already needs OpenGL v3.2 features), but drivers with v4.6 and a good core profile implementation (the core profile gets rid of old OpenGL versions cruft) are much faster.

NVIDIA proprietary drivers in OpenGL v4.6 core profile are typically +50% to +100% faster than in compatibility profile, something that is not seen happening with AMD proprietary drivers.

Edited September 15, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[kyte Lanley]

For the moment I have only had one testimonial from a 7000 series owner and he was not in favor of the AMD card due to a lack of stability. I don't think there are many testimonials. I have the impression that owners of AMD cards are disappointed by the behavior of this card in Second Life. I'm waiting for more than just one miserable testimony to give me an idea.

[Henri Beauchamp]

4 hours ago, kyte Lanley said:

For the moment I have only had one testimonial from a 7000 series owner and he was not in favor of the AMD card due to a lack of stability. I don't think there are many testimonials. I have the impression that owners of AMD cards are disappointed by the behavior of this card in Second Life. I'm waiting for more than just one miserable testimony to give me an idea.

I'm more under the impression you are seeking for just one favourable testimony to use it as an excuse to follow your personal feeling/belief that an AMD card would be better suited for you...

Just go ahead, and buy whatever suits your own needs/preferences, and take your responsibilities. Just don't come back here to complain ”we” gave you a bad advice, should you find out you committed a mistake. 😜

As for the graphics cards prices, it might be wiser/smarter to wait a little bit: NVIDIA's cards are already seeing an adjustment of their prices as a result of AMD's newest cards releases (competition is a Good Thing ™) . It will take some time to propagate to France (but you could just as well buy a card from a more reactive German supplier), but prices are going to drop a bit in the coming weeks. The second half of  October is usually a good moment to buy computer hardware (long enough after people's return from Summer vacations, soon enough before Christmas). There is also the option to wait for a sale/opportunity on the former cards generation (even a RTX 3070 is plenty powerful enough for SLing).

Edited September 17, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp