PC Drivers & Software

[End_of_life_user]

Simple question.

How can AMD justify killing support for a laptop device that's less than 3 years old?

I have a Lenovo 330, A9 chipset machine, and with the release of the new Radeon software 21.6.1, effectively, my machine is unsupported, so if Microsoft updates Win 10, and breaks something, I've nowhere to go, and that means replacing a machine that does what I need, in a reasonable time frame, and it still has plenty of storage etc. It wasn't an end of life machine purchased from a back street clearance house, the retailer was still selling a similar model to mine 12 months ago, it had the same CPU/GPU content, just a different drive and memory.

Looks to me like AMD has just well and truly lost any loyalty I might have had to them, and I am going to be very reluctant to buy anything with an AMD sticker on it going foward.

Am I the only person who thinks that AMD is no longer a good place to be looking when considering hardware in future?

[hitbm47]

Hi @kingfish 

Yes that is the directory I tried.

[kingfish]

We started with the next newest driver if that worked/helped we tried the next newest, and so on until we reached the one that screwess it up...then revert to the last good one. BTW you should clean install every driver using DDU in safe mode. Forget that....you are just installing drivers...not the package )>

[kingfish]

https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/how-to-correctly-uninstall-and-install-gpu-drivers#!

[hitbm47]

Hi @kingfish 

Thank you for your response, yes as I have stated AMD abominated Unreal Engine 3 performance since 17.7.2 with the removal of Radeon Additional Settings (or whatever optimizations was contained in it, but it directly divided the average performance by 4) and the 17.7.2 driver does not work with the new Interface and the new driver does not work with the older interface, I spent the whole day trying to get it working, unfortunately it does not solve the issue.

Furthermore, I did a clean install with DDU every time.

The fact is owners of Radeon GPUs, including Navi, will never have a solid experience with Unreal Engine 3 DirectX9 games due to someone(s) at AMD was not paying attention when they removed Radeon Additional Settings in 17.7.2 and deleted all the optimizations they ever made for the DirectX 9 version of Unreal Engine 3. Believe me I tested 4+ Unreal Engine 3 games today and all of them had performance decreased by FOUR fold in 50% of the gameplay and you'll be lucky to ever get the performance on a Radeon GPU that you had pre- 17.7.2.

Unreal Engine 3 games tested:

• Borderlands 2
• Alien Rage
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Heroes of Might and Magic 7
• Batman Arkham City

In addition, Cysis 3 and more CryEngine games had it's minimum performance decreased by three fold by using Windows 10 & Radeon and probably a newer driver than 17.7.1.

Please for everyone who cares report this issue to AMD so you can please get the experience you deserve for the money spent!

@guy_ludden/ @alexander_blake-davies / @warren_eng please have a look, this is a very, very concerning issue that AMD have somehow missed for the last five years and it should definitely be fixed for the sake of your supporters and for the fact that it was working properly five years ago. Here is the link where I showcase the 175% performance degrading in minimum FPS: https://community.amd.com/t5/opengl-vulkan/unreal-tournament-3-rx-480-still-performs-horribly-can-it... , In addition, I have recently narrowed it down to be specifically since driver 17.7.2 where the removal of "Radeon Additional Settings" caused the accidental removal of all Unreal Engine 3 DirectX 9 optimizations AMD made.

[LivingTheDream]

Your post reminded me of how AMD managed to break 90hz support in Windows Mixed Reality headsets on my R9 Fury with any drivers past 19.8.2. I submitted 3 support tickets chock full of details in an attempt to get it fixed and got no reply. Never got fixed and now here were are at deprecated support.

Take a wild guess what the box my Fury came in proudly advertises?

VR SUPPORT.

[rh1nocz]

I had my fair share of driver issues too, my card would for example throttle itself very hard without apparent reason, no thermal or power issue,  managed to fix it by setting multiple states to max speed, on other hand, it could undervolt like crazy. My brother had one of the early asus versions and was able to unlock all CUs on it, which made it basically fury X. Mine has ofc allready physically these CUs cut off. 

[hitbm47]

Hi @LivingTheDream 

That is awful news, you see that is what I am trying to tell these other guys that a lot of us have been struggling for years to get even close to the enjoyable experience we paid for on these cards, but you can't get AMD to fix things for 3-5years when they suddenly end support so that they do not have to attend to these things. But, these guys are so comfortable on their brand new unaffordable AMD hardware that they expect AMD to drop support for us and only focus on them.

In addition, I have noticed four years ago that it does not help to submit support tickets to amd.com, since they only reply once a day if you are lucky and then they just copy and paste from pre-determined trouble shootings step guides.

The closest you'll get to getting the developers' attention is to submit a question/post on the OpenGL & Vulkan forum which is on this community website. Sequentially, you can also submit a bug report through the Radeon Software "Bug report utility".

Kind regards

[Vantharas]

So to be clear. The only reason I have an Nvidia card is that it is what I could get ahold of. That and the fact that the AIB's have doubled the asking price of the 6800XT, and have almost doubled the asking price of the 6900XT which is what I actually wanted. Also every time AMD has a drop on their website it always times out I can't get through all the bots buying up all the cards. 

Also please don't think that AMD cares about any Individual. AMD is not your friend neither is Nvidia. Both AMD and Nvidia only cater to 1 person. That is the almighty shareholder with the almighty dollar. Not us little guys. If they did I honestly feel like the drivers would have been better from the HD7000 series through the R580. Near the end of the 580's life cycle, the drivers did start to improve quite a bit due to AMD having no answer to Nvidia and just trying to keep it afloat in the mid-range market. 

FX CPU's were only released because AMD put so much R&D into them. They *HAD* to release them. FX CPU's almost bankrupted AMD. With their god-awful performance incredibly bad design. Incredibly bad IPC just bad period. ( seriously look at AMD's stock prices once FX was released god the performance was trash ).  AMD's stock prices tanked when FX reviews came in and never recovered until the release of first-gen Ryzen. They were below 1$ a share when fx came out and the company was even threatened to be delisted from the stock market.

I had an HD7950 which was just an amazing overclocker. XFX version It went all the way up to 1150mhz. The thing was a beast. At one point I think I was number 7 on the 3dmark board with it for 7950's. I sold that card for 75$. Kinda wish I still had it. 

Nothing is going to change for whatever game /games you are playing if it hasn't been fixed now. Honestly, I'd like to know which one/ones it is.   AMD's driver team was not Nvidia's. At that time. They are also not going to go back and fix old issues on old video cards.  It is what it is at the end of the day. Trust me I wish they would go back and fix some things that bothered me when I had my 7950s. ( I actually had two of them running in crossfire they never bothered fixing crossfire profiles for a ton of games even while actively promoting it all the way up to the R580X they even said buy 2 580's to get Nvidia 1080 performance for half the cost. Yet still left a ton of crossfire profiles out and never developed a solid crossfire alternative that didn't rely on the developer and AMD implementation.) 

[hitbm47]

Hi @Vantharas 

I made a post about Unreal Tournament 3: https://community.amd.com/t5/opengl-vulkan/unreal-tournament-3-rx-480-still-performs-horribly-can-it...

It took AMD 2 years since 2016 (after 16.6.2 50-60FPS loss) to respond to my issue reporting and they said they were "working on a fix" in 2018, and had never updated me on the progress since, I could probably try to find the personal message but that would put the employee in trouble.

Believe me I get what you are saying but that does not justify losing major performance in old titles, that means something is wrong with how they fork/update to their builds, since once they improve some new issue it sometimes completely breaks things in an older application; for example, OpenGL and DirectX9 games could not even open on AMD at some driver update in the last five years. RAGE (2011) didn't even have shadows for years until I was able to find the OpenGL & Vulkan forums to show that it can work on Linux, and then a nice employee at AMD fixed the shadows, took two-three years and my endurance to get it to the attention of AMD developers.

I can mention a lot of titles, but Unreal Tournament 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 7, Crysis 3, (and more games which I cannot remember now had a major impact on performance in 2016). Another user @colesdav once helped me a lot to list out the major problems in performance with Crysis 3 on a post, and they massively affect Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 and Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts as well.

My Sapphire R9 280 (HD 7950 refresh) was also an amazing overclocker, think I got stable 1150Mhz out of it; in addition, AMD FX isn't as bad of an architecture people are making it out to be, there is some other underlying compatibility issue that is causing issues with it. I get great throughput with it in a very few amount of games such as Alien vs Predator, Doom (2016), Terminator Resistance, BFBC 2, BF3, BF4, BF1.

Blaming FX as a bad CPU is not an acceptable excuse, this thing was sold as top of the line AMD in 2016 in our country and even a Ryzen 5 1600 doesn't hide the issue; in addition, my previous i7 870 has exactly the same issues with AMD Drivers, but newer i5's such as i5 4670K fairs much better on a Windows 7 installation than these two. (I am using the latest Windows 10 by the way)

If AMD introduces new performance issues in new drivers for older games they should certainly fix them, it is not acceptable to pay 4500ZAR for a product that once performed very well in certain applications and then suddenly performs abysmal with any newer driver. Nvidia to this day still holds its' performance in older games, but I prefer the input response even without Anti-lag in games where a Radeon holds its' framerate.

Kind regards

[End_of_life_user]

Going back to the original issue, it is becoming a lot clearer why AMD are killing off support for a vast range of chipsets, and why it was done with such indecent haste without prior notification. They wanted the announcement out in the open before the announcement by Microsoft of the Windows 11 spec, as Microsoft are clearly planning to kill support for a vast range of CPU's and GPU's, if the list that's up on the Microsoft site is anything to go by. Pretty much everything before Ryzen is gone.

From what I can see of it, although the performance might not be stellar on W11, the machine here should in theory support it, but they've decided NO.

So be it, I suspect that before too long, I will be using a different OS, between being shafted by AMD, and then by Microsoft,, an open source alternative is starting to look a LOT more attractive.

[hitbm47]

@End_of_life_user 

Mine is also not on the supported list, what the hell I have a 64bit processor.. I wish it was that easy to move over to Linux, but I have tried it recently with PoPOS and to get games working it means you have to reformat all your drives to another format than NTFS, I think ext4 or something since Linux doesn't really like NTFS.

This means you lose all your important files and your game downloads if you do not have enough backup storage. Furthermore, it is also a gamble if you are going to get games to work.

I really want to try it as well since I have used Ubuntu before, but not for gaming, it is quite a bit more technical since you have to install most things through the terminal/console and give permissions to everything you are trying to achieve. Radeon software does not have a GUI like on Windows and all the additional features; furthermore, multiplayer games barely work due to anti-cheat software, etc.

But I have considered it a lot due to the open source driver, just not sure how well it performs.

Also, you do not really have tools like windows task manager by default or MSI Afterburner to check performance.

[Skrybe]

I know a lot of people won't like this answer, but...

The simple truth is that the number of people running older hardware is a diminishing number. So it's not a cost effective strategy to put hours (days/weeks/months) of effort into drivers that are getting used less and less. Realistically if they drop support for older products they can spend more time fixing issues with new products. And that is going to affect a lot more people.

It should also be pointed out that just because they drop support for a device doesn't mean that your existing drivers will be removed and that the device will stop working (unless you're using Corsair products and iCUE, now that is evil!). You can still use older drivers and the devices should continue to function. Sadly, if you've got a 4 year old device it's unlikely that new drivers were ever going to improve it. That's the brutal truth.

And of course all that is before you look at what MS is doing with Windows 11. They are drawing a line with what devices they support as well. Just like they have for the last 20+ years. I will say it's disappointing that AMD didn't use the Win 11 release date as their cutoff. I think it would have been a much better thing to support the older products up till then. But again, they're probably spending their driver teams time on making sure modern devices will be supported on Win11. And that will affect more people.

Just for the record, I don't like it either. But that's why I have a main PC that's as up to date as I can keep it and a second PC with all the older (but still working) parts running older drivers.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

Do you have statistics to show that as you are stating it is the truth that more people are using are using RX 5000/RX 6000 GPUs than HD 7000 - RX 500? Because I highly doubt that is the truth people can't afford to pay the current prices of GPUs. I included the latter range because AMD is barely improving performance on anything other than RX 5000 - RX 6000.

What is the simple truth is that AMD is trying to force another cash grab on people rather than be willing to fix a mess that they have made in the "lower end". They have become stupid of greed in a sense in that they forgot who their supporters were and think everyone will have money to jump to Navi when they do something as silly as end updates for older GPUs. You must also take into consideration AMD fixes things at a very slow pace and use the years that have passed as an excuse to drop support for older GPUs without fixing critical performance issues.

What CPU do you have Skrybe? Do you think of people that have something like an A10 7850k that were able to play Unreal Tournament 3 at 60-80FPS+ and in recent drivers they'll only be getting 20-60FPS+ due to how AMD broke things on the lower end as they release new driver updates, and obviously people would want some of the new drivers to get support for some newer games. Do you call that acceptable for AMD to leave things like that for 5 years where they broke it early in that 5 years and then end support for products without fixing them?

AMD APUs is what kept AMD in the game, not Ryzen (Ryzen only pulled them out of the hole) and their damage to driver performance even causes an A10 7850k CPU to bottleneck its' own integrated graphics (I am fairly certain I read reviews of the same thing on Ryzen 2400G APUs), just think about it, it will affect you later on-on Navi as well (it actually does in Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 & Contracts 1 if you go read on forums) so please explain how you can justify this behaviour from AMD? It will affect you at some point as well. Like I said Nvidia sets an example for holding stability in older applications with new drivers and AMD should follow by this example if they want to be nearly as Quality Assuring as Nvidia.

It is natural for a company to end support for older products, but not in a case like this where they break things and don't even fix them, never mind even putting a bandage on them and where they do not fix things at a pace where they can justify end of support.

Edit:

@Skrybe

don't think it will affect you on Navi and post Ryzen 2000, please think again after looking at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrkrAqdnBCM

It's of Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts (quite a new game) and look at AMDs new "fancy hardware" and "new driver benefits", he/she is dipping into the 40's consistently with that cutting edge AMD hardware. You don't think my RX 480 was fancy like this when it came out (It was the successor of the R9 280 and challenged some of the Higher older models)? I have had exactly those bad Quality Assurance throughout my entire five year purchase of the RX 480 and AMD will continue doing to you what they do in that video if you keep justifying it. Even switching my Display to my GTX 1060 3GB yields higher framerate on my FX 8350 than that RX 5600xt and Ryzen 5 3600 does in that game due to the continued absence of AMD in QA.

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 You want statistics? Here you go. This is from the steam video card survey. It's probably one of the best resources we can actually get that's real world. While it is obviously skewed towards gamers it's fairly representative of the wider usage trends. Available here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/?sort=pct

AMD VIDEO CARDS	JAN	FEB	MAR	APR	MAY	Change	Supported?	Percentage
AMD Radeon RX 580	2.16	2.1	2.13	2.04	2.04	0	Yes	16.99
AMD Radeon RX 570	1.54	1.51	1.55	1.55	1.54	-0.01	Yes	12.82
AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics	1.06	1.06	1.07	1.09	1.17	0.08	Yes	9.74
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT	1.03	1.02	1.01	0.98	0.97	-0.01	Yes	8.08
AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics	0.25	0.41	0.46	0.5	0.52	0.02	?	4.33
AMD Radeon RX 550	0.41	0.43	0.45	0.49	0.5	0.01	Yes	4.16
AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 Graphics	0.38	0.39	0.4	0.41	0.45	0.04	Yes	3.75
AMD Radeon Vega 3 Graphics	0.33	0.34	0.35	0.34	0.4	0.06	Yes	3.33
AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT	0.31	0.33	0.35	0.35	0.37	0.02	Yes	3.08
AMD Radeon RX 560	0.38	0.37	0.37	0.38	0.37	-0.01	Yes	3.08
AMD Radeon RX 480	0.42	0.4	0.39	0.39	0.37	-0.02	Yes	3.08
AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT	0.34	0.34	0.35	0.34	0.36	0.02	Yes	3.00
AMD Radeon RX 590 Series	0.36	0.35	0.37	0.33	0.33	0	Yes	2.75
AMD Radeon R5 Graphics	0.36	0.33	0.32	0.3	0.32	0.02	No	2.66
AMD Radeon R7 Graphics	0.33	0.32	0.3	0.31	0.32	0.01	No	2.66
AMD Radeon RX 470	0.29	0.29	0.28	0.29	0.27	-0.02	Yes	2.25
AMD Radeon RX Vega	0.27	0.26	0.25	0.23	0.23	0	Yes	1.92
AMD Radeon RX 460	0.24	0.24	0.24	0.25	0.23	-0.02	Yes	1.92
AMD Radeon RX 5700	0.25	0.24	0.22	0.23	0.22	-0.01	Yes	1.83
AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP	0.25	0.27	0.25	0.26	0.19	-0.07	Yes	1.58
AMD Radeon R9 380 Series	0.17	0.17	0.17	0.15	0.17	0.02	No	1.42
AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series	0.19	0.18	0.17	0.16	0.17	0.01	No	1.42
AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series	0.19	0.18	0.17	0.17	0.17	0	No	1.42
AMD Radeon R5 M330	0.19	0.18	0.17	0.17	0.17	0	No	1.42
AMD Radeon HD 8800 Series	0.17	0.16	0.16	0.15	0.16	0.01	No	1.33

The monthly percentage is of  all graphics not just AMD. The final column extrapolates the percentage of that particular card against JUST AMD cards (ie: 16.99% of steam users with AMD cards are using an RX580). So yeah, taking a look at that I can understand why AMD were willing to end support. Just over 83% of AMD users on Steam are using cards that are still supported. To be honest, it's actually more than that because RX6x00 series users appear in "other" at the moment and there is the generic radeon (tm) category which is an unknown.

And like I said, the older cards are a diminishing number of users. They're no longer making HD7000 series (for example) so every time someone ditches one of those card to upgrade, or the card literally dies the number of users drops.

You ask whether I think it's acceptable for AMD to leave stuff broken for 5 years - re-read my last post. In case it slipped past, no I don't, but if it's already been five years you're dreaming if you think they're going to fix it now. And yeah, I agree that sucks.

It probably won't ever affect my main system (5800x) since I always upgrade within 4 years. My spare PC (2700x)... maybe. But again there are still working drivers for it. Just because they're not writing new ones doesn't mean the existing ones magically stop working.

It should also be pointed out that the less cards they're supporting the less problematic the ongoing drivers should be. Less software regression problems since they're coding for a reduced set of hardware. Hopefully that'll stop (or at least reduce) the number of times we see a new driver give worse performance than the previous.

[hitbm47]

@Skrybeso double the amount of people are using RX 580's and a lot of people are leaving there RX 5000's for Nvidia cards due to these issues which is their newest architecture.

I am not saying they should continue support for these older cards, they should just fix that MASSIVE negligence of missing optimizations they had since 17.7.2; which I showed my finding in the previous comment due to them hastily dropping that Radeon Additional Settings which contained old OMEGA optimizations in one driver revision; because it will affect all new Radeon GPUs for the future to come and a CPU won't blast through it in all cases.

For example, I am now getting higher or the same framerates on my FX 8350 and RX 480 with 17.7.1 in Unreal Tournament 3 that you will be getting on your system.

They also introduced an major performance issue in Windows 10 for Cryengine 3 or 4 games such as Crysis 3, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 & Contracts which no CPU could blast through on Windows 10 but it can on Windows 7 Home 64-bit.

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 Ok so it took a bit of doing (I had to dig out my UT3 DVDs, jump through Windows 10 installer hoops, find the latest patch and install UT3 Benchmark, then tweak the UTEngine.ini) but here are my UT3 bench results.

Please note, this is at 2560x1600 because the UT3 Benchmark tool doesn't have an option for 4k res. The texture and level details are maxed out. The run at 61fps is before tweaking the ini file. By default UT3 is capped at 62fps. The run at 664fps is with bSmoothFrameRate=FALSE. This allows uncapped fps. You can also leave it to TRUE and set MaxSmoothedFrameRate to whatever you want to cap FPS at. I'd normally do that and set it to 120 or thereabouts.

mapname	changelist	datestamp		avg FPS	% over 30 FPS		avg GPU time		0 - 5	5 - 10	10 - 15	15 - 20	20 - 25	25 - 30	30 - 35	35 - 40	40 - 45	45 - 50	50 - 55	55 - 60	60 - INF		time	frame count	time disregarded
CTF-Coret	328909	2021.06.27-14.45.51		664.73	99.53		0.00 ms		0.00	0.00	0.38	0.10	0.00	0.00	0.10	0.05	0.00	0.04	0.00	0.12	99.23		59.47	39530	0.00
CTF-Coret	328909	2021.06.27-14.33.48		61.55	99.08		0.00 ms		0.00	0.00	0.53	0.19	0.07	0.13	0.00	0.05	0.00	0.07	0.00	0.03	98.93		59.54	3665	0.00

Sorry I don't have Crysis 3, Ghost Warrior to be able to bench them.

As for the bit about RX 580s. They're still newer cards than the ones being dropped from support. When I said dropping old cards from support to focus more on new cards I didn't just mean 6000 series. I meant *ALL* cards newer than the ones being dropped from support. So anything from rx 400 up counts as "new".

[Skrybe]

UGH! Lost my original reply because this forum software is dodgy as.

@hitbm47 

When I said AMD are focusing on supporting new cards, I meant newer than the ones being discontinued, NOT just 6000 series cards. So in that context an RX 580 IS a new card.

As for benches, I don't have Crysis 3 or Ghost Warrior to test but I do have UT3. I dug out the original DVDs, jumped through a bunch of Windows 10 installer hoops, patched it to the latest, downloaded UT3 Benchmark tool and finally tweaked UTEngine.ini. Then benched it.

The results below are ONLY at 2560x1600 because the benchmark tool doesn't support 4k. The Texture and Level details are both maxed out. By default UT3 caps FPS at 62, which is why one run is showing roughly that FPS. If you change bSmoothFrameRate to FALSE in the the INI file it uncaps the framerate. Alternatively you can set the framerate cap to something else (like 120) by changing the value of MaxSmoothedFrameRate and leaving bSmoothFrameRate as TRUE. The bench run at 664fps is with the uncapped framerate.

mapname	changelist	datestamp		avg FPS	% over 30 FPS		avg GPU time		0 - 5	5 - 10	10 - 15	15 - 20	20 - 25	25 - 30	30 - 35	35 - 40	40 - 45	45 - 50	50 - 55	55 - 60	60 - INF		time	frame count	time disregarded
CTF-Coret	328909	2021.06.27-14.45.51		664.73	99.53		0.00 ms		0.00	0.00	0.38	0.10	0.00	0.00	0.10	0.05	0.00	0.04	0.00	0.12	99.23		59.47	39530	0.00
CTF-Coret	328909	2021.06.27-14.33.48		61.55	99.08		0.00 ms		0.00	0.00	0.53	0.19	0.07	0.13	0.00	0.05	0.00	0.07	0.00	0.03	98.93		59.54	3665	0.00

edit: Sorry, somehow there are now two posts.

[hitbm47]

@Skrybe 

Thank you for your efforts of going through this I really hope you still have it installed because I want you to test certain parts of the maps if you do not mind and I'll post a link with some of the areas in the maps that have huge issues: https://community.amd.com/t5/opengl-vulkan/unreal-tournament-3-rx-480-still-performs-horribly-can-it...

Please go through all the screenshots and you'll find the areas that dips hard, on you system it will probably dip to around 120FPS whereas I used to get 80FPS in those areas and now only 29FPS because AMD deleted Unreal Engine 3 optimizations by accident. I will also appreciate a screenshot instead of average frame-rate statistics if you are willing since it does not help the issue a lot. It's possible that they made a fix for Navi, but they definitely did not for GCN and Vega.

Please also note you can activate your retail CD Key on Steam to get the UT3 Black Edition which is what I am using, but the performance issues exist in the Original as well with AMD drivers.

Edit: Even they guys on Hardware Unboxed have now said they think it was a bit too early: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQW7q689JIs

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

Ok, I got a few screenshots in Facing Worlds and Deck. But the game gives me motion sickness so I'm not gonna go taking too many.

Warning: The images I've linked are at 4k res so they're nearly 1MB each. Shouldn't be a problem in this day and age but don't click them if you're on dialup

Facing worlds was averaging around 350fps uncapped. Some areas were up to 900 fps, some (the very top of the tower with the sniper rifle) got as low as 120fps. Which isn't super surprising, it's the biggest view with the most polygons and most action.

Start area: 900fps

https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_FacingWorlds_Start.jpg 

Mid point: 350fps

https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_FacingWorlds.jpg 

In tower: 120fps

https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_FacingWorlds_Sniper.jpg 

Took awhile to find where you were talking about in deck. And I got killed taking the screenie. Again, it's about 340fps.

https://half-assed.net/images/UT_Deck.jpg 

Everywhere else in deck seemed to be between 300-500fps.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

Thank you very much for your efforts I really appreciate it, those other where you looked into the distance/semi-Sky is NOT of relevance (because they are basically not part of the map) but you proved my point with the one at the top of the tower where I guessed correctly you would be getting 120FPS since this means the optimizations are even missing on Navi, also you looked slightly at the wrong angle in Deck, I know that area very well, which is why you got that high frame-rate there.

So I just did the calculations, if AMD have not deleted their optimizations by accident/negligence you would be getting 331.2FPS on top of that tower since there is a 175% increase in minimum frame rate reverting from 21.6.1 to 17.7.1 . To you it might not seem that significant, but it's the difference between playable and not playable for the rest of us, since you do not want to know how that area on top of the tower feels like at 29-30FPS, if I can get 80FPS even at 4K on my RX 480 and FX 8350 using driver version 17.7.1 on top of that tower versus 29-30FPS with any driver newer than 17.7.1.

That means you are only getting 40FPS more on top of that tower than what I used to get before 17.7.2 @ 4K on a 2016 RX 480.

You see average frame-rates does not show the big picture, because I was specifically referring to those areas dropping to 28-35FPS because AMD was not paying attention when they removed "Radeon Additional Settings" in one driver jump.

I do really appreciate the effort you put into getting the screenshots, there is another map which I do not expect you to post a screenshot, but you can test yourself it is at Market District in Warfare when you look at the Bridge from the end of the road where there is a small roof.

The point is this greatly affects all Unreal Engine 3 DirectX9 games due to negligence from the driver team and basically voids our purchase of Radeon RX 400/ RX 500 and AMD FX owners where it was working flawlessly.

Edit:

In addition @Skrybe if you used MSI Afterburner overlay you would see your GPU actually only runs at like 10-20% in that area, meaning if you lowered your resolution to 1280x720 or any other 16:9 aspect ratio you would still only be getting 120FPS due to the missing Unreal Engine 3 optimizations @AMD accidentality deleted.

To also give another example, if you were using a Ryzen 5 1600 with your card in that same area you would be getting around 50-70FPS which is lower than I was getting on 17.7.1 with my card @ any 16:9 resolution. This is not acceptable at all since that CPU came out even after/same time AMD made the error / mistake with the unnoticed loss of their UE3 optimizations.

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 

Actually I run dual screen and I have the task manager and radeon metrics running on the other screen. GPU is typically sitting between 80-90% all the time. Even when the framerate drops. Interestingly today I couldn't get it to sit at 120fps in the tower on facing worlds. Instead it was sitting around 200-250fps there. Still lower than the 600 fps in most other areas, but better than the other day.

Not sure why, same drivers, same settings. I tried the different tower spots and they were all in the mid 200s framerate wise. About the only thing I can think of is my PC had been running for several days straight when I last tested, and it's had a fresh boot today.

As for Deck, I watched the framerate as I moved around near the portal and while it changes depending on what you're looking at the FPS in the screenshot was representative of what I was seeing.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

Thank you for your response, I am glad that you are getting performance improvements, but please remember you are on a monster CPU and it might just be slightly blasting through whatever became this major bottleneck in some instances, but those major dips still indicates something is wrong.

The concern is not really of the framerate within the tower, but rather standing on top of the tower while looking in the direction of the other tower where you initially said you got 120FPS which is in line with the calculations I did, and then also considering being in action on top of the tower.

With the optimizations still in place you would've consistently got 364FPS+ in those areas which would sound a bit greedy in your case, but remember for me in went down from 80FPS minimum to 29FPS minimum where for you for you it might be 360FPS down to 120FPS which is much less pronounced than for the rest of us.

Even at 4K my RX 480 is not hitting 60% usage consistently at 29FPS on 21.6.2, but on 17.7.1 I am getting 70-90% more consistently with no dips below 75FPS anywhere on any of the maps. In addition, please also note on systems such as ours much more maps experience dips to the 30-45FPS area (even at 640x480) than you will experience dips to 120FPS on that system. This also affects most of the other DirectX9 Unreal Engine 3 games in 60% of the areas of the maps; for example, in Heroes of Might and magic 7 I am consistently in 35-50FPS range when traversing the maps on post- 17.7.1 whereas on 17.7.1 I am consistently in the 60-90FPS range, this is a dramatic improvement I can't even reach simply by using a Ryzen 5 1600 with the latest 21.6.2 drivers.

Edit - here is a link of my RX 480 getting 80FPS on 4K with 17.7.1 as opposed to my other post where I am only getting 32FPS at 1080p post 17.7.1:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JP_bZxmRWBPgyIY3qFCugXszCQSXRYah/view

Post 17.7.1 40FPS at 640x480 resolution, this is from the post AMD deleted when I showed my GT 710 beating the RX 480 drivers at 480p:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VKyk1CBulisw1NCy0roMEqehmly0yblB/view

Post 17.7.1 getting 32FPS with my RX 480 at 1080p:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nQwWmwTw8cKUk6aSMAk07hBjn2UsGXmf/view

Kind regards

[LivingTheDream]

Question: Have you tried pulling the dx9 DLLs from the last good driver and dumping them in the same folder as the executable? It's a trick I use to keep Mantle support on my copy of BF4.

[hitbm47]

Hi @LivingTheDream 

This is something I wanted to try yesterday, but I could not find the correct DLLs since I am not sure in which directory it is stored, would you mind telling me where to find them? Could not find them in C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD or C:\Program Files, I tried looking in C:\Windows but it had more than one which were not in a AMD folder.

I also wanted to do the same for mantle since I bought a lot of games which had mantle support; including Thief, BF4, BF Hardline, Sniper Elite V3 and Dragon Age Inquisition.

I tried using I think amdmantle.dll in Thiefs folder but it was not working, but I would really like to use the older DirectX 9 DLL's as well. Would be interesting if they contain the optimizations instead of being in a separate DLL.

One thing I am afraid of is if; for example, the DirectX9 DLL also handles the clock-speeds for DX9 applications, if it might be dangerous of using too old ones for thermals etc. I would also like to try an older OpenGL dll for the two ID Tech 5 Wolfenstein games.

Edit: it seems they might be called aticfx32.dll, aticfx64.dll, atidxx32.dll, atidxx64.dll, can someone maybe confirm this, but usually you have to have a D3D9.dll proxy isn't it? Can someone please be so kind as to refer the names necessary for manlte, directX and OpenGL DLLs.

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 

I tried the top of the tower, that's what I meant when I said the three tower spots, there is one right at the top and two others part way. All three were getting mid 200s framerates.

This is the worst framerate I saw: https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_TowerMid.jpg

This is the top of the tower: https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_TowerTop.jpg

In both locations the other day I was getting 120ish. Yesterday it was, as I said low to mid 200s.

I've gotta say though that I would expect those areas to have framerate drops since they're the largest view distances with the most geometry in them. If it wasn't such a huge pain to switch video cards I'd get my old GTX1070 and do comparisons. I know the framerates would drop in the same spots. It'd be interesting to see whether it was as pronounced.

Just another thought with the drivers and framerate drops. I'd like to see before and after shots of the same games to check image quality. I wonder whether the old drivers were faster because they weren't rendering "properly" and fixing the issue resulted in a performance drop? Not saying that's definitely the case, but it'd be good to confirm that it's not.

Out of curiosity, do you still have two video cards in your machine? Because from the 1080p screenshot it shows you have both an rx480 and a GTX1060 in the PC. I've seen a lot of advice about not mixing video cards and making sure you've fully cleaned drivers from the nVidia one if you're using AMD and vice versa.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

It is definitely an optimization issue, I bought the GTX 1060 refurbished exactly for the reason because I was facing these issue years before I bought the 1060 and had no Nvidia drivers on my system prior to facing these framerate drops.

I am not arguing that there will be framerate drops in certain areas, but not from 80FPS at 4K down to 40FPS between 17.7.1 to 17.7.2 (or 21.6.2) driver versions even at 480p!

My Nvidia GTX 1060 is able to achieve 82FPS at 4K in that area with the latest drivers which solidifies the fact that it is an optimization for the game. I am currently on 17.7.1 so I cannot take extra screenshots now, but I can assure you the graphics looks exactly the same even when looking at things like culling.

If you lower your resolution to 1080p or 720p and are getting 363FPS (please read edit) in that area then your driver issue has been resolved. Because the amount of polygons and vertices your CPU has to send to the GPU is the same at the same aspect ratios, (16:9 for example) but your GPU then has to calculate all the colours for the pixels between the vertices of the polygons.

Edit: @Skrybe actually the fact that your getting 200FPS in that area tells me that AMD might have more than resolved the issue for Navi, I did the calculations again and even if the optimization was still present you were suppose to get around approximately 173,6 FPS due to the performance differences between our CPUs. I used the wrong base for my calculation when you initially said you were getting 120FPS in that area. Sorry for the mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that AMD has lost some of the optimizations for GCN. Still, if you want to see what your CPU is able to push out of your current drivers you can just lower the resolution to 1280x720 or 1920x1080 as like I said the amount of CPU work stays the same between 16:9 aspect ratios since same amount of vertices & polygons are culled with the field of view and sent to the GPU for shader applications.

Kind regards

[Vantharas]

Honestly, I'm glad they are. All of that old architecture is just that old. It doesn't perform well and mostly all of that old architecture has been moved as far as it's going to.  There is a reason that AMD didn't have anything competitive for the longest time. Focusing on hardware that is underperforming and not competitive would do them harm in the long run now that they have real graphics card architecture again that can go toe to toe with Nvidia. I get the whole 3 years thing. However, it's not like the product is just going to quit being useful. It'll be fine for years to come for esports titles and the like. 

That being said Microsoft is making Windows 11 Direct X12 as a minimum requirement. So you can also thank Microsoft as well. 

[madruded]

Honestly, I was very upset about this, in the middle of the pandemic and with the increase in price of video cards on the market, they say they will no longer support old cards.
A joke...

[rh1nocz]

Hi, r9 fury user here. Bad news indeed, been using fury for years,  and its still a not bad card, especially if you tweak it,  honestly, you can still game on this thing at 1080p in any game, if you sacrifice some details. Timing is even less furtunate, i have been trying to get 6800xt here for many drops, still no luck. but still hoping. Card is really cool, it deserves better.

[hitbm47]

@rh1nocz

is that the one that had two GPU chips? That thing looked awesome, especially the reference one from AMD.

I agree, you deserve MUCH, MUCH better!!

Kind regards

[rh1nocz]

You most likely have r9 295x on your mind, that card aged even worse, with crossfire dead, it become just a really expensive 290x. But at the time of release, it must have been a monster. R9 fury is a generation younger flagship card, that most noteworthly used first generation of HBM memory. 

[c_zagarskas]

I hate to sound like a "conspiracy guy" but... I am really starting to wonder if AMD is either consciously (or individuals within the company are secretly) making some of these "decisions" to DETER the people that use GPU's to mine cryptocurrency... Reading that statement here it does not really sound all that unreasonable, and with that thought in place "some of the things" I have seen go down lately suddenly make sense...

I agree with you 100%. Alas, I do see some valid corporate (maybe even political) reasons why AMD would do this - as an end user I feel a sense of betrayal and let down.

On that note, the only "solution" I have been able to come up with that keeps some of these older Supermicro+AMD+Ubuntu boxes up and running is I have had to simply "freeze" them, prevent any updates, never sudo upgrade (ever) and then CLONE the hard drives of working boxes anytime a new system needs to be set up. Unfortunately this means the software in use on those boxes gets stuck as well. 

This is an area where open-sourcing the older software could be a nice olive branch, where as if there really are enough people that want the support they could write their own solutions. I am not qualified to just write a new driver, but I would be interested to contribute to a GoFundMe or Kickstarter? Maybe "we" as a community can "make" the solution we need?

[AMDaily]

All of this has to be regulated by law, so that hardware manufacturers, together with operating system manufacturers, have to ensure sufficient support time. The politicians say everyone should plan sustainably so that the world is not flooded with garbage, but here they can ensure that the lifespan is artificially reduced if people say that the hardware is still capable to the work with satisfying performance? It should be mandatory that 6-8 years are supported or at least the buyer is clearly told when buying if this is not planned. 

[throau]

The warranty support period for PC hardware has been 3-5 years since the dawn of the PC.  This should not be news to anyone.  Expecting software support (or rather, driver enhancement - the existing driver won't simply vanish) far beyond this is simply not realistic.

These cards aren't being bricked or disabled.  They will work with the existing driver.

Expecting performance optimisations on NEW titles for an architecture that is 4 generations old is just not realistic.  You aren't going to get high performance gaming on new titles no matter how much they optimise, because the 4 generation old hardware simply does not have hardware support for new technologies - things that will make a massive difference like mesh shaders, variable rate shading, etc.

All writing new drivers for 5 year old hardware does is take resources away from fixing bugs in current hardware drivers.  As a regularly upgrading customer, why should I be putting up with stuff like broken oculus support on my 6900xt and Vega cards because AMD are too busy doing driver updates for 5-10 year old hardware that simply won't be decently performant on future software whatever they do (i.e., largely wasted effort)?

Polaris, Vega10, Vega20 and RDNA1 do not support those features either, but they're still within the 3-5 year "reasonable support" window. Expect AMD to drop support for all of those platforms as soon as reasonably possible because of this.  Likewise,  you can expect Nvidia to probably drop support for Pascal and older as soon as reasonably possible too - for the same reason (they currently support both 10xx and 9xx but guarantee it won't be for too much longer).

If you want hardware support forever (not just from AMD, but intel, Nvidia, or anyone else) then you're going to have to expect to pay for a monthly subscription model, because the original purchase price of a hardware device is NOT going to pay for indefinite driver development for an increasingly small customer base (shrinking due to upgrades/attrition of hardware, etc.).

[hitbm47]

Hi @AMDaily 

I agree with you, because people should consider e-waste as well, but they are mostly concerned with getting all the attention on their new hardware without realizing that a lot of other people before them have been treated poorly.

@throauare we just going to keep repeating things other people have already commented without reading what everyone else has mentioned already? If you have read previous comments barely anyone is expecting to have their cards become stronger, they are expecting compatibility issues to be fixed which has been dragged a long for years; furthermore, they are expecting compatibility to continue slightly longer for products that had wonky/mismanaged release dates.

What you do not realize @throau is you are going to put up with stuff like this, because it is mistakes that AMD continually make whether they decide to fix older issues or not, and they would not have had to fix it if they have done it properly from the start. That's what I got from my support for 2/3 generations of AMD GPUs and CPUs. So yeah, I did not want to put up with it either, but guess what, here we are. Furthermore, from my experience yes warranty has been 3-4 years, but drivers has been 4-5years or even slightly longer and yes a few games will actually prohibit you from playing with new game updates, there is no denying that, even if they were compatible.

PC hardware lifetime usually extends slightly over console lifetime, which is usually at least 5 years, since you can even then extend it by locking your games to 30FPS such as on a console. But, once again people were not expecting "forever" support from this hardware, like the OP originally said, he only got 3 years, go read that again.

Since you're mentioning Nvidia, I can guess they are probably going to drag the 900 or at least 1000 series slightly longer with the news of AMD dropping support in these times. Therefore, they'll probably use it as a tactic to win some of the customer base back.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

Since videos do not work here on AMD communities anymore, I have gone through the efforts of uploading videos to youtube of the AMD Unreal Engine 3 issue, please note even though I used a Ryzen 5 1600 in this video the performance drop is still major (Remember with a FX 8350 this bad driver issue of the second video translates to 29-40FPS in those affected areas):

Here is the awesome performance of 17.7.1 or earlier:

https://youtu.be/Pt0K8_SDevs

Here is the bad performance on 21.7.1 after Unreal Engine 3 DirectX9 optimizations have been lost in 17.7.2:

(please take note of the areas I am momentarily stationary since they are also in the screenshots on this post)

https://youtu.be/Q7vWCyE6WHk

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47out of curiosity have you tried a Vulkan-DX9 wrapper? https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases

There are people reporting that using that improves framerates noticeably in a number of DX9 games on AMD cards. Especially when CPU bound.

Original article here: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/11/2149848024140726141/

And some more tips here: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/379895/how-do-i-make-sure-that-my-game-is-working-with-vu...

No guarantees it'll help with UT3 but might be worth a try and it's pretty simple.

edit: Just FYI I tried it and needed to copy the 32bit DVXK binaries to the UT3 folder in order to get it working.

For some reason the DXVK overlay appears onscreen but isn't caught by the UT3 screenshot. Anyway, the two "usual" areas;

https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_TowerTop_Vulkan.jpg

https://half-assed.net/images/UT3_Deck_Vulkan.jpg

My framerates using the wrapper are about the same, maybe a touch higher on Facing worlds and a touch lower on Deck. Obviously your mileage may vary.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

Yes I have known of DXVK for probably two years, it only helps slightly in Unreal Tournament 3 but introduces more instability when the game is struggling on a single thread. In addition, it was actually developed for Linux and Proton, but believe me I have tested it a lot on Windows.

Furthermore, it makes some of the other games un-renderable; for example, it causes a black screen or artefacts in some UE3 games with only their user interfaces showing up.

In conclusion, even with using DXVK on a Ryzen 5 1600 with 21.7.1 the performance doesn't come close to what it used to be even on a FX 8350 using 17.7.1.

Another AMD user "DeepForest" was also able to recreate the issue on the post I made on this forums about Unreal Tournament 3, using even a different setup than mine, but also a RX 580/ RX 480.

It looks like the driver team might be investigating the issue, but now they are saying they do not have a licence key for Unreal Tournament 3, which I highly doubt.

Edit:

In addition, there is actually a much easier way to see if DXVK is working and that is to simply use the MSI Afterburner/ RivaTuner on-screen display, it shows "VULKAN" at the frames per second instead of "DirectX9/DirectX10/DirectX11", which shows that the DXVK translation happens before anything else 3rd party.

Furthermore, I have even been able to make Radeon "Wait for Verticle Refresh" & "OpenGL Triple Buffering" working by using DirectX to OpenGL wrappers for DirectX8 games, since DirectX8 games' VSync does not work on Windows 10.

[cablenexus]

It's a totally wrong business decision and unethical to release buggy drivers and stop supporting the product afterwards.

There is nothing to discuss or to defend. It's just plain wrong.

[hitbm47]

I can understand this. They both have their pro's and con's.

The Radeon's are awesome hardware, they are just lacking the Q&A in their drivers. Personally, I think Radeon cards make better E-sport cards,

but the Nvidia's have more stable gaming performance in most scenarios. Furthermore, a lot of AMD's driver team has a really hard time following instructions on how to replicate performance issues, I think they have ego problems. Me, and another user made independent video's for them on specific areas/maps on how to replicate a driver performance issue in a specific game and then they went ahead and tested other games (which I mentioned will also have the issue) on their own for the issue instead of this specific game and also not using the hardware I mentioned.

Thereafter, it seems they just left it unattended without resolving it since they are not willing to find someone in their company whom owns the game.

Kind regards