OK, first off. Black/dark screen issues, Started and existed on ALL 2020 drivers, with maybe the 20.3.x drivers being more stable-ish. This is a ridiculous problem that shouldn't exist. It seems to manifest after your PC goes screensaver then sleep mode? and waking up makes the screen DARK like brightness is set to 0 on a phone. Only fix is ctrl-shift-win-b. I think the driver is failing to initialize itself, and there may be 3rd party hardware/software/OS issues that contribute to it. Using PBO on Ryzen might cause the issue to manifest *more*, but I don't think it is the primary cause, and Ryzen 3000 itself is a complete joke where AMD sold super subpar silicon that never hits boost clocks without PBO. False advertising for sure. We need a class action lawsuit, because my 2000 series clocked higher than 3000.
That said, Microsoft keeps screwing up stability every OS update. They've completely wiped out multiple vendor's sound card drivers, and that's unacceptable IMO. It hasn't helped AMD stability, but AMD doesn't help itself in that regard. AMD doesn't globally support HWS, which is ridiculous. 5700 users got ONE beta driver, and it's ludicrous that it wasn't available for all cards, since all cards support async compute. Microsoft released the feature AFTER the hardware, so this is purely a software feature that vendors are playing games with. Just turn the thing on AMD, you don't even have a DLSS or raytracing alternative, and you need to support something new.
Second. 20.8.2 WAS working, with occasional dark screens, BUT RANDOMLY STARTED STUTTERING NON STOP. This is caused by AMD's freaking ReLive when Record Desktop is enabled. AMDRSServ.exe crashes and restarts itself NONSTOP. Disabling record desktop fixes it somewhat, but YOU CAN'T PLAY FULLSCREEN GAMES EITHER WITH INSTANT REPLAY TURNED ON. I have no idea what causes it, but I think it is some combination of various OS / software updates. Actually, I think it is sound related, because it started when I switched speaker mode to headphone mode, but nothing could fix it once it started. I also wonder if Coolsoft Virtualmidisynth / windows issues are related, since there was a bug that affected it's sound driver, and they had to write a patch. Maybe ReLive is also affected by the same issue?
I DDU'd the drivers and went back to 20.4.2, AND IT STILL STUTTERS. The lag even affects my mouse. Even weirder, the black screens have completely stopped, even on 20.8.1. So whatever happened, I traded dark screens for broken ReLive. Enabling Instant Replay does not work, causes stuttering, and even DISABLES THE IN-GAME OVERLAY. So, overall, I now have to turn off Instant Replay and Record Desktop to have any modicum of stability and usability.
I've tried 20.8.3 as well, but do not like the performance hit it receives in certain games and dxvk. I don't play fortnite, so there is no benefit. All of the drivers now seem to only work with instant replay and record desktop disabled.
This is on Vega 56, Ryzen 3700X, Crosshair VI Hero, 32GB ram, Windows 10 64-bit. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but these issues have seriously made me consider Intel / Nvidia for my next system build. AMD can't make stable drivers, bios updates, chips that hit advertised boost, power profiles better than the community, etc.
I'm sure some of these issues might be caused by OS updates or whatever, but how hard is it to write fallback code to detect problems? When AMD used CCC they had a recovery mode built into the driver, while Adrenalin has been nothing but unstable.
If anyone knows what is crashing ReLive, let me know. Hell, ReLive might have been causing the black screens too. ReLive seems like AMD's weak spot. The stability issues are probably less on the driver, and more on all the bundled software.
