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Anonymous
Not applicable

To help people game better I'll share how I set my ryzen win 10 5700xt system up for great gaming with samsung QLED and dolby atmos speakers and no black screens. Also response to nvidia's "efficiency claims" and freesync.

For a good gaming experience I feel how I set my PC up currently for great gaming and to eliminate black screens.
A simple solution I'd found was to run video player software and apps with "Vsync enabled" the easiest way to do this might just be to turn on enhanced sync globally then configure each game profile in adrenaline and in game settings to Vsync off and to run games in borderless window mode. Theres a free open source github program that can help some titles like metro exodus become borderless window mode even when the devs have rocks in their heads and didn't include it as an option called borderless gaming. You may also need to edit the user.cfg game file for metro exodus and set fullscreen to OFF.
Then have freesync on and enhanced sync off in all your game profiles in adrenaline and everything else off except in advanced settings in the adrenaline game profile you can set texture quality to high and surface format optimization on and turn everything off from anisotropic off to tessellation forced tessellation override to off triple buffering off all of it off off off. If your game starts tearing the image or it looks wobbly turn enhanced sync on if this is problematic or crashes use traditional vsync.
With Vsync off I do not really get tearing maybe because my TV supports VRR/freesync freesync is basically VRR really, basically freesync is awesome and I've got my display set to 1440p 120hz and configure my games with a mix of ultra/high and medium settings for high performance usually with no antialiasing but sometimes TAA if needed. You want high to ultra on textures and fiddle around with everything else texture quality is one of the most important things in how a game looks so yeah use 16x anisotropic filtering, you can maybe set shadows and reflections to medium or low and maybe try with ambient occlusion on medium or off. the higher frame rate is important for gaming and reduces the need for vsync. Set your resolution to 1440p in windows 10 display settings and in advanced graphics then adapter properties list all modes and set it to 2560x1440 120hz and make sure the active signal and resolution both match in advanced graphics page of windows display settings. If you begin to play a video with freesync enabled and fullscreen it its supposed to flicker black for a second when playback starts as the display changes output mode to freesync because video is maybe 24fps but your desktop is 120 so it needs to change output mode and switch its display because freesync sorta acts like a hardware framebuffer basically VRR simply accepts frames as they're delivered instead of queueing them in a buffer to keep them at a fixed display rate. However for it to repeatedly flicker black during playback if you aren't stopping and starting its not supposed to do that. Its usually because you're forcing 10bit colour or 12bit colour or the wrong colourspace for your display or wrong resolutions so ensure you've set to 8bit RGB and 1080p most of the time unless your monitor supports higher then maybe try 1440. if it needs other colourspaces or 10bit colour or a different resolution for the video the movie player app will switch to the correct colourspace and resolution to play the video and bit depth based on the video source. If you want to game in HDR you're supposed to go to windows 10 display settings and toggle on WCG and HDR colour option for the display then load your game up, it usually looks more washed out, actually HDR is support for more colour so things look dull and washed out unless they've been made and recorded in HDR with the extra colours so uhh yeah even playing HDR games in HDR game mode looks unimpressive to me compared to leaving WCG+HDR switch off in windows display settings then setting my Samsung TV's colourspace to NATIVE for desktop or gaming then editing the input source with the TV settings using the remote control to game console adjusting the backlight to about 16 for me and colour to 30 from 25 and applying 120% saturation in my adrenaline custom colour settings and adjusting the saturation slider as needed as some Netflix movies have very flat colour for it to be added back in by your display or hardware hardware. I then set the sharpness of my display while looking at small font to what I feel is best on the eyes which varies based on the resolution of the content being played.
To enable freesync you must press the buttons on your monitor or TV or the remote control and go into the menu options, I found mine under external devices in a game mode setting. *EDIT* important to note under my external devices menu I see important settings such at UHD colour mode and black levels. These if set incorrectly may cause black flickering as the display cuts out due to overloading bandwidth capacity. You will require HDCP 2.2 and hdmi 2.0b really or for 420 chroma hdmi 2.0A or displayport 1.3 or 1.4 on your display or TV. I recommend connecting directly to your display or else freesync or VRR wont work and you wont get low latency, have a separate cable HDMI cable from your GPU or computer or thunderbolt port to your audio receiver. Note many displays/tv's and receivers may have like 6 HDMI ports but most will but low spec and older and not allow you to play protected content or HDR content you must have HDCP 2.2 for UHD colour and 4k60hz. You MUST ENABLE GAME MODE for freesync. New TV's are best for movies when set to movie mode which processes the image with say edge enhancement or contrast enhancement and motion smoothing but this introduces lag time to process/higher latency which is terrible for gaming so you must switch from "movie profile" to "game mode" wherever its located in your TV for PC use. Some TV's and displays have specific ports recommended for PC use as they are lower latency but remove all the adjustable image settings like "colour" so for my Samsung TV I set its input source to game console as its low latency and freesync as its made for future hardware like the xbox one X's hdmi 2.1. Some hardware devices with HDMI 2.1 can switch between game mode or movie mode automatically depending on the content by using AUTO LLC or something which automatically detects when it needs to change to a lower latency mode. You enable game mode first. Then you can set freesync on, my TV says freesync ultimate I toggle that on. Once you've turned it on in your display you must make certain its on in your AMD adrenaline control panel under display and for each games game profile you can change from AMD optimized to freesync ON to ensure its turned on. this is how you enable VRR on TV's with variable refresh rate/ they require a freesync compatible display TLDR: VRR is freesync. You will notice it says variable refresh rate in little words under the word freesync in adrenaline control panel. You can tell when its enabled as you can disable vsync and not get tearing and get awesomely low latency from 16ms or more down to like 4-8ms.
For those of you wondering when 4k blu-rays and hdmi 2.0 first came out, it works with 10bit HDR by capping fps to 24 or 30hz which HDMI 2.0A can support with ycbcr 444 or RGB 444 (full RGB) just fine but gamers what HQ desktop environment with 1440p120hz so enabling high res and high refresh rates means you don't have bandwidth for 10bit or HDR and if you do, you've gotta game like consoles do like 30fps unless its a HDMI 2.1 device. So for those of you trying to game in HDR and crying about black screens set your refresh rate to 24hz or 30hz and try again or check the ports of your monitor even support it and your cables do too.
For audio. In windows 10 I go to the advanced sound settings or sound control panel and under the playback tab I disable all the outputs of the GPU that aren't in use or mainboard soundcard if I don't use the 3.5mm input jacks but USB headphone amp. I then right click my dolby atmos HDMI sound system and run the speaker configuration wizard and do not select spatial audio as it sounds lower quality and is only used for gaming competitively with headphones with the right settings in dolby access app for atmos to hear footsteps positions better in stereo headphones. I instead select 7.1 or stereo depending on your speaker setup and content being played back. and set my speakers to full range if they're fist sized if they're coin sized do not set to full range. Also if you have an audio receiver like an atmos or dts pioneer or Yamaha or whatever you set a crossover range in the receiver so its fine to output full range speakers. Then I go to advanced properties of the device and change from 32bit 48khz or whatever to 16bit 44khz with AMD GPU's the 44khz sounds more life like and better to me which is a compliment as in the 1950's 44khz was mathematically proven to be all the human hearing would require when sampling audio which is why CD's were created with that sample rate but our hardwares polling and well sound ability isn't up to "theoretical limits" so when we sample with higher polling intervals in the recording such as dolby atmos 32bit 384khz audio it surpasses the hearing limits of dogs and must be recorded at that rate then to output it most things are recorded in 16bit so leaving it at 16bit is fine if the audio was recorded higher quality outputting at 16bit on AMD doesn't really hurt it. I then use some free audio software players like daum potplayer or for audio I preferred kodi with certain settings but a recent update to windows or kodi maybe makes it not sound the same but potplayer sounds amazingly better than I remember? WASAPI renderer and passthrough mode, in the audio properties in potplayer you'll want to click the button and find where to check DRC (dynamic range compression) on and set all the passthroughs AC3 or true HD to default passthrough and disable the compatible connection and the "only use 48khz" i'd assume it'll sound better maybe without it. output as its a windows vista technology that lets apps get better access to the audio hardware and allows support for ASIO low latency and wave RT. If only app developers would use AMD's true audio engine. or some other better audio output method or solution that was developed in the last 15 years.. sigh. Its all a conspiracy to sell lousy beats headphones or overpriced but rubbish gaming headsets.
My atmos receiver I set the crossover correctly for my speakers and I then set distance to 1.11m and levels to maybe max or close to it for all of them and set ceiling speaker height for the dolby atmos front upfiring speakers to be 1.53m if receiver supports I do not enable the reflex stuff. may be different for your room do what sounds best to your ears. I set treble +10 and bass +10 but you can adjust according to soundfeel as some systems have more treble or bass than others. I did not use MCACC or auto EQ calibration or if you did that disable it. Disable all EQ settings however the dolby processor or sound mode on the output of your system if you press the surround button you will see options such as classical or studio or extra stereo surround I tend to leave that set to rock setting it sounds more like its in the room. And for some youtube content extra stereo may sound better to upmix its stereo content. I have a pioneer vsx 933 with Andrew jones 5.1 speaker pack and the pioneer addon upfiring atmos speakers. and also an onkyo txnr 545 with onkyo atmos upfiring speaker pack and Sherwood concerto 5.1 speakers. The onkyo has more bass and sparklier prettier treble while the pioneer lacks in high treble extension and seems to be pretty good in bass though but could be a bit better for a more musical sound but its good at reproduction of something pretty life like or maybe not life like but very impressive all the same especially for the price. You can spend fortunes on terrible beats headphones or brand name speaker packs and such that sound like the worst stuff ever compared to an Andrew jones speaker pack or some hifiman or Sennheiser or AKG headphones assuming you have the right hardware though expensive audiophile gadgets and speakers do sound better the increase in price tag makes them diminishing returns usually. I've some hifiman sundara's but he4xx's are cheaper and maybe nearly as good if I had the money i'd get an arya and upgrade my DAC/AMP from an xduoo xd-05 with burson audio v5i-d op amp to something better with MQA support but its not like I can afford all the luxuries I want in life I don't even own a car its how I afford a computer. I use XMOS USB chip thesycon drivers from the burson audio website and set for asio low latency plugged into the highest speed USB port on my x570 mainboard for super low latency.
Lots of clueless youtube morons test AMD's HEVC hardware decoding and encoding using anything but the industry standard proprietary HEVC. or are setting it wrong somehow. or worse using nightly experimental builds of buggy open source software like x265 that were probably developed on nvidia hardware and may have been sabotaged for AMD since its easily editable or made with custom settings or they may have overclocked their GPU or bought one from a dodgy brand and gotten expected image artifacts. If you see true d3d11 renderer hardware decoding of 10bit HDR content with free software like daum potplayer assuming your'e smart enough to know how to configure the settings to get it to play back properly with a high quality display like a samsung QLED you will weep at the image quality forget nvidia I'll buy an AMD card just so my audio and video can be that good. I just played back with a  few different renderers in potplayer and for some reason OPENGL renderer seems pretty good now it never used to work before, huh? well whatever its awesome.
As I'd said in the beginning issues with things like black flickering and other corruption or virus like activity can be usually be fixed by running SFC /SCANNOW in powershell with administrator rights by right clicking the powershell icon and selecting run as administrator. Then doing a DISM /online /image-cleaup /restorehealth command once SFC is complete. These commands ensure windows system files integrity. If it ever finds corruption I'd recommend disabling all overclocks or XMP profile for RAM and reinstalling your AMD display drivers after loading your BIOS defaults. In the AMD driver installer options check the additional options and perform an install with a factory reset and remove all user settings in case they were what was wrong somehow and test your system for speed/stability with and without the AMD x570 or x470 or whatever chipset drivers, I think the important ones are the ryzen power plan and PSP not too sure about the rest as they maybe seem to slow things down depending on your system. Test with them installed or not installed.
Then disabling xmp and all other overclocking but I will teach you a way to have your system not overclocked but still gaining massive performance instead and over the last few weeks/months i'd been testing and fiddling with secondary memory timings and found some corruption or errors maybe came about from altering certain secondary memory timing options like or enabling XMP or particularly setting different refresh cycles particularly to be ones that aren't listed specifically for the speed/timing in DRAM information section in bios. So yeah just disable XMP and any CPU and GPU overclock you'd been doing and then enable Precision Boost Overclock (P.B.O.) in the bios on your ryzen system it just means that when it runs programs it will stay at the boost clocks more often than it will at the base clocks, you can disable RAM ECC in bios too for more speed without fear unless you're running a business or webserver then why are you here or with a 5700xt or care about gaming?
Instead of using XMP just setting the voltage to what the XMP profile would normally set it to then leaving XMP profile to auto in my bios and setting your memory timings manually I recommend 1866mhz with command rate 1T to double the performance/speed so its actually 2x 1866 (thanks to command rate 1T its only sending each command once instead of default twice) so 1866 is faster than regular 3200mhz XMP and with shockingly lower latency timings possible around 1 third to half as low almost half the latency which in billionths of a second makes your system CRAZY responsive it all adds up over billions of times. Then Disable gear down mode (the command rate and gear down mode are at the bottom of the secondary memory timings for anything I've seen) then setting your memory timings to be those suggested for 1866mhz in the DRAM timing information.
(The easy way is to set 1866mhz then leave everything to auto in secondary memory timings except for command rate and geardown mode) But for me instead of all 13's for 1866mhz I set my memory to all 11's the 1600mhz setting in DRAM timing info so far I've not caught on to any issues from this as my system boots and runs fine lower but i cant notice much of a difference with 9 10 10 10 so I thought for stability i'd best leave it to all 11's but leaving everything to auto is fine too as long as you change to 1866mhz it will populate the numbers for you but they may not be as fast as they could be. I'd found it normally automatically lowers TRAS which is an active timing window so longer can be better on my system lowering below 38 makes programs load slower and icons in my system tray next to the clock take longer to appear when I boot into windows, and increasing it to say 42 can make them load faster but I'm not certain if it causes some unusual texture pop-in in games or something I dunno I left it to what the XMP would have set it to for optimal results i think its how the RAM was made? at 38 But thats on my system its best for me to leave it at 38 instead of 30 or something lower and as for FTAW being at 38 seems better than 17 or 20 or even 23 which are recommended for timings like 1600/1866/2133 as its also an active window I believe default is like 58 for this? which is actually really slow I don't know why but my system testing different values 38 seemed best 23 maybe close second? while 28 or 27 sucked. As I've some good RAM I set my TRC to be 38 which is meant for 1600mhz but if you suffer from a micro stutter every few minutes or something set it to what your DRAM information in bios says for 1866 which on my RAM says 44. (default is slow and laggy and terrible at something like 58 or fifty something?) setting the S/L timings under TRC to what was specified in the DRAM timing information in your bios, the S/L timings can lower the latency of audio and make it sound slightly different and slightly speed things up a bit, I only change the first two S/L ones as the second group of S/L can speed things up a bit if I set them both to 6,6 but it maybe causes issues somehow.
Next you will want to go into windows 10 settings and gaming menu option and disable everything there. Turn game mode off too. Then you will want to search the web for some guides on disabling unnecessary windows 10 system services they should give you an explanation of what each one does and you can decide whether you need them or not like remote desktop/hyper V(virtualization support) or fax machine support or telephone support or smart cards, touch screen and pen drawing support. Setting them from automatic to disabled can free up performance if you don't use or need them. You could also do the same for windows privacy settings turn off what you don't want or need in the privacy menu of windows 10 settings and disable all the background apps you don't want updating/running in the background. I can live if solitaire never updates or paint 3d because i dont use it. You can also set what apps have access to your microphone or camera. Next you will want to disable all overlays like steam overlay or AMD adrenalines overlay as long but you will require them to record game footage with relive or to broadcast in steam if you're doing that. But really you should for best performance only enabled them as required or if the game doesn't have fps or latency performance metrics like doom 2016 or borderlands 3 so you can see how low your average frame time and CPU latency is you can enable show performance metrics in AMD's adrenaline settings tab under general on the right hand side.
I also uninstall/remove windows features I don't use such as windows 10 media player or internet explorer 11 or powershell 2.0 (they're up to maybe 6 or more so 2 is useless to have). I also then ensure that my steam overlay is disabled I enable hardware acceleration in steam settings, and hardware video decoding and opt in to the steam client beta. I'm currently running a windows insider version 2004 of windows 10 so I am required to keep full diagnostic services and windows insider service keep this in mind when disabling services.
Most titles seem to run far far far better and faster higher FPS in borderless fullscreen mode for me. Doom2016 in VULKAN, Shadow of the tomb raider, Frost punk, GRIP, Red Dead Redemption 2, Just cause 4, witcher 3, gundam new breaker, halo the masterchief collection and vermintide 2 are some of the titles i'd tested which appear to run better in borderless windowed mode than fullscreen. Though I'm not certain about some titles like Warhammer chaosbane as it refuses to want to run in borderless windowed mode or something? Maybe give it a try in borderless window mode the games you are struggling with as it greatly reduces latency for me and gives me a great gaming experience it might help you with your black bars as it seems to make my system with a 5700xt game better.
I've a 2017 Samsung QLED Q7FN and a ryzen 2700x with some gskill trident Z RAM.
I recommend using Samsung SSD's/NVME's but I don't think you actually need to enable RAPID mode. also better RAM is better but only by a few % so consider if its worth the price increase. Samsung B die memory is awesome but most people shouldn't waste the money on such small gains unless pro gamers. AMD's bios RAID is good its one of the few raid controllers better than windows software RAID performance for NVME's intels highpoint RAID controllers just aren't up to beating windows software RAID last I checked. So yeah YAY for AMD. I'm not sure about a massive improvement with RAID 0 but its maybe better than nothing, when I tried a volume raid the default RAID option it seemed to boot into windows faster but that may be me having 2 SSD's and 2 NVME's or something to do with AHCI and Samsung drives or file optimization of Samsung drives and lower latency.
As for the people suggesting that the 2070 super is better than a 5700xt. Forget the 2070, if you look at a 2080 ti's 754mm squared chip size and do some simple division maths of silicon area its something like 3.3 times that of a 5700xt but its not even 1.5 times better FPS that's trash. I changed over from a gtx 1060 to a rx 580 and the VIDEO and AUDIO quality were SOOO IMPRESSIVELY amazingly better when hooked up to the same display that even 10bit colour desktop or HDR video content looked better like nvidia's was false 10bit or not true colours software faked or something I swore off nvidia even if AMD only ever games at 60fps tops versus nvidia's falsified benchmarks of 200 whatever they're selling I wouldn't care at all the audio and visual experience is sooo much better and worth it.
Simple fact of life, if the cards do the same thing, they'll use the same power end of discussion. When I mentioned VRM I meant the 7phase Power Regulation my powercolor red devil has on the PCB versus the default of 4 or whatever AMD's standards said. This lets you play with more power and maintain stability and ensures your components get the right amount of power if you were say overclocking or something. But I don't really need that i've got a factory overclocked card. 7nm process uses like fractions of the power that 12 or 14 does so if AMD uses more power and runs hotter its a freaking powerhouse unstoppable unbeatable machine. Don't take my works for it read TSMC's promotional materials for their 7nm fabrication process you'll see words and figures giving you how much power gets absurdly slashed and performance increases for the exact same CPU or GPU simply by being scaled down to 7nm. Maybe you've never heard of TSMC or global foundries or you know the companies that manufacture all our CPU's and GPU's much like how samsung and hynix and micron make all our RAM. or LG makes most of the cheap disposable OELD TV panels for other companies like B.O.E. (sony) and such when samsungs OLED/AMOLED panels are vastly superior a google nexus displays oled panel makes you wanna throw your google pixel 2 into space because its worlds first LG OLED panel in a phone and it was horribly bad by comparison just taking a photo of the two phones next to each other the whites on the Samsung and brightness was sooo contasty by contrast. pixel 2 had ghosting like mad on first release dunno if ever fixed. 
True fact the worlds first mobile phone processor on 7nm did have like 1.6x faster GPU and something like 2/3 longer battery life all this was in a jump from 14nm down to 7nm and the clock speeds were like roughly the same basically. It was called the kirin 980 from Huawei. Google it, read, learn, learn to understand what words and specs mean and facts and reality. Reality is what nvidia fans hate the most as it contains the truth or at least an education.. AMD CPU's and GPU's are so advanced you don't even know till 10 years later you might begin to have a clue, but nope AMD's superior hardware been around since playstation 3 where devs could offload processes to the AMD GPU for vastly higher quality for video and audio from texture compression support to audio processing but you read playstation 3 developer blogs about the morons saying "thanks to the IBM cell processor developed by lisa su we can now dedicate different cores to different process threads so we can make one for water physics and one for audio and.." I hope they die of a raging clue.
You can tell me how much better nvidia are but they're just simply not. AMD freesync is like a decade old free and open standard anyone can use or build with. Nvidias latest greatest cards don't even support it at all, but heres the thing all it is is simply lower latency by passing frames directly into the display instead of using CPU+SOFTWARE VSYNC BUFFERING of them. If nvidia's cards cant low latency pass out frames without vsync what does that tell you? I'm taking an educated guess and thinking that nvidia's gsync is literally just different software vsync modes being ran by the CPU and as the frame rate goes up and down it actively switches between fast and half vsync modes in the nvidia control panel for you to eliminate the issues encountered when you have inadequate software frame buffering. So out of all the thousands of freesync displays tested nvidia lied out their arses and said "well these 15 monitors are good enough that they seem to work OK when ran with our garbage hardware". And you're throwing money at them saying "ohh if I spend thousands more on a Gsync display the thousand dollar display magically seems like a better display than a cheap $200 freesync display, mostly because I don't know how to enable VRR or freesync or how to make it work or I've only ever gamed with vsync enabled." But yeah a thousand dollar display may have some better colour and latency and HDR specs than a cheap freesync one who would have ever believed it was possible what a world we live in.
Hope this helps clear up and eliminate black screens.
Also when installing AMD drivers carefully pay attention to the end installers finished screen. If it gives you an error number your computer may seem to work but it isn't and you'll get system stability and black screen issues. Carefully follow AMD's recommended steps to perform by searching the error code on AMD's website and scan for viruses or SFC/scannow and DISM /online /cleanup-image /restore health as those tend to fix it most of the time. or you maybe just require some visual studio redistributables. If all that hasn't let you install AMD drivers without an error code contact AMD support staff.
Hope this helps everyone out there struggling to game on an AMD system.
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