My opinion?
RDNA v1 was rush job so that they could get a solid lead on the console launch with dev kits based on that technology and to live fire test the drivers for that new GPU architecture. It didn't help that Vega was an evolutionary dead end. From what I have read in the meantime, there are is a lot hardware errata on RDNA v1 cards that supports this theory to some degree. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The drivers for the first three months or so were *classic* AMD with fixes for some games and regressions in others. This reminded me mightily of back in the day with my 8500 then my 9500 Pro, then just a touch of it when I was running my 7950. A new arch, new problems.
Plenty of cards had issues with firmware not implementing the zero RPM fans in a sensible way (I returned a card that didn't turn the fans on until 100C and then turned them on full blast until 50C or so - so never ramped them down.) OR failed to properly seat the heatsink to the GPU OR failed to adequately cool the memory, the list went on and on and it was never clear to me whether AMD specs were wrong, AIB partners just crapped cards out without much QC or what. Launch quality was a mess, which is one reason why I have a blower 5700xt which I am quite fine with. It generates enough heat I am happy to have it out of the case.
I expect (hope?) that this is going to be like when the iterated on the 7950 generations and realistically the drivers were pretty darn stable for several years. Like when Hawaii came out that refined how Pitcarin (pulling from memory, hope that's right) worked and just did it with wider hardware the drivers didn't die. GCN, GCN+, GCN++, GCN+++ if Intel had been naming them, haha.
I see this as RDNA+. Erratum fixed, ray tracing hardware baked in, silicon tune for efficiency and scaling. But the basic architecture and how it works with drivers staying largely intact.
ALSO, and I think this is a big deal, X Box Series X is some sort of Windows based console. Reading about how they are delivering drivers for it, it sounds like they deliver firmware and drivers all in one package but given that W10 and the Series X are going to be using software to make RDNA 2 GPUs work with DX12U we can hope that AMD is taking driving stability very seriously, a bad launch for the Series X that comes down that kind of issue could be a huge, epic, terrible disaster.
Again, that's why I think they wanted RNDA based cards in the wild for a minimum of a year to shake the software out. If I was a firmware/driver developer for AMD and watching the high stakes roll out of the Series X and the PS5 I would have serious anxiety issues
I use DX12 only with Borderlands 3 and it works pretty well. Rebuilding the shaders every so often is a burden, and the game has it's own bugs but I guess... I just want to see ray tracing at usable frame rates at 2k resolutions. My current favorite feature is HDR and I hope nearly all games implement this going forward. It pops! I don't think that is even DX12 dependent.
TL;DR - I feel confident that RDNA v2 cards will be largely stable when released and should be a great long term value given their shared feature set with what is likely to be 100M shipped consoles. Whatever Ampere brings to the table, if it isn't closely aligned with the consoles it may be underutilized.
So there you have it. Multiple paragraphs of opinion from someone who has definitely fought the good fight on the AMD driver front.
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