I’ve been following the news on the release of the 40-series cards with some interest. In as much as you can follow through hype, hype aversion, and rumor mills telling you your new GPU will be able to turn your computer into an apartment complex if it means they get a click. It must be true, “insiders” say so. But with the latest 4060/4060Ti releases. What’s morbid fascination has turned into something more akin to concern.
See, in the heart of my computer lies an older GPU board. The second one of its kind on my possession after the first one decided it didn’t want to simply deploy graphics. It wanted to be an artist and so it decided to draw things on my screen on a suitably abstract fashion. I decided to see if the grass really was greener (or redder, as it were) on the other side.
The RMA wasn’t particularly conductive to a positive first impression. Though it did mean I got a new GPU at a time where everyone was dumping a grand on something that was supposed to retail at $250. And the new card has decided that it’s going to behave well. Sure, occasionally I get a bluescreen, my full-AMD build having given me more of those than my previous two intel systems combined, but thanks to the magic of ever-evolving autosave capabilities, I haven’t lost anything yet.
Nothing except the AMD drivers themselves, which Microsoft decided at some point to overwrite with it’s own, only slightly better than non-functional version. Not being a fan of much in the way of GPU interference and “filters” I didn’t notice until I wanted to open the AMD command center and was told that it wasn’t compatible with the existing driver. Amazing, especially when the last install I made came with it bundled in.
After a couple of repeat performances of this play, every time removing more and more options telling me that Microsoft is absolutely sure that they know better than myself or AMD, it all kept going perfectly. That is, apart from the occasional random messages telling me my overclock was lost and I was back to stock speed. Again, very unexpected on my account of not having over locked the GPU at all. And at this point I had to wonder, was I having a bad experience?
I mean, sure, most of the things that are happening to it are not AMDs fault. The RMA process went well, it’s not their fault that Microsoft keeps making their OS more and more of a nuisance we tolerate rather than like, but this one? Are the drivers bad? Is this GPU dying like the last one and it’s only doing it slower? The AMD faithful claim that their drivers have gotten better. And they have, but in my experience only in the same way Windows 8.1 was superior to 8.
So as evil as they are, I’m really interested in going noVideo next time. And the 60 series does seem to have the advantage on certain areas, like the featureset and a lower power consumption at this level of performance. A normal 4060 would do just fine.
It’s just that every time I look at it it seems to become a little less fine.
