PC Drivers & Software

[MrGuaren]

Disclaimer based on experience from other forums: As long as it physically works, you wont convince me of dropping this perfectly fine hardware; I know AMD shall, at best, support only 1 of the components I'll list by now, but since I dont know whether Google has been useless or just unhelpful, Id like to discuss an issue that is apparently general-oriented (be it an AMD GPU or any other device), yet nowhere to be found. FYI and before anyone assumes Im a poor man or anything negative against me for this, I already got a "new & good (tm)" device. Thanks for understanding internet, I shouldnt be THIS defensive to begin with.

Motherboard: ASUS A55BM-K

APU: A8-6600K (quad (or dual?) at 4.2Ghz) with HD 8570d

dGPU: RX 580 8GB 2048SP (unmodifed latest VBIOS)

RAM (just in case): 2x8 (=16) GB at 1833Mhz (DDR3)

In a weird quest to get the longest possible software compatibility (around 37 years of software with this machine), Im constantly switching between the integrated and dedicated GPUs. And I tried to install drivers for both on Windows 10, without success.

First I installed the HD 8570d driver, worked fine. Then I installed the RX 580 card, setup display at PCI-E on BIOS, then installed the Radeon PRO (and not Adrenalin but it still switched somehow), but it otherwise worked fine as well.

Yesterday I switched back to HD 8570d in order to do compatibility tests, but to my surprise (and probably due to an odd change I made months ago I couldnt remember), I got Windows' basic driver loaded instead; device manager lists an HD 8570d driver there, but this "driver" itself IS = no driver.

I tried EVERYTHING, including unistalling both cards' software (catalyst install manager was a pain). But no matter what, even if I remove the RX 580 and null 8570d drivers from device manager (they persist post software uninstall), they STILL come back with each reboot, AND whenever I try to reinstall 8570d software as well. Re-installing the latter does NOT replace Windows' null crap, and I think I know where the culprit is:

Frustrated, I tried to install it THROUGH the device manager, both in the old way (display.inf) and the new way (made it search through "pre-setup" C:\AMD path), and in all cases, Windows decides not to install it BECAUSE it thinks the null driver is the "best version". ARGH!!!

Just what else can I try? Looks like a deep bug from Windows, cant I just delete whatever broken reg entries or files are left, if any? Already tried deleting all from C:\Program Files (including x86), whatever folders within AppData folders, and so on.

[FunkZ · Accepted solution]

The reason for your troubles is that the HD 8570D is from the Bulldozer family architecture which is no longer supported, while the RX 580 is of the Polaris family which is still on limited support. Additionally, the software for one (Catalyst) does not support the other (Adrenalin) and vice-versa. If there were some period of overlap of these products then one package could potentially support both, but unfortunately the last Catalyst release 16.2.1 predates the RX 580 by over a year.

If you have not yet already tried DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) that may offer a solution to complete remove one software package before reinstalling the other.

If the intent of your testing is to support multi-generational graphics then another, and likely cleaner, solution would be to dual-boot to a separate Windows instance.

[MrGuaren]

Thanks for all and mentioning DDU, managed to reinstall properly. Also found an unused SSD laying somewhere with my old stuff, I'm indeed keeping two installs just in case now.