PC Drivers & Software

[Vynski]

Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this problem with Realtek drivers.  Here are my computers; an AMD Ryzen 7 2800X with an RX 480, on an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus board, a Ryzen 9 3900X with an RX 5700 on an MSI MEG ACE board, and an MSI BRAVO 15 with a dedicated 5500M GPU.  The major problem I have had is when I update the Realtek drivers to the latest update, my Ryzen 7 2800X will crash every time.  Since I don't need the onboard audio drivers, since I have a Creative ZSE sound card, I simply disable them in the BIOS.  I was aware of the problem over six months ago of the conflict with the Realtek drivers, just from my own experience and isolating when the crashes would start.  Out of curiosity, a couple of days ago, Windows 11 had the optional Realtek update for several months and I was wondering if the 22.6.1 Adrenalin drivers may have solved the problem.  So I decided to give it a try and update the Realtek drivers once again, and you guessed it, the system crashed on the very first restart.  It's no big deal with me due to my setup, but what about someone that does not have a dedicated sound card to be able to disable the onboard audio.  I just did as I have previously and uninstalled the Realtek drivers, AMD chipset and AMD Adrenalin drivers then shut down and used a cold system restart and reinstalled chipset and adrenalin drivers.  There is some coding in the Realtek drivers that is down right ROTTEN. 

As I said, I'm just curious if anyone else has the Realtek audio and wi-fi and using AMD, is experiencing crashes.  These crashes, in my opinion ARE NOT an AMD problem, they can be traced to Realtek, both audio and network. Yes the same problem occurs with their network drivers.  That is where I discovered that the culprit was Realtek.  Since I no longer have a need for a hardwired LAN, I also disabled that in the BIOS.  I have gone strictly to Wi-Fi network and since it uses the Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 chip, I just bypass Realtek and install the Intel drivers and all is bliss.

Vynski

[Axton]

While I can't explicitly say I have the same issues as you, (there's quite a few different configurations out there) but I will say that AMD absolutely needs to separate their audio drivers from the graphics driver installation package.  They are not alone in this either, nvidia did it but somehow nvidia's package handles it better, I'll explain why I say this.

On my (fairly basic) system I use onboard audio on an Asrock x570 motherboard with a Ryzen 3600.  When I had an nvidia gtx1080ti I could install any driver I wanted, uncheck the audio portion of the driver package during installation, and it wouldn't even prompt for a reboot if I already had a previous driver installed, it just worked.  If I did not have a driver installed already, after a reboot my default sound output device was my monitor but after setting it back to the onboard device I'd never hear or see any errors or complaints from the operating system again.

With AMD Adrenalin since I bought a 6950xt in May this year, there is no option to not install audio drivers (unless you do a basic Adrenalin install which does not give you access to the fan controls because AMD didn't put a practical fan control curve in the bios for some reason), so my operating system will randomly choose to play the usb-unplug-replug sound when a game starts up or when certain keys are pressed. This happens even if I disable/uninstall the AMD-related sound devices in Device Manager.  And yes even using DDU does not solve this, nor did installing a fresh copy of Windows.

UPDATE: Now when I start Steam it plays the usb unplugged sound!  The mystery gets even bigger by the day.

So I feel your pain, but more importantly we really should have some acknowledgement from the driver team on why they insist on forcing audio drivers on all of us.  I don't like to make threats anywhere but this experience is not encouraging me to stay with AMD or recommend their products to my friends.

[FederaluL]

do they have a "driver team" ? sometimes I'm thinking there must be only one man working on drivers, considering the amount of same problems passed from one release to the next. lol

[Axton]

@FederaluL I suspect the team is careful where they get their input from.  But I learned a new 'feature' about the AMD driver tonight, it will automatically reinstall the "AMD High Definition Audio Device" on my system even after I've removed it from Device Manager.  At some point in the 5 minutes after I removed it and accessed the driver control panel it reinstalled itself.

I really wish we had a proper guide to prevent this stuff from happening.

[Vynski]

I have noticed that the last two Adrenalin updates (22.6.1 & 22.7.1) did give you a choice on installation.  I never looked at the choices in the selector FULL was the default and I just clicked install on the 3 machines I updated.

When I was researching my problems with driver compatibility I read something about Realtek has not really updated their drivers since 2014 or 2015.  Has anyone seen and read this also?  Think about how much Wi-Fi has changed in the last 7-8 years.  Its no wonder why it was trashing my Wi-Fi 6 ax200 drivers.  As for the sound drivers, I'm assuming it had something to do with codecs, not sure.  It was just less of a hassle to purchase and install a new Soundblaster card.  I only wished I could have used my older PCI XFi card, but since none of my motherboards even have a PCI slot.  No offense but save your breath about Gigabyte.  I have one computer on a dedicated machine that is more obsolete than PCI and needed a PCI board to operate it.  As far as the Gigabyte board I'll never own another, absolutely hate it.

[filedzmen]

Yo, exact same problem, i can't even open realtek settings, every time i tried to install updates it just didn't work, got bsod and back to old driver. Saw somewhere that the drivers are forced update over mines, but idk about that. Gotta get myself some sound card instead of the integrated one.