PC Drivers & Software

[phxrider]

I wouldn't mind some opinions before I go to Powercolor about this - but I had another thread about driver timeouts and crashing during Far Cry 6, which I seemed to have gotten mostly under control with the most recent preview driver, but only mostly because it still happened, just not as frequently. In the meantime, I also noticed the red Adrenaline icon would occasionally disappear when the system was running all day, even when not gaming. We'll call this PC my main system.

I am fortunate enough to have a second identical 7900xtx GPU in a system hooked up to my living room TV, and I had a day off work and was working on some other computer projects, when I got the bright idea to swap the GPUs between systems, to see if the behavior was any different. Since then, I have not had a crash on the main system, neither in any game nor has Adrenaline just magically been not running when I looked for the icon. Tonight I decided I should play on the living room system to see if it now started crashing, and the driver timeouts started right away - first after a reboot it logged in to an immediate driver timeout dialog box, then I played an hour or so of FC6 and experienced the familiar freeze, then Ubisoft Connect and Adrenaline asking me if I want to report the crash. So now I'm thinking it's my GPU that was bad all along....

I'm going to give it another week, regardless, to make sure this is absolutely reproducible, but it has not crashed the driver on the main system since swapping them. And hoping if it does stay consistent and reproducible, that Powercolor doesn't come back with "we couldn't find anything wrong".

[FunkZ]

Your testing methodology makes a pretty convincing argument for the problem being related to the specific card. If you put it in your ITX system and it exhibits the same behavior that would be the nail in the coffin.

[phxrider]

I'm thinking so too. The ITX system is a bit of a pain so I'd like to avoid taking it apart if I don't have to, but with the main one suddenly becoming impossible to crash - I even played Far Cry 6 for a couple hours, then just found a safe place to hide and stuck my dude there, turned off monitor timeout, left it running and went and watched a couple hours of TV with my GF, then came back and played it some more - for a total running time of over 8 hours in the game, and it was 100% fine, and Friday I took a couple of breaks from work during the day and did 20 minute plays while leaving everything I use for work running, then played it after work for a couple of hours, with no bad behavior whatsoever. Not even Adrenaline becoming fussy or the icon disappearing or taking a long time to pull up the context menu or Alt+R not working, which were common occurrences before the swap.

Unlike some of the other things I thought might have fixed this previously, my gut tells me this actually did it. Nothing that initially seemed to work and ended up not working ever made it 24 hours, while this has been 3 days now without a hiccup. I'll see if the living room system gets another driver timeout sometime in the next few days to be sure, but I have a feeling that card is going to be getting RMA'ed. Powercolor has a 2 year warranty and I'm still within one year.

[Deemon69]

Hello!

Yes, a video card malfunction can lead to such results. But I would not rush to pass such a verdict on the video card. Try resetting the shader cache in the AMD Software Adrenalin Edition settings before launching the game and launch the game. Will the problem with the game remain?

[phxrider]

Man, I can't count the number of times I did that already. And downclocked everything. And changed my RAM and CPU. And reloaded Windows. And tried every different driver version since 24.5.1. And turned on and off various game and driver features. And probably more that I'm just not thinking of off the top of my head....

Then I swapped the cards and it's suddenly uncrashable, even with leaving Far Cry 6 (which would always eventually reproduce the driver timeout) running for 8 hours... AND the other system started getting driver timeouts.