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.

[GreenCobra]

I have a similar problem with the 24.10.1 drivers. Every time at idle the drivers crash and in task manager i don't see the 7900xt anymore, only the integrated graphics. To get it to work i have to restart the PC.

The voltage doesn't seem to drop from 680 at idle however your solution with the metrics overlay works and the crashes stop.

The crashes also stop if i have the adrenaline software open.

Edit: Sorry the voltage does drop to 55. I used adrenalin to see the voltage but it maintains at 680 thats why no crash with it open as i said above. I now used GPU Z and i see it drop to 55.

[radu1006]

Can we have this post pinned? So that the solution is more visible?

Thank you

[PlumBoniT0]

 @radu1006  OP, Can you try something out? If possible of course. Install 23.1.1 as driver only. no Adrenalin.

I have a wild theory here, since 7000 series had high idle power consumption, and lots of reviewers mentioned it when it released, AMD had to mess with the power states of these cards and optimize it's idle power consumption further.

If you check the driver notes, you'll see "high idle power consumption" as a known issue for multiple driver releases. Until 23.7.1 where they marked high idle issues as fixed for single monitor, and on 23.8.1 they noted down multi-monitor issues as finally fixed. that's eight months of updates.

By messing with the power settings to solve the "high idle power consumption", they rendered some of these cards unstable at idle, since obviously they couldn't test them all. Why some cards fail and some don't? I have no idea. I'm assuming a bit lesser silicon, or maybe related to the OC card models. Unsure at this point. 

If you test this and it works without having to use the overlay to increase idle power consumption, we could probably set up a nice bug report for AMD to look into and maybe fix this once and for all.

[radu1006]

It is not a theory it is actually what happened. But AMD messed with the power settings starting with 24.1.1. This was the first driver to cause instability in idle. 23.12.1 was working fine in this situations and one solution is o use this driver, but you will be missing the support for newer games.

Note: this only applies to these idle crashes, not crashes while playing games.

I have opened bug reports with almost every new driver version, but AMD is ignoring them. Probably if more people would be doing this they will notice.

The problem is that most people open bug reports that do not have much details and AMD probably cannot reproduce the issue. Also other people are happy that there is a workaround and do not open bug reports about this.

[PlumBoniT0]

Another observation that I noticed, with my XTX and monitor setup (Samsung G70A 4K 144hz), minimum board power consumption on GPUz when using DisplayPort is 12W (after a day of use).

When using an HDMI cable, the power consumption rises to 20W minimum, and throughout all these months, I've found the GPU is absolutely more stable when I'm using HDMI.

And yes, just like you mentioned, this is separate from the (lots of) users that are getting timeouts and such while gaming, this is really an idle state crash because seemingly AMD is pushing the power savings a bit too much which renders some cards unstable.

This is confirmed since none of our GPUs crash under load, hell I haven't gotten a single timeout or artifact while gaming. Nothing at all, absolutely zero issues when the GPU is under load.

I'll try to gather some more info and maybe try to ask more users that have these symptoms to submit more bug reports. It is absolutely the idle power states being too low what's causing all of this. 

[PlumBoniT0]

I have a question @radu1006 , which PSU are you currently using with the system? 

Do you by any chance have a PSU manufactured before the card was made? or just a model that was released previously. 

I am sure this is power related at this point, but I've also never considered it being my PSU. and PSUs have changed a lot in the last 2 years or so.

Just curious if you're running an ATX 3.0 / 3.1 PSU already, or (much like most other users having this issue), an older but quality unit.