PC Drivers & Software

[cellon]

Current setup:

Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ 8GB

Asus Prime Z370-A

Intel i7-8700k

HyperX Fury DDR4 2133MHz 2x4GB RAM kit

EVGA SuperNOVA 650 G2

Worth noting the issue persisted through an upgrade (from MSI B150 PC Mate mobo and i5-6400) and a fresh Windows installation.

Ever since the Adrenalin branding got added to the AMD graphics drivers (might have been earlier too) I have experienced an issue where the combination of running a Twitch stream on my second monitor while playing games, specifically I've noticed this happening with GTA 5 and WoW, the AMD drivers will randomly crash. The screen will just turn black and after a some seconds return, no error message is given and only going into the event viewer shows that graphics driver amdkmdap stopped responding and was restarted. Every time this occurs there are two entries for this in the event viewer, always roughly 10-11 seconds apart. The crashes do not occur when only a Twitch stream is running and they do not occur when only playing a game. I also haven't noticed the crashes occuring in any other game than WoW and GTA but that's mostly because the crashes are pretty rare and I usually don't watch Twitch while playing other games. There is absolutely no pattern to when the crashes occur, it could be after 5 minutes or an hour or three hours, or some days it might never happen.

I currently run driver version 17.4.4 which does not crash.

[pokester · Accepted solution]

When using the newer drivers, have you already tried setting the power limit in wattman (slider below fan setting, slide all the way to right) to the maximum for your card? Either +20 or +50 for RX 480 I believe. I know that doing this adds much needed stability for RX 480 and RX 580. Don't know for sure that this fix will help but it does help many. However both of those games you list are have know issues with the games themselves with AMD and nvidia. Worth a shot though and easy to try, if you already have not done this.