Same, but R9 380X back in college. Bang per buck it seemed better than NVidia. But despite my distaste for NVidia back then, after that experience, I resolved to never get an AMD GPU again unless things drastically change.
Drivers would constantly break something, some games would run poorly and I would have to fiddle with driver versions to address this (often involving annoying version rollbacks), it would randomly start overheating for no reason, sometimes it would just crash the system, etc. Upgraded to 480 later, and the exact same story repeated.
You know what happened once I got an NVidia GPU years later (1080Ti)? I never had to think about the GPU ever again. I install a driver update occasionally, it “just werks”, and I would go on my merry way. Upgraded to a 3080 about half a year after it got released, and had the same story - it just works, and I never have to think or worry about it ever.
I would love to support AMD GPUs, but I cannot, in good conscience, buy their GPU again and waste time troubleshooting it and stress over every driver update.
On the flip side, AMD CPUs are amazing. Been with them since the original Ryzen release, upgraded once (from 1700 to 3900x), no issues whatsoever and am very happy with those. My next build will be an AMD Ryzen CPU as well, but it will have an NVidia GPU.
Funny since I agree about mobile radeons being like this where every update is a risky thing however I moved from Nvidia only (after my one ATi 9800 Pro) to AMD due to the drivers stuttering, breaking and finally making my 8800Gts 320 unusable in games because it wasnt the magic 640mb edition.
I've since had 5770, 6770 (same card but in fire), 290X, RX580X, and now 6750 without any issues.
iGPU stuff however has been awful but then again so was my Intel/Nvidia laptop having problems with iGPU fighting the dGPU.
In my case, all of the configs I described were desktop builds, as I am not willing to touch a windows laptop with a 10 foot pole again, and in general gaming is the last thing on my mind when considering a laptop.
