PC Drivers & Software

[the_slayer]

Hi there. I'm honestly tired by all this, since october that I have my system, I am never been satisfied by it. How could I do it if the gpu has rarely ever gone above core pstate 3 thus resulting in embarassing performance?

I really have tried everything, every driver, every setting, but I have never been able to decently play on this machine. I have likely never seen on the gpu more than 4/8 leds on, maybe sometimes only in GTA V. If it is not enough, a lot of times it just goes to 4 leds on without any application opened, not even any folder nor any background task except for radeon settings itself.

I also have strafed their report forms for hundreds of problems but it seems they really don't even read it since no one of all my problems has ever been solved.

I am talking about freesync that's never worked in ANY game, Chill only working on GTA V some rare times (along with pstate leds), brightness flickerings, radeon settings continuos crashes. I'm honestly bored of all this situation. Here ​you can see the pstate behaviour in action where it is always stuck on 4 leds powered on (core pstate 3), I just took a screenshot from this game because the overlay does not work in the other games as it freezes the screen (strange uh?), and also because it's the only playable game because even with low power it can exceed 144fps, but it's still a tearing mess so not completely playable anyway.

I hope someone at AMD can at least ACKNOWLEDGE all those bugs and tell something, otherwise since I can't play in any way I will be forced to switch over NVidia, I won't pay a g-sync monitor and have tearing but hey, here freesync does not work too, so not that much of a problem

amdmatt​ maybe you could read through this please?

Thanks, sorry for the heavy words but I'm heavily frustrated too.

Also please patch that black space in the overlay, it's just ridiculous.

Reference Rx vega 56

Ryzen 5 1600

Asrock ab350 pro4

Gskill 2x8gb 2666mhz

Corsait tx 750m

[the_slayer]

Now it happens sometimes that is sets all the leds on when in Pause menu and locks again on 4 leds when I re-enter the game. Very good.

[le_chat_scholiaste]

That's likely because the pause menu is producing insane framerates. Enable the Frame Rate Target Control and set it to a reasonable level.

[the_slayer]

FRTC usually does not work, but even when it did it did not change a thing.

[pokester]

The forums here are not AMD employees, they are a community of peers, like you. Fixes only can come from AMD, and you are 99.9% of the time not going to be talking to AMD in these forums. I saw your reference to amdmatt which would be an example of the rare occasions that AMD responds here, if he does, and I hope he does.

It is great for all of us to know about new bugs so please always share anything you find. Ultimately though you aren't letting AMD (at least not the driver team) know about your problem here. You need to open a new support ticket upon every new driver release that does not correct an issue, unless they address the issue as known or fixed in the release notes. Then you know they know about it. I agree this option is not optimal, but to my knowledge is the only way to communicate with AMD in an official capacity.   Email Form

Now I also feel your frustration and would like to see you get this resolved. I have no experience with the Vega series, I have an RX 580 and maybe someone with experience will come along and offer help with your Vega.

Who did you buy the card from and did you talk to that manufacturer about your issues? If so did they offer advice that did not work or did they tell you to come here?

I ask this because your situation does not seem like the normal issues I have seen and think maybe you really do have a hardware issue. If that is the case it is a repair or replacement of the hardware you need.  Not saying it's not a driver issue either. Just saying in the interest of getting this working for you as fast as possible. I would be pursuing all available possibilities.

Good Luck!

[the_slayer]

Of course it's what I did, I sent all the tickets of every single issue at every driver release, but no one has been acknowledged since that.

My card is a reference sapphire vega, and it is known sapphire support is completely non-existant: even finding anyone to do RMA is a pain.

Funny thing here: I RMAed every single component of my system except for my cpu and gpu because all were defective, including all the peripherals and the monitor: last one being the mobo, which I have just removed and will send tomorrow. I also suspect the power problem may be caused by the PSU not delivering energy in a good way, as I said I rmaed it too already because it made it shut down my system, I hope this new one is not defective too. Btw when I receive the new motherboard I will do a Windows 10 fresh install, maybe it will solve the power behaviour, otherwise it's a psu or gpu problem. The strange thing is in fact 90% of the times timespy and firestrike work wonderfully using the gpu at 100%, the games use it at 20%, and I used for some minutes only furmark and it also tops out at about 40%, or around 70% with Power limit +50%. I have a 750w corsair TX unit powering a single vega 56, come on..

But freesync and Chill never working are 100% a driver problem, and AMD refuses to listen to all the people claiming this.

[pokester]

Oh there is no doubt there are serious driver problems and likely are the core of your issues if you have already RMA'd so much to no avail. I have many issues with my RX 580  but luckily the workarounds at least allow me to enjoy my card. Luckily on those if your freesync doesn't go beyond 75 in range it seems to work unlike for others at high refresh rates over 100, and doesn't seem to work at all on the Vegas from what I read. Now chill does work for me and has for a couple version now. However I know that doesn't mean it works for everyone but on my product it is finally working, so with modified power & temperature settings and some Windows 10 tweaks I don't have any current issue that I know of anymore as this latest driver finally fixed my ROTTR issue too. Again I fully realize that many still have huge issues. What I went though to get stable really is not something any consumer should have to do. many of these problems should not be problems and I do think that AMD should be doing a way better job. I will also state as others have already said that you also have many people who seem to have issues no matter what and no fix ever seems to help them. So I have to believe it is a mix of both realities. I think that AMD just bit off way more than they could chew (wattman/adrenaline, Vega and Ryzen at same time) for the driver development team they have. They have huge issues to solve and the small ones are receive near zero attention for many driver releases. They are stretched way too thin. I don't excuse them in any of this, but do acknowledge as some don't that they are, absolutely making progress. However it may not seem like it on many configurations and I get that too.

To top all that off the board makers don't want to support the cards they make either. As you said Saphire is known to be horrid (although the hardware they make is usually great) you however have a reference design. So why buy their card if you know they have bad support? For me I have bought a Saphire card because I believed hardware was the best. Several cards I bought because XFX had the lifetime warranty and they stood behind it, but they don't do that anymore so I have since had an Saphire, Asus and now back to XFX again as it was all I could find.  I can tell you that I have had decent support for RMAs from XFX (yet the actual support expertise is not great they will take their card back and replace it) and Asus has been good too.

If you have not messed around with the temperature control sliders, it is what makes my RX 580 work. I set the max to 70 and min all the way to the bottom at 45 and the card is then rock solid. Don't know what a Vega would be but you could experiment if you have not already.

I will point out that when I fist got my card I had problems right off the bat and had a 550 watt PS that was supposed to be enough and was a bronze Corsair. I replaced it with a 650 watt gold EVGA and saw a huge improvement right off the bat.

With so much of this stuff it's like you have to have the perfect mix of everything for it to work right. Seems to me it should not be this difficult and isn't currently if you go another path.

[the_slayer]

Yeah, I also apologize they do really think what is important for a company is to offer the most modern tools and all to outshine the competition, but they really don't understand all this is useless if you don't take minimally care of whatever you do.

Really, they spend time on things like AMD link which no one cares about and they ask what people want more, while people with vega either have black/green screen freezes, performance or Chill issues other than unstable drivers. They must really sit on a chair and think what they can do to get impressed to the actual consumers, not abandoning them like ants and then thinking they could take a hit to the competitors.

As everybody knows vega has always been in a shortage situation and in countries like mine it has never been available, so I imported from a foreign site the only vega 56 available, which was a sapphire model unfortunately. God, they even say on the manual "Put the disk in the PC to install the drivers", but.. there isn't any disk in the box! I don't know if sapphire is a shadow company of what.

I tried much alike setting max rpm to 4900 (max possible) and temp to max 70°C, but nothing has ever helped, surely after RMAing the entire system you must restart from scratch to understand which one component has failed AGAIN, but that's it, at least I'll change motherboard brand since Asrock is the worst company after sapphire, but atleast sapphire products have hardware quality.

And yeah, I'm the most unlucky guy on the web I guess.

[pokester]

Your take on what AMD is pretty much spot on if you ask me. I have said for a long time now that offering all that fluff in the drivers and phone apps is nice if it works but should have never been wasting peoples time until they had rock solid drivers to begin with. Then you add maybe 1 feature at a time and no more until that is rock solid across all cards and so on. Features don't mean anything if they don't work and make it so you can't play or get your job done. Right now I think they just have so much conflicting with each other, combined with the newest hardware that isn't really software stable either and on top of that the ever changing Windows Updates that screw everything up these days and it is a disaster for AMD. I had never even been to these forums before last October, when I purchased my RX 580 and my issues began, luckily with some reading and the help of many here I learned quickly the workarounds that have made that card usable for gaming. There is no doubt though that no user should have to do those things for a product to work. If that is something that has to be done then it should have been a default in the drivers to begin with, IMHO. I know I will probably upset some when I say this again but I have only had 1 nvidia card in the last 15 years, and that is a 1050ti that came with my sons new computer in early October last year and it has just worked without having to adjust a single thing since day on. He is in school for engineering and is a big gamer and that minimal card just flat out rocks, stability and non-issue wise. I would also point out that I have had every generation of AMD card myself beginning with the HD 4850, 4870, 6870, 7850, 7950 and R9 380x and all those worked rock solid and the the 7 series cards still do. The R9 has issues now too with the Adrenaline drivers, I however rarely use the computer it is in and really when I do it is for video playback and that's about it so it works for that fine. At the time I had bought my RX 580 I had no experience with the AMD drivers after like February of last year as I never used to update unless I had a reason to. I had never seen the Wattman era drivers.  Always been kind of a if it is broken don't fix it kind of person. I am in IT professionally and have always found that the middle of the road is where the stability is, never want to be on the bleeding edge of anything nor left behind. 99.9 percent of the computers I take care of at work are Intel with integrated graphics and the only issues I ever deal with are the ones that Windows and it's updates bring to the table. The computers for generations now since the first core processors to the current generation have really been great from my perspective. I have had a few AMD machines from the Athlon days to the Phenom II days and those machines were not problematic either and at home I had nothing but AMD processors from my first AMD 486 until my Phenom II x6 ( I just replace 4 months ago) which were all great machines and never had the kind of issues I see reported here today. Now personal laptops are another issue. I have had 2 AMD APU based laptops in the last decade and both were great initially but the support from the manufacturers and the drivers fell off almost immediately. The second machine was not supported less than 2 years after purchase and I never could even get it to upgrade to Windows 10 even though spec wise it should. AMD stopped support for that machine on Windows 8 and after a couple Windows updates it wouldn't function correctly anymore. It was my wife's machine and we replaced it with a Lenovo Yoga i3 and it has been flawless. I had purchased another Lenovo i7 for my son to take with him to school everyday the year before and it has been great too. From my own experience with the AMD apu's and what I have seen reported here in the last 6 months, I personally would have to see a long track record of doing way better before I jumped on that bandwagon again.

Best wishes to you. Good Luck!

[the_slayer]

Yeah, I have had always intel cpus with igpus until around 2010 and I haven't had any problems so far. Now I'm again on my old laptop with and AMD GPU (HD 7500m/7600m) since my gaming PC is lacking of a motherboard, and this laptop since Windows 10 have Always had a problem that around every 10 seconds the sounds freezes for a fraction of second: I found out the solution after around 1 year of usage and it was to uninstall the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller". Then back in the 2017 I bought my new shiny gaming rig powered by an AMD GPU and, surprise, that problem was there since the first day, again I solved it uninstalling that controller. I checked another spare PC with amd GPU and again surprise, same problem there. I checked 2 pcs I have at home, one powered by and intel pentium dual core with igpu and one with an nvidia card, and they don't show this problem. Very good AMD I must admit, very good really.

I have another story to tell about the shiny amd drivers. The actual laptop I use has been bought in December 2012, and the drivers stopped to be released at the catalyst release, after not more than 3 years if I remember correctly.

But it's not all: just Yesterday I randomly found out on an unknows site that AMD released a crimson beta release back in 2016, a driver to support "legacy gpus", which won't be further updated with other crimson releases, the article also cited the .exe name. I searched for it on the net, it happeared on the amd site, but the link was broken, very nice. I searched again on unknown sites and I found it, I really was glad it really worked. It's not even the end, because after installing it I found out it can be updated to the latest crimson edition which has been released in november 2017, very nice I must admit, except it is a false positive since it fails because it's not based on GCN arch, it would have been better if it didn't happear at all as available.

But what is the problem then? It's that every singular person that want to install the latest available driver is going to use the automated installer from amd driver page, which is proved to install the latest available one, but will just install the catalyst one instead, making the further crimson edition developement completely useless.

Things like this tell about how much a company is trustworthy, and AMD really seems not in every aspect.

[pokester]

I too have found many incorrect, outdated and broken links on the AMD site. The website itself is a mess in many regards, I would have had a chat with the webmaster long ago. I can't speak to the automated installer going to the correct driver, but if you manually search it takes you to that Legacy driver.

They absolutely did release the one beta driver officially and you can still get that 16.2.1 beta driver here on the AMD site today: Legacy

I have found guru3d.com to have an excellent repository of old drivers too for future reference. I tend to not like to install software from random sites anymore.

[colesdav]

Hi,

See this about Radeon Chill.
Where can I find a list of games defined by AMD as supported and working properly by Radeon Chill in...

Bye.

[Bsiate]

Hi there, have you found a solution to the gpu being stuck at p-state 3? Because it started to occure for me as well...

[Bsiate]

For me it has something to do with the "AMD External Events Client Module". If I kill it in the Task-Manager, the Problem does not occure anymore, but people say that it is important for the freesync functionality...