General Discussions

[kingfish]

AMD is aware of user complaints regarding black screen driver crashes on Radeon GPUs and general instability and is investigating these concerns. That’s the word from company representatives, after ET reached out to discuss the situation.

For those of you just tuning in, the AMD subreddit has been buzzing lately about various issues and instabilities affecting the Radeon driver stack. Complaints on Reddit have often centered around a black screen problem that can leave a player with no choice but to hard reboot. While the system hasn’t necessarily crashed, the display is reportedly unresponsive and will not turn back on. A number of users have unhappily been discussing these problems on reddit. Some of these complaints have been popping up for awhile, with black screens mentioned in threads dating from August, but they seem to have gotten more numerous recently.

I reached out to AMD to discuss these issues because they sound similar to some problems I encountered during the 5600 XT review. I wrote that review on an all-AMD testbed, partly because I genuinely wanted to take a look at midrange gaming on a platform that we know is increasingly popular in the desktop enthusiast space — but it was also partly because I had trouble getting the driver to install on an Intel platform. Every time I tried, the driver would hit 67 percent and the display would turn black. Swapping from the 5600 XT to the 5700 XT didn’t solve the issue.

I didn’t make a big deal of it in the review because 1) I’d already been planning to do the all-AMD system evaluation project in the first place, 2) I couldn’t be sure the problem wasn’t in the early review driver (and believe me, this happens), and 3) None of my fellow reviewers at other sites were reporting any issues with the same GPU and motherboard combination, which typically indicates the problem is specific to the reviewer’s hardware.

After the review ran, I worked with AMD to troubleshoot the issue. I had missed a UEFI update from Asus released between November and January, and AMD recommended setting the motherboard to specifically use PCIe 3.0 on its x16 slots rather than “Auto” for link speed detection. The combination of the new UEFI and the PCIe 3.0 setting fixed my problem, though I didn’t test which of the two changes were responsible.

According to AMD, the black screen issue I had encountered was distinct from the problem affecting games. That’s a really important point in this. The reason I’m sharing information on what was deemed a separate issue is because there may be more than one contributing factor to the issue. Subreddits and forums are a great way to hear about the issues people are having with equipment, but not everyone knows how to write a good bug report or properly swap a video card. An issue as vague as “black screen” could seem larger than it is if people attribute monocausality to what are, in fact, separate issues. I’m including my own experience here in case it proves helpful for troubleshooting, but it may not help most folks.

AMD’s Responses

First, there’s the statement AMD sent to me. It reads:

Stability of our drivers is a key priority for our software team. They are monitoring forum discussions closely, including the black screen and other issues users are reporting, and we are actively identifying and working on fixes. As soon as we have more information to share, we will let you know. We encourage users to report issues they are experiencing here [http://amd.com/report] so that our team can investigate.

There have also been some posts on Reddit. There’s a specific survey for reporting results with black screens, which you can take here. There’s also a number of threads on the subreddit with users reporting various solutions that have worked for them. The thread for the public release driver for the 5600 XT also notes: “Some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics users may intermittently experience a black screen while gaming or on desktop. A potential temporary workaround is disabling hardware acceleration in applications running in the background such as web browsers or Discord.”

If you own a Radeon GPU and are having problems with it, ET recommends you check for UEFI updates for your motherboard, manually specify PCIe 3.0 in UEFI settings, make sure you’re using the latest drivers, and try disabling overlay support, at least for now. AMD is aware of the problem but has not given a timeline for a fix. Given how long the problem has been percolating, we’ll hopefully see one sooner than later.

AMD is Investigating Black Screen Driver Issues on Radeon Cards - ExtremeTech 

[black_zion]

Given how long the problem has been percolating there needs to be some pressure on Lisa Su by the stockholders to drop the hammer, especially when current nVidia cards are priced very close, if not cheaper, than Radeon yet have the same, or greater, level of performance, they don't have to deal with this, and nVidia announced during their earnings report they would reveal Ampere at GTC, and that is going to put AMD so far behind the 8 ball they'd have to make 6 banks just to tap, and "Big Navi" isn't going to bring them anywhere close if Ampere is indeed 50% faster as all the evidence so far points to. The generic statements AMD puts out are not going to cut it much longer if more of the reputable partner review sites start bringing this mess to the forefront. GamersNexus was one thing, but Despite All The Efforts, AMD Radeon GPU Drivers Reportedly Still A Mess – Black Screens, Stuttering,...‌ and https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/radeon-graphics-cards-black-screen-bug-is-haunting-amd.html are starting to push it too. 

You know by most of the people who come on here, they don't know anything about computers, and asking them their system specs is like asking them to do brain surgery, they're not going to want to figure out how to do any of that, they're just going to say F it and go buy nVidia for the same price. They are going to want a card they can put in and then go play their games. Heck, that's all anyone wants, their card costing upwards of $500 (or more) to just work correctly, they already probably have to deal with Windows 10 being schizophrenic on them. And again this goes back to AMD thinking they can pricematch nVidia, doubling the prices from the previous generation while having persistent issues and a lack of feature parity. If the 5700XT cost $250, like the RX 580 it replaced, then persistent issues would be put in the context of a much cheaper product.

And to conclude, Intel GPUs seem to be coming along faster than most thought they would, and AMD is probably closer to two years away from something that will be able to challenge Ampere, by which time they will be on their refresh cycle as well. When the experts expect 40% growth per year from AMD over the next 7 years to justify their stock prices, and their GPU division is in third place behind Intel and nVidia, that's not going to happen.

[black_zion]

Oh, and to followup with that, remember that AMD is expected to release a whole new line of Big Navi derived cards, effectively EOLing very expensive cards not even a year old, again.

[hardcoregames_]

My X570 is out of order at present so I have to use the backup X470.

Parking my R5 3600 on that board was good bad and ugly. The good, RAM at DDR4-3200. The bad the RX 480 8GB seems to be seen in error with a red LED. The ugly, windows will not install or boot with UEFI enabled.

The video card is working this is a BIOS fault. Like the video card enumeration and the CPU issues.

[colesdav]

I think AMD drivers have been unstable compared to Nvidia drivers for years on PCs and laptops I run.
OS support is Windows 10/7 only since 17.7.1.

I don't consider that AMD really support Linux OS at all.
They seem to rely on opensource programmers to do it for free.
There is no Adrenalin Settings GUI built in to Ubuntu which is the OS many may try to use to move from Windows 7.

Blackscreening happens on Vega GPUs for sure so that problem is about 2.5 years old.
R9 390x still has no working fan control yet many on here seem to think that is O.K.
Older GPUs just seem to get dropped. They get no new features.
The Driver installer would not install drivers on my HD7970 for ages.

RX5700XT benchmarks are good and cause Nvidia to release "Super" versions of Turing.
It looks like the AIB GPUs with problems like ones from ASUS, MSI and XFX are at least getting fixed this time around.

This promise to do better on driver quality seems too little, too late.
Sorry but I have no faith in it at all.
Something seems seriously wrong.

Look at the Vega, Radeon 7 and RX5700XT launches and launch drivers.
Even worse, look at post release VBIOS flashes on Radeon 7 and RX5600XT.
It would probably be better to delay the launches and do them properly.

A first step to addressing quality if AMD are serious about it would be to open a proper Bug Tracking System because AMD Reporting forms give user no feedback whatsoever and I doubt many people take time to use it.

Since AMD can already gather System Information in the driver then how about autofilling the Report Form so it saves lots of time to report bugs.

I still think the installer needs fixing to catch AMD GPU drivers installed by Microsoft in Windows 10 and those Microsoft installed AMD drivers need to be updated. Saying it is all Micrsofts fault does not cut it. This installer gotcha is possibly responsible for many AMD driver install problems.

The other thing I want to ask. Where is the official AMD Support Forum - is it here, or Reddit, or Twitter?

I hope AMD do something to improve this situation.

[colesdav]

Correction - OS support is Windows 10/7 only since 17.7.1. - updated.

[black_zion]

Sadly it does seem like social media Reddit has become the more "official" support forum, and this forum itself seems so antiquated if you look at nVidia's forums.

[shoesfx]

I always try to support amd since my first radeon 7970, rx480 and rx5700xt. I could understand some minor bugs but this hard reboot will damage my pc.

There is no official support and frankly although i love my new card i will give it a couple of months before i ask for a full refund.

[pokester]

I'm not going to beat the drivers to death with already known issues. We all know they are there and unresolved for many users.

I do have a question though about the AMD response to the author:

"Stability of our drivers is a key priority for our software team. They are monitoring forum discussions closely, including the black screen and other issues users are reporting, and we are actively identifying and working on fixes. As soon as we have more information to share, we will let you know. We encourage users to report issues they are experiencing here [http://amd.com/report] so that our team can investigate."

What forum are they saying they are watching? If they are watching these forums it would be great for them to acknowledge this and mention they are working on it. Other than a couple mods I have never seen AMD driver team in these forums. If they are watching it would be a huge morale booster for them to say so.

I regularly read the Reddit feed too. While there are lots of complaints and discussions there too, I don't see AMD engaged there like they were about a year and a half ago. 

So what forum are they saying they are monitoring?

[kingfish]

In a perfect world, they should be monitoring all of them. I also wish they would make themselves known...should require one person a week to peruse the forums adding some input.

[black_zion]

Andrej Zdravkovic, SVP of Radeon Software Development, needs to be much more active. Minimum he needs a weekly post on Facebook, Reddit, and here of updates, and not in those generic "we are aware of..." formats, and even needs to host a teleconferenced question and answer session viewable by all but where the reputable tech sites (TomsHardware, Anandtech, etc...) ask the questions, most of them will be issues seen on their forums and elsewhere anyway. He also needs to establish higher standards for the driver developers, and fire them if they do not hit them. And finally, he needs to get a driver control panel out at least when the release of RDNA2 cards happens. He needs to start acing like an SVP and not like an anonymous employee. He needs to bring Radeon up to par with GeForce before Xe hits the market...

Also, I came across the interview he gave KitGuru back in 2016. How much of this can you say applies to AMD these days? Their out of box experience is far from ultra simple (disable this, tweak that, change that setting in UEFI to attempt to prevent this black screen issue, for example), the software is not intuitive to use anymore, and I dare say the Navi architecture is so flawed that it is impossible to fix with software, which is why major issues are persisting for months.

[hardcoregames_]

nothing has changed since then, drivers are still troublesome 

[pokester]

Can I get an Amen to that one!

[devilzzz]

It is now July 7th, 2020 and I still see many people talking of issues that happened long, long ago.  When does AMD get this right?  I honestly don't want to go back to Green Team.  AMD get your act together.

[pokester]

All issues will be fixed by the end of the week. We just don't know which week yet. LOL

[colesdav]

Why do you say " I honestly don't want to go back to Green Team"?
Their GPUs:
(1). Have stable, working drivers, Nvidia Control Panel might look old, but it works. The Nvidia Installers work.
(2). Work with 3rd party overclocking tools like Palit ThunderMaster, Asus GPUTweakII, MSI Afterburner.

(3). Nvidia GeForce Experience offers more advanced features than Adrenalin 2019 GUI/UI . I do not count Adrenalin 2020 because it is a mess.

(4). Get bug fixes on games very fast. Still support some very old cards and add new technology features to them where possible.

(5). The RTX Turing series have Ray Tracing hardware and it works.
(6). If you are a Blender Artist / User, an RTX2080 can beat current AMD CPU or GPUs using Nvidia CUDA or even faster with OptiX which uses RTX hardware.
(7). If you do GPU Coding - CUDA is much more widely supported and easier to get started with than OpenCL.
(8). If you use Linux - Ubuntu for example - Nvidia provide a GUI/UI for their GPUs.

(9). AMD Opensource ROCm for OpenCL is a nighmare, and AMD latest cards do not work on it.

(10). Nvidia cards are not much more expensive than AMD now, since AMD claim they perform as well as Nvidia cards now.

I am not here trolling.
I believe the above statements are all true, based on my time using AMD GPU versus Nvidia.

The only AMD GCN/RDNA GPU series I have no hands on experience with so far is the Radeon 7.

The most recent AMD GPU I tested / worked on was a Navi RX5700XT, and I was really disappointed with it after seeing all the reviews and hype about Navi.
I compared the RX5700XT at stock clocks (barely stable, so no overclocking) to an RX Vega 64 Liquid with an HBM2 overclock. Very little difference in performance. Identical at 1080p ULTRA. Slightly faster at 2K ULTRA, but stutters. Slower at 4K ULTRA generally. In a few cases where it reported higher FPS, it suffered from stuttering versus smooth experience with RX Vega 64 Liquid. The RX5700XT does run at high temperatures as well.  The compute performance on the RX5700XT is worse than the RX Vega 64 Liquid. Blender performance is poor. The power consumption reported by the RX5700XT GPU is ~ 260Watts at 4K Ultra versus ~ 360 Watts on the RX Vega 64 Liquid GPU.That is the only improvement I see.

RX Vega 64 Liquid GF 14nm   launched: August 14, 2017.
RX5700XT Series TSMC 7nm launched: July        7, 2019.

So after two years of development and R&D effort, and migrating from GF 14nm to TSMC 7nm  AMD released a GPU with the same performance as an RX Vega 64 Liquid, and they still cannot do Ray Tracing. It has taken about 1 year to get ~ working stable drivers using a Hybrid install of Adrenalin 2019 GUI/UI and 20.5.1. drivers.

Pitiful and really sad.

[devilzzz]

What I mean by not going back to Green Team is giving them twice as much for high to top end cards.  They are making PC gaming more expensive.  Also about things you mentioned about Green Team many I know and don't need to be told.  I remember when I could get the high end card, GTX 1080 Ti, for a reasonable price in Canada but now ... LOL!  The only way I would buy Nvidia is to buy their stuff used.  The are an example of disgusting corporate greed right now.

[pokester]

I agree that all GPU's are too expensive. AMD's pricing is near double what it was a the same tier points a few years back. While a  5700xt is a little cheaper than a 2070 super for instance it is worth the price as it has hardware features AMD does not, and a driver as well as interface that actually work with no tinkering required. I think they all need a reality check on pricing.

I am hoping with how strong the next consoles will be that it will help driver PC GPU pricing down. Time will tell. 

[hardcoregames_]

My RTX 2080 was slightly less expensive than the Radeon VII and it is slightly more powerful

[devilzzz]

It depends on where you live.  If you are in America then it is a whole different ball game than Canada and other parts of the world.  Please don't defend Nvidia's pricing practices lately.

[colesdav]

ATI was based in Canada, then AMD bought them.
ATI Technologies - Wikipedia 
Is that why their GPUs are cheaper in Canada than Nvidia cards?

[hardcoregames_]

devilzzz wrote:

It depends on where you live.  If you are in America then it is a whole different ball game than Canada and other parts of the world.  Please don't defend Nvidia's pricing practices lately.

I do not defend anyone but I am quick to criticise some predatory pricing such as older video cards priced at $2000 and other crap I see on Amazon ads especially. I have mentioned this to them many times and posted screenshot etc

[colesdav]

It is likely that overclocking the HBM2 on Radeon 7 would improve it's performnce versus Nvidia. 
I have not seen any details onhow much the HBM2 can overclock on the Radeon VII.
RX Vega 64 Liquid can run at up to 1150MHz versus 945MHz stock.

[hardcoregames_]

colesdav wrote:

It is likely that overclocking the HBM2 on Radeon 7 would improve it's performnce versus Nvidia. 
I have not seen any details onhow much the HBM2 can overclock on the Radeon VII.
RX Vega 64 Liquid can run at up to 1150MHz versus 945MHz stock.

I am only comparing stock card vs stock card. Otherwise I would overclock my card to compensate.

[colesdav]

I guess it depends where you are.
Wher I am 2060 super is the same price as the cheapest RX5700XT. 
The lowest cost 2070 Super I can find is cheaper than the more expensive RX5700XT.

Given all the advantages of Nvidia GPUs I list above, I think they are better value than AMD GPUs.
Nvidia prices are so high because they do not have any real competition for years.
AMD AIB card quality and drivers have been bad since RX Vega. 
The RX5700XT has failed for the same reasons.

[hardcoregames_]

colesdav wrote:

I guess it depends where you are.
Wher I am 2060 super is the same price as the cheapest RX5700XT. 
The lowest cost 2070 Super I can find is cheaper than the more expensive RX5700XT.

Given all the advantages of Nvidia GPUs I list above, I think they are better value than AMD GPUs.
Nvidia prices are so high because they do not have any real competition for years.
AMD AIB card quality and drivers have been bad since RX Vega. 
The RX5700XT has failed for the same reasons.

I have an EVGA RTX 2080 Black Edition which is slightly higher performance. I own a 4K panel so I was motivated to find a strong enough card. My RX 480 was starting to show signs of stress.

[devilzzz]

Nvidia's prices are so high yes because of a lack of competition but also that bs with ray tracing that hardly works on any games.  Anyway I have kept following the AMD posts having them still sent to my email seeing people talking about their RX 5700 XTs and well after all the craziness in dealing with Amazon today I got my paid return paper to attach to the box and well also I finally though have all the parts for my new build.  As much as I have had trouble with the card I am going to give it one more go in my new rig which will have an i5 9600k, 16 GB of 3200 DDR4 and so on.  Since I tried to start the refund process I have not had issues with the card but I have only been playing WOW on max. LOL!  I wish I could afford an Nvidia offering that would help play games in 4K at the price the RX 5700 Xt is supposed to handle 4K and so hoping for the best when I try it again with some fairly new games.  Still glad to have the option to get a refund as I contacted and arranged things on my last day of being able to return the card.  Amazon (Canada) screwed things up so I still had it luckily to try with a new build before sending it back.   Anyway like others I have seen comment I hope new offerings in the future from AMD and Intel will give Nvidia a run for it's money.  Also going to be trying Windows 10 with the new pc.  Anyway it has been some time since I posted in this thread.  Finally I see mention of cards coming out in September is it from Nvidia and AMD?  What is the expected pricing for them?  I am in Canada so add basically 33% more in cost and 15% sales tax. LOL!

[diegof1]

It also affects mobile integrated GPU where there isn't other option 

[Soap1907]

Investigate for green screen on Browsers too.