PC Drivers & Software

[rawintellect]

No question here. Just a statement. 20.5.1 HWS is incredibly stable for me. I can run Planet Coaster all day long. No crashes to desktop. No BSODs. It performs the way NVIDEA drivers do on my laptop. AKA it works! Set it and forget it. As it should be.

20.8.1 and 20.8.2 are absolutely terrible. BSODs continuously. I've honestly never seen worse from AMD than these two versions. It was so bad it corrupted my system. I do a Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth after each BSOD. As well as a sfc /scannow and chkdsk /f as you should.

However after so many crashes with these two drivers my RestoreHealth command didn't even work. Sfc /scannow still found corrupt files and Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth found errors in the component store. I manually pointed to the sources folder and the install.esd file to force a repair of the component store and this DID fix it as well as sfc /scannow not finding any errors anymore.

But I like to keep my system tip top and I felt I should do an "in place upgrade" to really make sure all was well. That is, I put in the installation USB drive and clicked "setup" and kept all my files and apps. Essentially deleting the OS and reinstalling it. I then tested 20.8.1 and 20.8.2 again. Again BSODs and crashes. After repairing windows again I installed 20.5.1 HWS. Not a single issue since. Nothing. Smooth as silk. Planet Coaster performs the same as it does on my gaming Lenovo Legion 5 laptop (that has a RTX 2070 installed). Perfectly.

If AMD could just finally bring HAGS (HWS) to the forefront and add enhanced sync I'm sure this will be a winning combination. Whatever direction you're headed in with 20.8.1 and 20.8.2 is the wrong one.

Just my feedback. I'm sure many will disagree but this has been my honest experience. 

[ouro]

The driver download page states that this driver is only for the following Series.
Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.5.1 Beta is compatible with the following AMD Radeon products.

Radeon™ RX 5700 Series Graphics

Radeon™ RX 5600 Series Graphics

Are you using it for another graphic card or those two?

[rawintellect]

I am using it with a Powercolor Red Devil RX 5700 XT 3DHEP/OC.

[higgih01]

I certainly agree with this observation. I have had a continuous series of 'Default Radeon WattMan settings has been restored due to unexpected system failure' issues with both 20.8.1 and 20.8.2. These only seem to arise if my PC if left on for a longer than normal time - e.g. over 24 hours but without playing games. I use my PC to run a series of Fortran programs that take around 20 hours to complete and ever since upgrading to 20.8.1/2 Radeon Settings seem to crash with the 'Default Radeon WattMan settings has been restored due to unexpected system failure' issue.

I can't see the issue in Windows Event Viewer, unfortunately. Before anyone suggests it, I disabled Windows Fast Startup a long time ago which was the original solution to my 'Default Radeon WattMan settings has been restored due to unexpected system failure' issue a year or so ago. I don't OC my card, but I do set Auto Undervolt.

I did not have this issue at all with 20.5.1-HWS.

Do the latest Radeon Settings versions (20.8.1/2) automatically include Windows Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling as it is not clear in the supporting documentation?    

[rawintellect]

They don't include HWS in 20.8.1 and 20.8.2. I too program for mainframe and compile and run programs in COBOL so having a running system is crucial for me in my job as a mainframe analyst. I honestly will not upgrade from 20.5.1 HWS until I see support for HAGS and it seems stable. These two new versions this month are terrible.

[higgih01]

Thanks rawintellect. This is very useful information. I will revert back to 20.5.1-HWS.

I don't quite get why AMD would not automatically include support for HAGS in all future releases after 20.5.1, given that the software support has now been written. Also, it's not great that users like me have turned on HAGS in Windows, only to not have it supported in later drivers without any warning.    

[rockerpimp]

I have HD7850 with the same bad function of the last drivers. Even worst! Black screen, so i will using a generic drive while i fix this issue. I will try this and feecback soon.

[rockerpimp]

Not! still the same problem, black screen, win10 1909 crush seriously with amd driver for my 7850.

:/

[rawintellect]

Try cleaning up windows using DISM SFC and chkdsk as I stated above. Then DDU and install 20.5.1. 

[dsrevan22]

Yeah, same thing happened to me. I just replaced the HDD with a new SSD in my Ryzen based laptop (ryzen 5 2500u) and downloaded the latest radeon drivers and it constantly crashed Windows 10 (2004 version) So I started troubleshooting, redownladed the drivers, selected factory reset during the installation but it didn't solve anything. Then tried DDU and selected the option where it blocks the OS from installing drivers but it was still crashing, then I even tried to reinstall Windows 10 but that didn't work either and after a couple of BSODs and black screens later I had to reinstall the OS for a second time because it was stuck on the boot screen. Since then I reverted to 20.7.2 drivers because I rememberd that 20.7.something was working before and it seems like that solved the problem as a I haven't experienced BSODs and black screens in more than 5 hours now. Even though there are still a couple of issues because when I open the performance tab in Radeon software where you can check temperatures, GPU usage, CPU usage sometimes it crashes but at least it just restarts Radeon software not the entire OS, so at least this isn't such a big issue. I don't know what they changed in the 20.8.1 and 20.8.2 versions of the drivers that is causing these problems but as long as it's this unusable they shouldn't have released it. I don't think that many people want to live in fear ahead of each driver update that it might corrupts the entire system after BSODs, crashes and black screens. I'm also pretty positive that this isn't a hardware failure as I tried many things before because I was going trough the same thing during the winter when AMD first released these new drivers (memtest, ran the diagnostics software that Lenovo provides for their laptops and ran a GPU stress test with furmark but none of these detected anything)

[dsrevan22]

update: No it doesn't work, just got another BSOD a couple of minutes ago.