PC Graphics

[UnPotat]

Hi,

I’m just wondering a few things and to see if anyone else has run into the same issues as me. I’ll be trying the latest driver tonight after work and will update as there was an issue in Cold War, however I’ve also been getting ‘crashes’ in Shadowlands when RT is turned on. They’re much more frequent when in Rage mode, and if I try and overclock by even 50mhz it almost instantly ‘crashes’ ( Game goes blank, then flashes back into life with RT ‘disabled due to graphics related reasons’ ).

Without Ray Tracing it seems perfectly stable but as soon as it’s turned on it doesn’t seem to be stable at all and I’m starting to wonder if my card is actually faulty in some way. I was previously attributing crashes on the stock presets as all being driver issues and while some in Black Ops were I haven’t heard of anyone else with my issue in Shadowlands so I’m starting to wonder if it’s not quite stable at stock clocks causing the game to disable RT.

As an example with RT disabled at 150% render resolution and MSAA8x it seems fine even at 2600mhz without issues but again with RT on it will instantly crash even with an extra 50mhz and will crash on Rage mode within a few minutes.

A bit puzzled by it all and scared to RMA as the chances of actually getting a replacement seem slim to none. That said if anyone else has tried Shadowlands with RT on I’d be grateful to hear how it’s gone for you

Specs -

Ryzen 5 2600X

MSI B350M Gaming Pro

16GB 3066mhz Ram (tested at 2400 no difference)

Powercolor Red Dragon 6800 XT ( does have severe coil whine like there’s a bee trapped in the case )

Corsair TX850M PSU ( replaced my old Kolink 850w PSU while troubleshooting but made no difference )

Have tried DDU and had no effect, have a 1TB SSD coming tomorrow and will try a clean install on that but I suspect it won’t make a difference.

[UnPotat]

I think the problem is that there are a lot of people on Reddit etc who have responded and tested along side me and claim anyway that they get no crashes in any of these games. So its hard to tell what is a driver problem and what is a hardware problem, and the last thing I want to do is end up with faulty hardware that I can't get replaced.

Update on my end, my friend was testing in Fortnite and was able to play for over 3 hours without getting a crash and we were going to send it back to me and I was going to spend over £500 on a new Motherboard + CPU + Ram to rule anything there out. Before this he decided to download Cyberpunk 1.2 on steam and give that a go. He had a crash within around 1 and a half hours. 

Cyberpunk seems to have great logs and it indicates a hardware fault on the GPU. So now he has had crashes in Control and Cyberpunk, this being on a 5900x + x570 system which is only a few months old at most.

As much as I'd like to think its drivers I have seen too many people on here and on Reddit test the same things and have no crashes for hours. Added that my card seems to be random, crashing straight away at times but taking ages at others. Probably some skimping in the QA department what with cards being in such short supply and being so valuable.

[colesdav]

It took Nvidia some time before problems in Game titles with RayTracing Reflections, Shadows, Global Illumination were ironed out after launch of Turing GPUs. 
Initial DLSS performance was not great, with downscaling and image sharpening producing similar results. 

That is still no excuse for crashing though. 

[UnPotat]

Oh yeah for sure, I'm understanding of the fact that things take time and that it could be that. If I knew for sure that it was that then I would stick it out with the card.

The problem is that people on here are playing WoW and Watch Dogs for hours without issues where as I seem to get them in the same games, and it having happened on two separate builds makes me think somethings up.

If I RMA and get sent another card which turns out to have the exact same issues then I'd be more open to the fact that it's a driver problem but I just don't think it is.

Edit: That said with the amount of issues I've had, if it was a driver issue I'd expect it to be listed under the issues section, but transparency is a whole other story. That said it could not be that at all. RT is new for the AMD cards, who wants to bet that they haven't updated their validation properly to test the new part of the cards which may be a part of this all.

[colesdav]

You are all guinea pigs to test a new AMD GPU release, as usual. 

[heart_of_the_tiger]

Now, that attitude is not helping anyone. While it might be true in some sense, it should be noted that non ray traced applications seem to work fine even under heavy load. AMD's raytracing solution does not involve tensor cores, so if the card is working correctly under normal conditions, I don't even know the likelihood of an rx6000 card's ray tracing capabilities to be broken on a hardware level.

[heart_of_the_tiger]

NEWS:

I actually got my card stable, or at least more stable. Cyberpunk, Metro Exodus and Quake RTX work with RT now. Cyberpunk crashed once when starting the game with RT reflections, but when I started the game without RT and switched on all the effects ingame, it ran without crashing... framerate was horrible though.

How did I do it? After obsessively seaching forums, I found some people mentioning that Radeon cards are very sensitive to system memory. So, I Increased my Ram voltage from 1.35V to 1.4V. That was all. I'll test this more tomorrow.

[colesdav]

RE: How did I do it? After obsessively seaching forums, I found some people mentioning that Radeon cards are very sensitive to system memory. 

Do you mean PC DDR4 Ram voltage?
Are the RX6800XT GPU generating more noise than an Nvidia GPU like an RTX3080? 

Why would that be?  

[heart_of_the_tiger]

I do not know what you mean when you say "generating more noise". 

But, yes, I mean DDR4 RAM voltage, just a quick fix in my BIOS.

[UnPotat]

Hopefully that fixes it for you! This was something I tried having seen a similar thing on a thread over at Overclockers. At first I thought it had helped but it turned out to just be part of the random crashing for me. Had the GPU back from my friend for a day now, got to leave it running Cyberpunk with ray tracing turned on when I went to work and it crashed at around the two hour mark that time.

The game has great error reporting "Gpu Crash for unknown reasons! Callstack here is probably irrelevant." . It gives a whole load of data and a screenshot of the game at the time of crash. Same as other applications in the past where it just registers the GPU as either having crashed or just not longer being there.

Will update at some point when/if I actually RMA but to be honest this is just a lesson learnt for me, I lost a grand and will buy a 3080 when I either get lucky or when stock gets better. This will probably be a paperweight for me, or a spare GPU as long as there is no RT needed.

[colesdav]

I mean "electrical noise" on the power supply interfering with writing to / reading from DRAM.
DRAM errors will cause your Game / PC to crash.
The way you will spot the problem is to run Karhu Ram Test whist running the GPU on the game in Windows. 

That is one reason why you would have to increase DRAM voltage.
It increases noise margin and therefore resistance to electrical noise.

If yor DRAM passes PassMark Memtest86 test pre-boot into Windows and Karhu Ram Test whist
running the GPU on the game in Windows then you should not have to touch (increase) your DRAM voltage at all when you turn RT on, unless it is increasing GPU power or power spiking. 

AMD RX68/9000XT GPUs have lower spec TDP than Nvidia RTX3080/3090. 
Lower power should mean less electrical noise if the supply input filtering on the GPU is good enough.

[heart_of_the_tiger]

So I thought I should reply in this thread too, before this drives me insane. In my last post I described how i fixed my RT crashes by changing RAM voltage. It turned out that wasnt the case, I just had fewer crashes. 

I subsequently changed my power supply from a BeQuiet 700W unit to a Corsair 850W unit. No more RT crashes since. IDK why, I can only speculate at this point.

[colesdav]

What does the AMD Radeon Performance overlay report GPU Temps, Power,FPS  on games you tested with with RT on versus off? 

Do you have any numbers you can report? 

Thanks.

[colesdav]

Turn on the Radeon Overlay and take note of the GPU Temperatures and Power reported with Ray Tracing on versus off. 
What do you see?
Thanks. 

[sieyiewen]

dude i have the same. paired with 5900x. on 1080p. playing cyberpunk 2077. without RT. all maxout and fine.i set min core 2300 and max 2400. on 1000 mv. i know i undervolt it. if i switch on the rt.. at somepoint it will crash. i then increase the voltage to 1050mv. quite stable . but.. the temp man... reach 82 and 100 celcius hotspot. i dont think this card is ready for rt even if it can. just do the game without rt man.save the age of the card too. im already happy playing all games at 1080p max out graphic setting.