PC Drivers & Software

[mLukasm]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been dealing with driver timeouts on my system for the past few months and wanted to share my experience in case it helps anyone. My setup includes a 7900XTX Hellhound, 7800X3D, B650 Tomahawk Wifi, and 2x16GB Corsair 6000 MHz RAM. (I play at 1920x1440 (4:3) stretched on a 240Hz monitor.)

The crashes seemed to start around the release of the AMD 24.5.1 drivers, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when. I scoured Reddit and other forums for solutions and tried everything from disabling MPO and hardware acceleration in browsers to performing a clean Windows install and reverting all overclocks—nothing worked for the last 2-3 months.

After a lot of trial and error, I finally found the issue: using 8x MSAA in CS2 was causing the crashes. When I switched to 4x MSAA, the crashes stopped, and I was even able to overclock my system with no problems.

Interestingly, the same issue occurs when playing CS2 in Vulkan or DX11, so switching to either one doesn’t help at all. It could be something AMD or CS2 did recently that triggered the problem.

If anyone else has experienced this issue and has found a way to use 8x MSAA without crashing, I’d love to hear your solution. Hopefully, this post helps others who are dealing with similar driver timeout problems.

Thanks!

[Shawn22]

Thanks for sharing your experience—driver timeouts can be so frustrating! It’s interesting that lowering MSAA from 8x to 4x resolved the issue, especially with such a high-end setup. It seems like AMD’s recent driver updates or CS2’s optimization might be causing conflicts. One thing you could try is experimenting with different driver versions—some users have had luck reverting to 23.x series drivers for better stability. Also, tweaking power settings in Radeon Software by enabling “Maximum Performance” has helped others minimize crashes. Your post will definitely be helpful for anyone troubleshooting similar issues!

[mLukasm]

It doesn't make much sense to revert to older drivers, as I've already tried that and the crashes persisted. Plus, with older drivers, you miss out on support for newer games and important optimizations or features like AMD Anti-Lag. It's more likely that CS2 introduced something that's causing conflicts or instability. I've already tweaked a lot of settings in AMD's software, but nothing has resolved the issue. As I mentioned, with 4x MSAA, the system is rock solid, even with heavy overclocking. AMD or Valve should really work on identifying the issue. Since AMD introduced features like Anti-Lag, it's clear they have the capability to optimize driver stability. Improving this would not only solve problems like these but also make their GPUs more appealing to potential buyers.

[florijanftw]

Hi, I am also having the same problem, all of my 3 screens go black randomly, have to wait few moments and after that they come back, and I have to exit the game. I will try 4x and let you know if it helps. Thanks.

[mLukasm]

and did it work?

[florijanftw · Accepted solution]

Hi people, UPDATE, it did actually work!
So keep it on default settings and use 4x MSAA

[mLukasm]

I'm glad I could help. It's kind of sad, but I can live without it. In CS used to play with 8x MSAA on a 1080p monitor at a resolution of 1280x960. But since I got a new monitor with a better resolution (1440P) I can play (1920x1440) and the game looks therefore much better, because of the higher Res, so 4x MSAA is enough. BTW I wrote a personal E-Mail to AMD and VALVE about the problem, maybe they will fix something about it...

[rickmd1991]

There was another post awhile back talking about increasing the log cache in the event viewer which did stop my crashes for about a week. Now I'm crashing again. For me I only seem to crash in wow within 30mins to an hr of gameplay. I don't know the driver number exactly but I 100% had no issues until the ff16 and above drivers were released. Unfortunately, I need the newer drivers to play ff16.