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legitartist
Adept I

Half-Life: Alyx Blackscreen Problems (Radeon VII)

I am experiencing frequent blackscreening while playing that doesn't seem to correlate with any specific gameplay actions. This doesn't happen in intervals but rather at random times leading me to believe this is a graphics card or driver issue.
The longest I've been able to play consecutively is 30 minutes.

The GPU drivers are the latest release (20.3.1 release for Doom Eternal and Alyx).
The blackscreen will lock up the system and requires a reboot.

I am playing on the Oculus Rift S, and everything is up to date.

My Specs:

AMD Ryzen 7 2700x

16GB 3000MHz RAM
AMD Radeon VII
MSI Tomahawk B450
1TB WD Blue SATA m.2 SSD

A similar issue occurs everytime I (try to) play The Labs Robot Repair (Source 2?).

119 Replies
ushuo
Journeyman III

Same thing here ! Been trying to make it work with battlefield 5 since August, black screen after a couple of minutes or hours that ends into a manual reboot. 

While i never got anyblack screen before, i had one not long ago with beat saber -.-

I've tried stock, undervolt, overclock. it is watercooled with maximum 76°c hotspot at 2100mhz underload (Gosh i love that card) but for the love of .. i cannot play bf5 at all. 

Even changed memory (ram), changed psu and switch from the 8086k to the 3950x thinking it was the cpu itself.

Well, i've got a second computer for streaming i guess

AMD 3950X

32GB ddr4 @ 3200mhz 

Radeon VII

X570 MSI gaming pro carbon

PSU : seasonic 80+ titanium 850W

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joevolcano
Journeyman III

I have a RADEON VII too.
I tried to play Alyx on my Oculus Quest and after 5m the game hangs and black screens. 
 ALTHOUGH it's not truly black screen because on the Quest head tracking works.
I turn my head I can see part of the game screen, turn the other way its all black.
I suspect this is because of the Quest is a stand-alone unit and able to step outside of the crash to see it...

Do you guys also get a GPU Memory warning when you launch the game?
The R7 has 16GB of video memory alone, wth is Valve talking about?!
PS.  If I play Alyx through "Virtual Desktop" it works fine but wireless has lag and its hard to remote grab items... :-/
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Try to download Oculus Tray Tool and play with your settings (i.e put everything on max performance)

Also make sure you turn off your screen saver/screen turning off after being idle in power & sleep options in Win 10.

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This issue is related to the newer and cards. I swapped my Radeon fury in and was able to play for 4 hours with no crash

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mist17
Adept II

Modern Warfare Warzone was having the exact same crash for me until about 5 or so days before the current season when they patched it, now runs perfect. So Valve stuffed up somewhere I think.

The latest update for Warzone has brought the crash back to Warzone.

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renner
Adept II

Installed just freshly released 20.4.2, still getting nothing through my HP WMR headset, while WMR portal tracks properly *sad violin*...

Seriously, if anyone had issues like these with their Vega if there's any solution I would kill for it.

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Actually had the same bug with my Acer WMR, the hdmi cable was defective after a couple of days playing with it. 

Have you used an extention cable ? That was my issue, 4k adapter extention broke the cable. Did rma & got a new headset tho. 

Getting the Index valve tomorow or saturday, will tell you if i'm crashing with Alyx. 

Ps : i've installed the new pro drivers 20.3.1 and i've yet to crash so far.

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I've mentioned earlier that I've tried a friend's GTX1070, and everything worked fine in there. I may try some ancient driver, or letting Windows to just install driver itself...

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Try 19.5.2. It works the best and always has for the VII. Alyx also seems to manage run in it without crashing from my testing at this point.

It's inexcusable that a driver almost a year old works better, but it's better than nothing.

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heavenwood
Journeyman III

ith the latest drivers of version 20.4.2, I managed to play ALYX on Radeon 7 without fail during the day ... I hope that it will be so now

Same! I'll keep playing and report back if it crashes, but played for a couple hours and it was all good. Also enabled hardware acceleration on all my browsers and so far so good, but was doing more playing than browsing so we'll see if that holds up as well!

So Half Life: Alyx still has been working great!

However, I was just watching a YouTube video on Chrome with hardware acceleration enabled and it crashed with nothing else open. I also experienced a crash in Premiere while scrubbing through the timeline on an H.264 file. Chrome with hardware acceleration was open so it might've been due to that. Will continue to monitor!

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Same here 3hr run in Alyx and no crash finally. Not getting any crashes with Vivaldi a chrome based browser, although Firefox is my main.

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Same here for me! 3 chapters without as much as a stutter. 20.4.2 seems to to the job.

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Awesome news, I'll give this a go tomorrow.

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Same for me using Alyx on a Rift S ; I finally managed to play Alyx for like 2 hours without any crashes !

I also noticed the "GPU memtest" in OCCT doesn't crash any more with this driver.

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Same here finished the game with a 4 hour session not one crash, Rift CV1 here. Although Warzone has a very Similar crash as Alyx did. And OCCT no longer crashes with 4 hour test in the GPU Memory and the normal GPU test.

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mpcav
Journeyman III

I have managed to fix this problem and a lot of other problems with my 5700 XT.

Basically I replaced my previous card which was an r9 390 and just updated my AMD drivers.  This appeared to work but I was getting a lot of crashes.  I tried to move to earlier versions of the AMD drivers and it seemed to help but not fix.  I uninstalled the drivers completely, cleaned my registry then let windows install the driver (it downloads the latest minimal driver set, no ATI Catalyst)

It's been working for days with no crashes.  Previously it would crash many times every day.

The driver version windows installed is 26.20.15029.20013

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technostone
Journeyman III

It seems that Record Desktop was the root of the issue. Updated to 20.4.2 and no issues at all! Updated yesterday, played ~10 hours without any issues and overall system stability looks much better. I'm glad that Radeon VII finally got some fixes

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I was able to play alyx and battlefield 5 for more than an 1 hour without crashing, it's a first since august..

Will keep monitoring & will update if i do crash.

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fizbang
Adept I

Looking promising on 20.4.2 drivers.  Played Alyx almost two hours and no crashes.  It had done this on rare occasions before - but just played another session of just under 2 hours and no crashes.  

There has been an update to Steam VR as well, not sure if that's done anything.   

Will probably carry on with my playthrough tomorrow (third times the charm   ) and see how it goes, but looking good so far. 

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rajadog20
Adept I

Lol I just spent 60 dollars to ship my Radeon VII to gigabyte for RMA on AMD supports instructions. If this was all a driver issue (like we all assumed) I'll be kinda pissed haha.

I even told AMD support that I was pretty sure it was a driver issue but he said no it's a card issue, RMA. The support ticket responses are useless, I'm pretty sure I know more about the design of the card then them 

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To be honest with you, since the release of 20.4.2 driver i've yet to get any blackscreen on Bf5, alyx which is a massive improvement !

Before it was between 5 to 1h of gameplay, quite random. and now, i can play 8h easy.

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Check my latest comment. If you get multiple black screens again try resetting shader cache and see how long it goes without black screens again

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I was very close to RMA it myself after a good 4 months of troubleshooting. good thing i am month+ since my last crash/black screen.
Currently using the latest driver 20.4.2.

I wonder if you can just get a refund when sending to RMA instead of a replacement.
At this point i would love to just take a 2070 Super/2080 instead.

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amdog
Adept I

IMPORTANT:
Correct me if im WRONG please.

Between paste yesterday and yesterday i've been having black screens like never before.
I didnt do any change to my config, nor restart my computer. All i did was:

""""""""""""""""""RESET SHADER CACHE,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,


And the black screens stopped SOMEHOW. I've been resetting shader cache for a while but yesterday its likely that has been confirmed that it HELPS somehow as i stopped having the black screens.

Now i might go for a week clean of black screens, and if it happen again, it will clean the SHADER cache again and keep testing.

NOTE THIS: Im on 20.4.1 DRIVER, i will keep testing with this driver as i only got RECOVERABLE BLACK SCREENS

not freezing bsod black screens.

I will update.

This may be the cause that why it stays stable for a while after reinstalling everything?

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renner
Adept II

Here I am again.... DDU'd everything and left Windows to install a pure driver, didn't help. Installed now ancient 19.5.1 on recommendation, still the same. Nothing comes through the headset, while portal works correctly. Again, worked with GTX1070. Its no surprise I've seen almost none Alyx gameplay vids with the Vega. There's one guy with Vega 56, but he's using Valve Index.

Now, the question remains. Is this AMD's fault, or maybe its HP WMR. Btw, I noticed something strange with the latest 20.4.2 driver. Occasionally I get this momentary blink, like the driver has a spasm or something, and any video opened in tabs stops, while the sound continues playing.

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Do a DDU, install amd chipset first, this seems crazy. then install GPU driver. if you have intel cpu, then i dont know.

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fat227stuff
Journeyman III

Based on all of what I'm seeing here, I'm gonna say this lands squarely in AMDs court.. I have the same issues with the valve index on Radeon vii. Although I was surprised to find this card runs hotter than the fires in h***, it doesn't seem to be heat related.

For me it happens somewhat randomly, but more often than not it's within the first few minutes of running VR. If often, but not always, is triggered by just setting my headset down and letting it go into sleep mode.

When it happens the headset image freezes and eventually goes black. Meanwhile the monitor goes blank (and even says no signal). After about 40 seconds the desktop will come back and steam VR has a message that says there was a problem with the Graphics card and it has to quit. From that point if I try to open the radeon software it just opens an empty frame of a window and either crashes or the screen goes black again.

It doesn't happen every time I play, but it is frequent enough to be annoying.

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its not heat related, it happens even on light games like league of legends where the card doesnt even reach half of the max temperature i've seen while playing other heavy demanding games.

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rajadog20
Adept I

This is not resolved and the response from AMD has been piss poor for a $700 product. 

AMD refused to even look at the error logs and reports I sent them to help find a solution and simply told me to RMA it. 

So I spent $60 and RMAed my card. After 4 weeks I get it back and was told there were no issues with the card.

So I try using it again and I get consistent crashes in COD warzone, at least once every two hours. Not even with using the card at this point.

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Same here, Every game is stable but Warzone which as of today I can't play for then 5 min without the black screen reboot.

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Exactly the same, but i'm now getting it sometimes on other games.

Also display port has weird lost signal on reboot. while hmdi is fine.  but does it only on my LG 34'' 144hz and not on my index valve.

Weird

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Have you tried reinstalling windows yet?

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Unfortunatly, many times. DDU / swap hardware from 8086k z370 to 3950x x570. memory etc.

Check with a 1070gtx i've got spare around & the game doesn't give me hard blackscreen / freeze with sound that buzz until the computer reboot itself

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Just tested a mates old Vega 64 in my system and no crashes so far but will do more testing, looks like it could be a VII problem! Think we'll have to wait for the next driver update for a fix.

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ushuo
Journeyman III

After a month, it started again =/ 

Not only i'm getting black screen on modern warfare, i'm not getting black screen while doing nothing. 

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Try clearing shader cache. I feel somehow that when it start to do black screen on my computer i clear shader cache and it stop for a while. A week of no black screen. I prefer shouldnt have to do this but somehow it looks like it works.

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renner
Adept II

Here's another update. I just borrowed my old RX480, which I sold to a friend, and I'm getting picture through my HP WMR headset. So, yeah, it seems to be an issue with Vega. Off to see how Alyx works at last...

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