Drivers & Software

[paulfwatts]

I purchased my dream gaming PC about a month ago with a Ryzen 9 16 core, 7900 XTX, 64Gb memory, 1000 watt psu, windows 11 Pro etc.

Mainly  playing Starfield and MSFS 2020. Upgraded to 29.3.1 without problems when it was released and the system has been running flawlessly the whole time.

Then 2 days ago I upgraded to 29.3.2. MSFS and Starfield kept crashing either right at startup or soon after. Could not run my games without crashing.

No problems I thought I will just roll back to 29.3.1 but then had exactly the same problem (and plenty of others experienced this I’m reading on various forums).

Even tried to use DDU, the cleanup utility, a previous System Restore but still continued to have problems. Have wasted 2 days on this so far.

Currently back on 23.8.2 and reinstalling MSFS to see if I can get it working. I was starting to think my hardware was failing or a windows corruption but ruled this out after many hours of testing and reading today that other people have had the exact same experience trying to go back to a stable system.

Will be super cautious in future and wait a week to thoroughly research the forums and discords before updating.

[Vladimir545]

Try it temporary Workaround:

disable Freesync in  monitor

Seems new branch 23.20 have agressive energy saving issue, hope they fix it soon as possible. Or just temporary return to 23.8.2-23.9.1 on old branch

Before reinstall driver - off a net adapter  and use a amd unninstal utility in safe mode, after restart in normal mode install new driver, and when turn on internet adapter again.

[paulfwatts]

I'm just waiting on my MSFS reinstall (165Gb ) and if crashing persists will give this a shot

[lavisa]

Something like this rarely happens, but there can always be issues with any software.

Try to rule out any concurrent issues. Sometimes there can even be multiple problems at the same time (which makes troubleshooting extra difficult).

[thanatoast]

23.9.2 also caused BSOD's on my system under various circumstances. Spent all yesterday messing around and even tore my PC apart to run only essential components for diag. Rolled back to 23.8.2 and everything is fine now. Big waste of time...but **bleep** happens. Been AGES since I ran into a bunk driver like this...

[paulfwatts]

Thanks. What I can't get my head around though is the problems trying to revert to a previous working driver and still experiencing the same problems. Makes me think the 29.3.2 screwed something up in Windows 11 beyond what is normally included with a driver update.

[thanatoast]

Are you still having issues even on 23.8.2?

[paulfwatts]

I'm just waiting on the MSFS re-install to finish and then will test it.

I've run Starfield for about 10 minutes and it ran fine when before it would always crash on startup.

[paulfwatts]

After having further strange errors trying to reinstall MSFS I’ve done an external memory test using MemTest86 and it is flagging memory errors.

Therefore, although extremely coincidental, my problems most likely are hardware related, most likely memory, but not the video card or Adrenalin although 23.9.2 could still be buggy on my system as the problem was going back to a working driver and I had still had issues.