OpenGL & Vulkan

[hitbm47]

Dear AMD Developers

It took me from 2015-2018 to convince you to investigate the RAGE (2011) dynamic shadow issue; which you thankfully fixed in 2018; so please don't let this new fault take so long to fix.

The same has now happened for Oddworld: Strangers Wrath (renders in OpenGL) where the Dynamic Shadows are not showing at all on my RX 480, where it used to work perfectly and still works on my Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB. My current system specifications are:

- Windows 10 (one of the latest builds and up to date)

- 16 GB RAM

- RX 480 8GB

- GTX 1060 3GB

Here is a screenshot of the Shadows not working on my RX 480:

Here is a screenshot of the Shadows still working on my GTX 1060 (look at the shadows casting all over and from Stranger):

I do not understand why there is clearly not proper Quality Assurance protocols at the driver team and this makes me hesitant to upgrade to another Radeon in a few years, since this already happened in RAGE (2011 OpenGL Game) which indicates that you do not thoroughly test driver changes across supported cards and Unreal Engine 3 (DirectX 9) optimizations has not been re-included for non-Navi GPUs since we have been reporting it from 2017 July.

@dorisyan, @xhuang  if you can please get a team on this OpenGL issue.

[dipak · Accepted solution]

Hi @hitbm47 ,

Thanks for your patience. As I have been informed, the dynamic shadows missing issue has been fixed internally. Please wait till the fix is available with the public driver.

Thanks.

[dipak]

Hi @hitbm47 ,

Thank you for reporting it. 

... the Dynamic Shadows are not showing at all on my RX 480, where it used to work perfectly and still works on my Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB. 

It would be helpful if you please provide the information below.

1) driver version where you observed the issue 

2) last driver version where the issue was not present

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

Hi @dipak ,

Thank you very much for your response, 1) the last two drivers I found the dynamic shadows to be definitely missing was in 22.7.1 and now still in 22.8.2.

2) Unfortunately, I cannot tell you exactly where the shadows started missing, but it can be somewhere between 2019 to early 2022, although it was definitely working most of 2019. I will post screenshots here of the timestamps of my last saves and I am vaguely sure the last save of 2021 is what initially caused the long break when I found a working OpenGL title to suddenly miss shadows, here are the screenshots:

- 26 October 2021 (this might be close to the date, but it can even be more recent since the shadow appears in the screenshot of the save):

- 12 November 2019 (the Shadows should have definitely still been working here):

So my bet would be to start with 21.10.2 , I am uncertain if I have such old driver packages on my PC and not sure if I should test it considering I recently took out savings to go for a Ryzen 5 5600 and don't know what the compatibility with the driver would be since I know they work somewhat interchangeably on a Radeon/Ryzen system.

Kind regards

[dipak]

Thank you for the information. I have reported the issue to the OpenGL team. 

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

Thank you @dipak , I really appreciate it!

[dipak]

Update:

The OpenGL team was able to reproduce the issue. A bug ticket has been created to track this issue.

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

Thank you very much for your efforts @dipak , I really appreciate it!

May I quickly mention another unrelated driver bug to you? It is simply that in DirectX or Vulkan games when having Enhanced Sync enabled, it causes consistent screen tearing with my RX 480 when I then enable the Radeon Performance Metrics OSD, but the screen tearing disappears as soon as I disable the OSD again. This is not related to this thread, but thought it would get in quick hands with you.

[dipak · Accepted solution]

Hi @hitbm47 ,

Thanks for your patience. As I have been informed, the dynamic shadows missing issue has been fixed internally. Please wait till the fix is available with the public driver.

Thanks.

[hitbm47 · Accepted solution]

Hi @dipak

I would just like to let you know that I have tested 22.11.2 and the missing dynamic shadows has been fixed.

I want to give a big thanks to you and the responsible driver team for fixing the issue, this is great from you guys to have investigated and fixed the issue and I am really thankful!

I hope issues like these gets less and that if they occur that AMD will continue to show interest in fixing them.

I will now mark this as solved.

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

Hi @dipak ,

Thank you for your efforts, this is awesome news! Do you know what caused the issue? If it was maybe a function name in the driver which was misspelled?

As soon as I test the next driver it is fixed in, I will mark this post as solved.

Can you also please please inform the team about this Unreal Engine 3 (DirectX 9 version) problem again:
https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/directx9-unreal-engine-3-optimizations-loss-still-not-...

A few months back I gave proof that the optimization was deleted for Polaris and Vega cards by using the Radeon Modded drivers and forcing the Navi Kernal which gave the performance back which has been lost for non-Navi cards since 17.7.2.

I also now have new evidence on this, I have recently built a test PC with the following specifications wherein Unreal Tournament 3 runs like it used to in 17.7.1:

- Windows 7 64bit Home Edition (and continually updating it),
- 16 GB DDR3 RAM,
- FX 8350,
- MSI 970a G43 Plus,
- Sapphire Radeon R9 280x

Furthermore, I installed the latest Windows 7 Legacy 22.6.1 driver which was quietly released by AMD for older cards and in this combination the optimizations are back, and this card definitely also had the optimization missing on Windows 10 for non legacy drivers.

This indicates to me the optimization is missing for non-Navi Cards on Windows 10, but the 22.6.1 legacy drivers for Windows 7 reintegrates them on Windows 7.

Furthermore, I have tested on my main system with a Ryzen 5 5600 and RX 480 and also on a laptop with an A10-7300 with Windows 10 on both systems and the optimization is missing on both 22.6.1(A10-7300) and 22.10.1 (RX 480).

I am please still asking for this to be fixed even though I am privileged to now have a Ryzen 5 5600, it is unbelievably upsetting for pre-ryzen users to have a bad time on Windows 10 with something that had no problems before.

So someone with a FX 8350 or an intel earlier than the 3000 series will have to choose if they want DirectX 12 or if they want to play DirectX9 games smoothly and go back to Windows 7. For example, Syndicate (not assassin's creed) performs much better as well on Windows 7 than 10 with this combination, and Crysis 3 performs better, I have tested all of this.

My suspicion is that AMD is doing the same as intel and using Microsoft's d3d9on12 wrapper on Windows 10 for some older games, and this will cause game-specific optimizations to disconnect for games like Unreal Tournament 3 for example, I have tested this with DGVoodoo2 and my refurbished GTX 1060 3GB, the DGVoodoo2 DX12 wrapper causes GTX 1060 to loose its' optimization for Unreal Tournament 3, this tells me that AMD is using some wrapper for some older games.

[dipak]

Sorry, I don't know the exact details about the fix.

Regarding the Unreal Engine 3 issue, as xhuang mentioned in that post, we already reported the issue to the DX team. However, based on their feedback, they were unable to reproduce it internally.

Anyway, I will try to notify them again.

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

Hi @dipak

I would really appreciate if you can ask them to look properly into it again, they did not follow my guidelines to recreate the issue, where I even made videos to easily reproduce the issue.

The team was not willing to find a copy of Unreal Tournament 3 and decided to test another game (Borderlands 2) which I vaguely mentioned might also have the issue, but from the top of my head here are some games definitely affected by the issue:

- Unreal Tournament 3,
- Heroes of Might and Magic 7,
- XCOM 1 (I think it is called enemy unkown),
- Alien Rage,
- Alien Breed 3: Descent

And I can go on with the list, but these are games I can recall that are definitely severely affected by the issue in like 40-50% of the gameplay duration and the driver "bug/lost optimization" definitely makes it unplayable since 17.7.2 was released.

This is a major issue, because close to 50% of games released during 2007-2014 were developed with the DirectX9 version of Unreal Engine 3. It affects a lot more AMD customers out their than you think, and will prevent them of upgrading to new AMD hardware.

EDIT: Dipak, you know I have helped a lot on these forums to identify OpenGL shadow bugs which your teams were thankfully able to recreate and fix. I have even helped other users on these forums to fix driver/hardware issues on their PCs. Therefore, I would not lie about this and attempt to waste AMD's time, although it feels I have wasted a lot of my own time to try and get AMD to look into this.

Kind regards

[dipak]

Hi @hitbm47 ,

As this not related to the original post i.e. OpenGL Dynamic Shadows issue, it would be helpful to track it if you please open a new thread or use a related thread to post the above information.

Thanks.

[hitbm47]

@dipakI understand, but since you were being helpful it was best to quickly make you aware of the Unreal Engine 3 issue again, since it gets ignored until ray_m locks the post from further discussion.

I just find it interesting that these issues are ignored so much, at some point I would have even liked to do driver quality assurance testing in games for AMD, but I barely get a thank you for all the issues I help in identifying. It is like you want to make things hard for yourselves.

To conclude, I will now wait for the newer drivers to test if the OpenGL dynamic shadows for "Stranger's Wrath" has been fixed and in that case I will mark this post as solved; furthermore, I cannot start a new post for Unreal Engine 3 as it will just be locked & ignored.

Have a good day and I would like to want to say it is my pleasure in helping you guys.

Kind regards