Describe your system:
AMD Graphics Card: Sapphire R9 270X 2GB OC with 1070Mhz base clock and 1400Mhz memory clock
Desktop
Windows 10 64 bit upgraded from Windows 7 64 bit earlier this month
Radeon 18.5.1-may23, 18.6.1, 18.7.1, 18
Samsung S22B150 (1920x1080@60Hz) monitor
Motherboard: MSI Z170A PC MATE (MS-7971) (U3E1)
CPU: Intel i5 6500
Power Supply: Corsair 650W
RAM: 8GB
Problem:
For most of 2017 and 2018 I have been getting crashes in these games: Diablo 3, Heroes of the Storm, Dota 2, Warframe, Far Cry 4 Himalayas levels.
All of these have been crashing ever since the Crimson drivers were released and continue with Adrenaline drivers.
Overwatch crashed for me between 17.7.1 and 17.12.1
The only temporary solution is to use MSI Afterburner to downclock my computer. I do not want to go further back than the 16 series crimson drivers, but when I tested on the 15 series drivers I got the same crashes unless I downclocked.
Heroes of the storm and Dota will crash 10 or more times in a single game unless I downclock my graphics card all the way to 902Mhz core clock and 1100Mhz memory clock. The other games in my list above will run on 999 Mhz core clock and 1200 Mhz memory clock.
When I run Far Cry 4 at normal clock speeds the game runs fine until I go to the Himalayas at which point I get hard lockups. Other than that the game runs perfectly. When I downclock my card I have to run it on medium settings because on high I get small blue square artifacts on the mountains in the background. Diablo 3 and Warframe do not crash at all at 999 core, 1100 memory. I have not tested Dota 2 yet.
Reinstalling Windows or changing drivers seems to have little to no effect on the games that crash. Many games do not crash at all and run fine and many of them are heavy duty current generation games like Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5, the new Doom, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of War and lots of other graphically demanding games like GTA 5, Arkham Knight, Dishonored 2, Shadow Warrior 2, Subnautica, Alien Isolation, Dragon Age Inquisition, Assassin's Creed Black Flag, Fallout 4. My card is not overheating and I often take my card out, clean out the dust and reseat it properly.
On Windows Event log I see - Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
On the AMD settings app I can see - Default Radeon WattMan settings have been restored due to unexpected system failure
With some crashes the Blizzard App will also crash, and for other crashes that does not happen.
Does this mean that my card is dying? Does AMD not support overclocked editions of older cards? Is it a power supply problem which is solved by downclocking? I am seeing many other users getting TDR and black screen crashes with the R9 cards.
Increase the power limit slider to it's maximum. No they don't account for overclocked cards. Only the people that made your card can do that. The vanilla AMD drivers are set to reference card standards. So slide that power limit slider all the way to the right, it should accomplish the same result as underclocking, without the performance loss.