PC Drivers & Software

[radu1006]

For some reason my 7900xt since the 24.x.x drivers were introduced, has a very low idle voltage. Also at the same time with these drivers , I started having Crashes and black screens in idle.

Can this be related? It Sometimes drops to 59mV. I suspect that it my drop even lower and when there is a spike for a task, the driver will crash.

Does anyone know if this voltage is normal? Also even when setting a minimum voltage for the GPU clock does not seem to affect the clock in idle.

I want to mention that I have disabled ULPS in the registry, and it seemed to be stable for about a week, but then I started having these instability issues again.

This voltage drop has to be driver related, since if I revert to 23.12.1 drivers voltage never goes that low. It always stays above 100mV.

[FunkZ]

When the 7900XT/XTX first launched users complained about high idle voltage and board power. AMD made adjustments to the drivers and idle power usage improved. (decreased)

Your 7900XT looks normal to me. I'm running 24.8.1

[radu1006]

Do you also use HDR? Because HDR uses more power usually. Nvidia GPUs in idle use about 40-50W with HDR enabled.

Also had 4 crashes with driver timeout in the last 2 days. If I revert to 23.12.1 the driver that has a higher idle power usage, I don't have these issues.

[radu1006]

My theory so far is that because of the low voltage in idle (aggressive power saving), when a more intensive background task like an update starts, the display driver crashes.

Right now I am trying to force a bit of GPU usage with Wallpapre Engine to see if it makes a difference. Unfortunately the min clock frequency setting from Adrenalin does not do anything on desktop/browser. Or maybe it does not work at all.

[FunkZ]

The screenshot I posted is with no other applications open. As soon as I open something else, even a browser window, voltage and power usage go up. I do not get crashes or black screens.

[radu1006]

Indeed there is not much load, but I have the browser open and 8 apps open in system tray as well.

The problems that I get are if I leave the PC in idle for a while. When in idle, some apps: like browsers, antivirus, even windows will start doing updates in the background.

If the voltage is very low at that time, the update task will do a spike and there is a chance that the GPU will not respond fast enough and high power is requested a low voltage and the driver crashes. It is similar behavior, as for undervolting.

AMD seems to have the voltage set borderline low.

You may not experience these crashes, as it also depends on the silicon lottery and maybe your GPU is a bit more stable at these low voltages, but a lot of users complained about these driver timeouts.

AMD should up the voltage to 100-200mV to improve stability. This will only add 1-2W of extra power in idle. Under load it would not matter.

[radu1006 · Accepted solution]

For the last few days I have been testing with the Metrics Overlay enabled on desktop. This seems to increase the voltage in idle at around 600mV.

It was quite stable, but I will give it a few more days. This increases the power usage in idle to around 20-30W. For me this is not a problem, but it is probable that it may be stable even with lower voltage, maybe around 200-300mV.

Anyway, this is an ugly workaround to have the overlay displayed all the time.

AMD, please check this problem and increase the idle voltage if needed to solve this issue!

I have already opened a bug about this a while ago.

[radu1006]

Tested with 24.10.1 and it has the same problem with low voltage. The Overlay workaround still works fine.

Adding this reply, so that the people will still see the post and workaround.