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The AMD Driver Thread

Soldato
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Under the hot sun.
Are you using Windows 10?

Fast alt-tab for me is usually a sign if the game is running in borderlesss window mode or Windows has activated the full-screen optimisations "feature" (which allows for faster alt-tabbing even when running the game in exclusive fullscreen mode) but for me in some games I get worse performance or stuttering when it's activated and usually just "disable full-screen optimisations" in the compatibility tab of the game executable if I notice performance issues/stuttering to make sure it runs in "true" exclusive full-screen mode. It might also explain the performance improvement if the game is now running in "true" exclusive full-screen mode instead of using the windows feature.

The only thing that has changed is the drivers not game settings. It exhibits it on all full screen games with the 18.12.2 drivers. An issue that didn't existed with previous drivers.
 
Associate
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10 Aug 2017
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52
The only thing that has changed is the drivers not game settings. It exhibits it on all full screen games with the 18.12.2 drivers. An issue that didn't existed with previous drivers.


It's a feature that is built into windows 10 and automatically enabled by default. It will try to hook into fullscreen mode games to make alt-tabbing faster but for some games it makes performance worse or causes stuttering, and in some games it doesn't hook in at all, there is no easy way to confirm when it's hooked into the game. I think it's tied into the Windows settings "game mode" feature. It might be that feature was hooking into games previously (fast alt-tabbing) but now windows is not hooking into them with the new drivers so you are now experiencing "true" fullscreen mode e.g. better performance but slower alt-tabbing.
 
Associate
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7 Aug 2014
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175
I've installed 18.12.2 again seeing as many people don't appear to have stability problems and wanted to see what the Freesync2 HDR10 Tone Mapping was like. I think Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks better but it could be placebo. I daren't touch WattMan though!
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Nov 2009
Posts
13,252
Location
Under the hot sun.
I've installed 18.12.2 again seeing as many people don't appear to have stability problems and wanted to see what the Freesync2 HDR10 Tone Mapping was like. I think Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks better but it could be placebo. I daren't touch WattMan though!

All games look sharper with 18.12.2 compared to 18.12.1 and 18.12.1.1. Is not you :D
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jun 2009
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6,847
First time I've gotten to actually play a game with the new driver. So far it's crashed twice immediately after using Alt-Enter to go fullscreen. Back to 18.11.2 I go.
 
Associate
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9 Aug 2016
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After doing some further testing my conclusion is this driver is a piece of **** period. Auto under volt is basically power save mode and savages your performance. Auto overclock GPU & memory does absolutely nothing so is a waste of space. The fan curve is an absolute ****in* joke TBH. Set the curve to 60% at 75c and it went to 100% as soon as the game started (3330 rpm) and stayed there. Whatever figure I put in above 50% yielded the same result WTF?

With the previous drivers I could cap the fan speed which would affect temperature and performance but at least the fan noise was bearable. With these drivers AMD seem to think we want to run the fan at 100% all the time for a meager performance increase. Sorry AMD you're wrong give me less noise not more.

For some reason, might be because I have the original blower card, I get no option to run fan speed at 0. I see absolutely no benefit in this release and seriously wonder why AMD even bothered to make a big thing about it other than they've got absolutely nothing else they can talk about in the GPU space.

To say I'm disappointed with this POS is a major under statement. All hype and no delivery. Where are the primitive shader gains you promised? DSBR and all the other Vega features that don't work or aren't implemented? Terry Makedon should hang his head in shame after releasing these drivers and maybe it's time he walked the plank as he seems to be as useful as a chocolate fire guard. Sad times to be an AMD Vega owner to be sure.

I'm rolling back these drivers and maybe in a few months if they can fix all the faults in this release I might download another set of drivers but I won't be holding my breath TBH as I'm not sure they have the talented engineers to pull it off as they've all fuc*ed off to Intel
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Soldato
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Had a good chortle at this @lordhawkwind an honest but frank review which unfortunately I guess was predictable from AMD trying to do too many things in a release and doing it poorly. :(

The fan setup, whilst lovely to setup, is actually broken for me, it's not adaptive at the plots, it just gets stuck at the first one it sees. Not sure if this is due to the lc64 using different pwm settings to traditional air cooled Vegas?

In the days of Tahiti and Hawaii and Tonga, and upto the 28nm stagnation, Amd with the lack of new hardware in sight, worked hard on the wonder drivers, to help unlock performance and gain features, when Nvidia were pushing forward with a better architecture and more advanced features. It made sense for Amd to tweak what they had back then. But I'm sorry they are terrible, because as an engineer I can see how lazy they went about programming and refining the avfs on Vega.

Let alone the execution of Vega is a half assed attempt at compute/gaming.
 
Associate
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8 Sep 2017
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Australia
Agreed this driver is a total POS pile of craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap full stop.

Loaded it onto my second rig with an i7 9700k and an RX 590, accessed Wattman and the Wattman screen just freezes and driver crashes, have to alt/tab/del to bring up task manager and terminate the radeon settings host application. Happens every time! period. Yet to install it on my Threadripper/Vega rig but at this rate I think I'll pass.....back to 18.12.1.1
 
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Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Romford/Hornchurch, Essex
Just installed the latest drivers, and had a play around. Im running a EKWB cooled reference Vega56 with a Vega64 bios (for faster 945mhz 1.35volt HBM support).

Auto undervolt GPU, it did nothing.

Auto overclock GPU setting on my GPU and it killed my PC. . The only way to get it to boot to windows safemode was to flip the bios switch to the Vega56 low powered bios and do driver cleaner.

Auto memory overclock im scared to touch! lol

I guess i know my card limits (1692/1190) so should leave auto well alone.
 
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