So this one is a bit of a storyline, but hang in there....
I'm an avid FPS gamer (and IT engineer), and lately my main game is COD warzone.
I've configured a new system with:
ROG Dark Hero X570
6900XT Liquid Devil
1200w ROG Thor psu
980 Pro 1 TB ssd
64gb Gskill samsung b die memory at 3600 / 16 / 16 / 16.
Full custom loop watercooling with all EK parts.
Over time the game just did not feel smooth enough for me, although I average around 200 FPS on medium settings there were some microjitters/stutters going on and it was just bugging me while losing some close quarters fights....
What I've done so far:
Replaced 5950X with a new one.
Replaced memory with new
Replaced mainboard (to Aorus Master X570, and then back to a new Dark Hero)
Replaced previous 6800XT with new 6900XT.
Numerous reinstalls of windows. Numerous yes. Numerous.
Now as these nice new RX6000 videocards have coil-whine, I put down my blaring headset, and listened to the system in game (while gaming and spectating after death), and I noticed some erratic changes in coil whine, seemingly correlating with the same stutter I have experienced in game.
Looking into the performance metrics, I see huge changes in wattage, drops in clock speeds and what not. I tried locking in the minimal clock speeds (2450 min 2500 max) which also made some difference. Please see the video on the 21.8.2. driver. It's ridiculous, I really don't care about power optimization in game! I want a normal experience.
I also noticed that when I alt+tab (while in game) to do things on my secondary screen the erratic behavior decreased significantly, almost even evaporate. That got me thinking, should I run fullscreen borderless, or even windowed? That made no difference at all, and I started to further analyze the issues...
I got the feeling that when they added new functionality in the driver (monitoring FPS/Frametime and probably most importantly the Ryzen part of monitoring (like the RyzenMasterSDK in task scheduler)) things started going south unfortunately.
I tried disabling all monitoring features, disabling RyzenMasterSDK, removing the game from the Radeon Driver, and many many more things, until I finally gave up and yesterday.... Downgraded my driver.
I managed to DDU and install 21.2.3, and started my game.
The difference was immediately improved to a point where it is unnoticeable. I then also locked back in the minimal and maximum clock speeds in game (2450-2550) and started a new game.
Coil whine is constant with no huge changes in sound, no micro-stutters in game, FPS is stable (I mean for warzone it is), all in all this resolved my issues with this setup in my favorite game.
It's so unfortunate to see a brilliant product line fail due to Driver issues and new-found-fan's (like me, as I came from a 1080ti) willing to already leave the platform due to these issues.
AMD -> Please look into this and issue a fix... For now, I'm not leaving this driver, and might even downgrade to the GA driver for the 68/6900XT release to be sure nothing is bloated or crooked in my setup.
Hope this helps anyone with the same issues.
