I have been thinking about buying a new video card and R9 390 and GTX 970 are the two cards at my price range. I will only be playing on 1080p so GTX 970 could be fine but if I want to play games with extremely high resolution textures and a lot of anti-aliasing, then the 8 gb of VRAM in R9 390 would be useful. Both of these cards perform quite equally on most games but R9 390 performs better on vram intensive games that go over 3.5 gb even on 1080p.

So here comes the important question. If you own a 300 series R9 Radeon card, do you have any driver problems right now? Searching the net I found a lot of posts about crashes and other driver problems from the time when R9 380/390/390X released but it's hard to find info about the current situation. Also it seems windows 10 might be part of the problem so also mention if you have any problems running on win 7.

I would like to buy a R9 390 as it's more powerful but I might be too scared about messy drivers so gtx 970 is always an option. Thanks for your input.

I have a 390x, it's fine. But if you don't turn off hardware acceleration in Google chrome, the driver will crash. That sucks

@travisrex: Did you previously have any problems or have you been able to play from the start? Also could you tell what OS you are using?

I just installed an R9 380 4 gig a couple of weeks ago (hooray for sales!). I'm running Win 7 64 bit & I had just upgraded my CPU & mobo a month or so ago - so far, so good.

The latest Catalyst drivers seem to be fine. I've been re-installing games, maxing the settings and checking performance one game at a time and I haven't run into any issues [knock wood].

Depending on how badly you need a new card, it might be worth waiting for the next generation of Nvidia cards. Apparently it's supposed to be a big jump from the current stuff.

I'm having an issue on Windows 10 with my 390. My audio decided to stop working after being idle for too long or if I switch the input on my receiver (have PC plugged to receiver). The quickest temporary fix I have found is disabling the AMD sound drive in Device Manager and then Enabling it.

Anyone have this issue or know a permanent fix?

I have the 390 8gig and have had no problems with it. The only quirk that I have seen is that it doesn't like to output audio to the HDMI to my TV, but I chalked that up to it being my 3rd monitor/mirror of my primary monitor.

@e30bmw: It would be smart to wait until next year, but I want to play Fallout 4 hopefully at max settings so it's time to upgrade my old 560 ti. Nvidia's flagship pascal gpu will be a big jump in power compared to current flagship, but I'm willing to bet that the gimped ~$350 range card is 10-20 fps faster at 1080p than 970 or 390. So I should be fine with a current gen card for a while.

@icemo: Fair enough. I'm in a similar boat, I had been thinking about upgrading my 770 to a 980ti (because I'm an idiot with too much money right now haha), but I think I've decided to wait until next year. Fallout 4 was specifically the game making me think about upgrading too haha.

@e30bmw: With your 770 I think fallout 4 will look pretty good since the leaked screenshots don't look that demanding. My 560 ti on the other hand is too old so I want to upgrade right now.

@icemo: I didn't have problems before, but I had a much older amd card before the 390x. Other than that weird Google Chrome bug I haven't had any problems. Just an fyi, the card puts out some heat. Like near scalding, lol. I'm on windows 7.

@travisrex: That sounds all right for me, I can lower the heating during winter then. Only thing I'm worried about now is crashes when playing so smaller bugs like that chrome one are fine.

@e30bmw: Dude, your 770 is going to run Fallout 4 just fine. The game would be more demanding on a CPU instead of GPU. You'll feel like a bigger idiot when you see the new Nvidia cards that are coming out soon have a larger jump in performance than the jump from 700 to 900 series.

I'm in the same situation deciding what to get for the Oculus. I never had a gaming PC until 2013 when I got a 7870, and it's been fine for games, but the Catalyst Control Center is a huge pain.. difficult to navigate and unreliable. I don't know what Nvidia does for managing desktops (eyefinity/surround) and video modes, but is it any better than CCC? Oh.. I have 3 monitors and I switch video modes a lot, that's when CCC cause me trouble, just to be clear.

I will tell you this, any info about how nvidia drivers are better is a LIE. I switched over this year from a 7950 and i've had way more issues with nvidia drivers than i ever had the 3 -4 years i had amd cards. They don't call their drivers betas even though they are, half the time upgrading will break performance in other games besides the one they are optimized for. It's really just a pain compared to Amd drivers IMO. I don't use surround (eyefinity)but I do know every time i upgrade a driver i have to reset settings in the control panel(Physx, DSR etc) so i would imagine it would be the same. Also the control panel and nvidia experience are super fucking slow, for the first few weeks i thought I had installed them wrong but the software just runs terribly slow.

That said, i do enjoy the fact that nvidia cards use less power so i don't have to get huge power supply's to run everything, and the actual act of playing games has been a lot less of a hassle since my 980 kills my 7950 with less/= power consumption.

Since this old thread popped up I should mention what I did one month ago. I bought a R9 390X since I got it for almost the same price as 970 or r9 390, and there have been zero issues with drivers. I'm very happy with the card! It's so nice to max out all the graphical settings and still have constant 60-130 fps depending on game.

Glad you haven't had any issues. I did pretty much exactly the same as you. The only problem I've had so far has been with Just Cause 3. The game would crash after about 15 minutes of playing and showed a window that mentioned driver problems. However, I upgraded to the new beta drivers from AMD and haven't experienced issues since. I love this card, though it does run a bit louder than I would like.

AMD just completely recreated the catalyst control centre UI, I haven't had a lot of time to play with it but the new suite has a much bigger focus on individual game setting control.

I'm using the latest drivers and I'm having no issues with my R9 390. Speeds are really good, too.