31 replies to this topic

[Fizzzzle]

As I've mentioned a few times on here, I bought a 7950 a while back. Things were going great, we were getting along fine, when all of the sudden it introduced me to these new drivers last weekend. After I installed these new drivers, things went to shit. My shit started crashing every few hours, so I decided to revert back to my old drivers. My system was still crashing, though not as frequently. So I wiped my drivers again and reinstalled the new drivers, thinking that the problem may have somehow been with my install... nope. My computer has crashed twice today.

Have any of you had these problems with AMD drivers? I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do here.

[Bitgod]

Lol, AMD people problems.  This is why I'll never go back, I've always had more problems with AMD/ATI.

[Fizzzzle]

This is my first AMD gpu, and it really hasn't given me a good impression, to say the least. I didn't have any problems at all until I updated to the new drivers, and now I can't seem to avoid crashing.

[misfit410]

There has to be something else with the system causing this many issues,  I play hundreds of games on 4-5 systems with a range of AMD/Nvidia products, my AMD system have never once given me an ounce of trouble.

In fact the only person I knew that had that much crashing issues had a 4850 I had sold him, and it turned out to be overloading his PSU.

[Pretzel]

Have you taken a second and thought that maybe.... just MAYBE something else could be wrong?

This whole blame AMD drivers thing on this board is just absolutely hilarious.

[UMad?]

Check your PSU or the temps on your gpu. This don't sound like a driver issue at all.

[forsayken]

Fizzzzle, do you have an onboard GPU? Take the 7950 out and use onboard for a day or two and see if the system stabilizes. That will rule out the videocard and/or its drivers if the system still crashes.

You shouldn't need to, but run drivercleaner or something to really make sure the old drivers are gone and then install either 12.3 or 12.4 again.

[NeoandGeo]

You can search for 'ATIMan Uninstaller' that is a pretty good utility to clear out all traces of old drivers. AMD has good drivers, but I never have any luck with them unless I completely erase all traces of the previous driverset before upgrading.

[Wakim]

I installed the new drivers on 4/28, and have had no issues.

[Lucian04]

Fizzzzle, on 05 May 2012 - 03:25 AM, said:

This is my first AMD gpu, and it really hasn't given me a good impression, to say the least. I didn't have any problems at all until I updated to the new drivers, and now I can't seem to avoid crashing.

I've really never had issues with AMD, but that's not to say that everything with AMD is all gravy either.  That said the latest Nvidia drivers give me similar issues.

[NeoandGeo]

Also keep in mind the Nvidia fiasco where the certified WHQL drivers actually killed cards.

[brandino@work]

Did you use the AMD auto driver updater thingmajig?  That's caused problems with me in the past, but uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers manually may fix the problem.

[projectmayhem]

Pretzel, on 05 May 2012 - 10:25 AM, said:

Have you taken a second and thought that maybe.... just MAYBE something else could be wrong?

This whole blame AMD drivers thing on this board is just absolutely hilarious.

Where the fuck you been? Also I agree, never had a problem with my AMD/ATI shizz.

[Fizzzzle]

brandino@ Workout D Jansun, on 05 May 2012 - 01:48 PM, said:

Did you use the AMD auto driver updater thingmajig?  That's caused problems with me in the past, but uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers manually may fix the problem.

That's what I've already done, and it didn't help.

forsayken, on 05 May 2012 - 11:07 AM, said:

Fizzzzle, do you have an onboard GPU? Take the 7950 out and use onboard for a day or two and see if the system stabilizes. That will rule out the videocard and/or its drivers if the system still crashes.

You shouldn't need to, but run drivercleaner or something to really make sure the old drivers are gone and then install either 12.3 or 12.4 again.

This is probably what I'll do. Thanks.


And yes, I have considered that the problem may be with something else, but I just find it unlikely that another part of my system just happened to start having problems immediately after an AMD driver update.

[jrcbandit]

I've had more issues with Nvidia than ATI/AMD drivers (although I haven't had a Nvidia product lately).    My only real problem was the AMD Rage fiasco.  

That said, I give a second recommendation to ATIman Uninstaller - it really helped my laptop, which was screwed up because it has manual integrated drivers+AMD, and HP never released any updates for it.

Also, are you overclocking?  Try increasing the voltage - my video card suddenly requires more voltage to keep its overclock in intensive games like the Witcher 2 and Crysis 2 DX11, although that might be due to switching motherboards.

[Fizzzzle]

Nah, I'm not overclocking. I haven't run into a game that needs it, and only once has my computer crashed while I was playing a game (and I was playing Trine).

And yeah, I'll definitely try out ATIman uninstaller.

[TomCat]

I had issues in Skyrim with the 12.3 drivers  lots of artifacting  but the 12.4 drivers fixed all my issues

[Fizzzzle]

Hm. The problem wasn't with the drivers themselves - I wiped all display drivers and took the card out, and was still having problems, but it still has something to do with whatever happened when I updated drivers last weekend. My shit runs fine in safe mode. I ran into some other problems, too. Tried running windbug to figure out what was causing the blue screen, but Windows won't let me access my crash dump file, even though I'm the administrator and I disabled UAC anyway. So now I'm running a system scan to figure out why I can't do that.

This shit gets old quickly.

Ha. nevermind. I forgot to run WinDbg as administrator. Silly me. I mean, after all, why would I think to do such a thing when I am the administrator...

[RileyLewis]

I've had 3 nVidia cards and now 1 PC with AMD cards.  I've never had major issues with any of them, except for very minor issues with crossfire stuff (which is less driver related than game related).

[Fizzzzle]

I don't know what the issue is anymore. It started almost immediately after the driver update last weekend, but after consulting the interweb about my bug reports, I've seen all types of causes, from driver issues to bad memory slots to not enough power from the PSU. Looks like it's going to be a long couple days trying to crack this nut.

[TomCat]

If you go to the win7 forums and follow thier dump procedures Someone there will look at the dump file and figure out your issue for you. Very friendly guys over at that forum.  I had a similar issue and also thought it was driver related. Turned out it was a Dot.net update I needed

[projectmayhem]

I suggest you change the thread title and apologize to AMD

[Lucian04]

Project Mayhem, on 07 May 2012 - 07:38 AM, said:

I suggest you change the thread title and apologize to AMD

This reminds me of when Royal spent two weeks bitching about Witcher 2 not working for him only for him to finally realize that he had left Windows in dev mode.  Dumb ass.

[Fizzzzle]

All this shit still happened right after an AMD driver update. I'm not letting them off the hook until I have proof that it was just a coincidence.

[Fizzzzle]

Update: The BSOD shit I was having was a separate issue. That's been fixed, and I've switched to a different breaker, and I'm still having problems. And it ONLY happens after I install the Catalyst 12.4 drivers. I was using the default/disc drivers for the last week or so and didn't have any issues, then I installed the new drivers again and it all came back. My computer doesn't crash, but the video feed to my monitor just cuts out. Usually while I'm playing a game or watching youtube videos.

[TwinIon]

I'm getting BSOD issues with 12.4 as well.  I'm uninstalling them right now.  Hopefully it'll clear things up.

It's hard not to blame it on AMD when it only started happening after installing 12.4, and the BSOD says atipkg (or something close to that).

[Fizzzzle]

I was having BSOD issues before, but it looks like that's all been cleared up. My driver issues seem to be with it just cutting the video feed for some reason. I'll be watching a youtube video or something and my screen will go black and I'll get the [no signal] thing on my monitor. And my GPU fan goes nuts. I can still hear the youtube video playing, though, so apparently my system is still running fine when it happens.

[forsayken]

Maybe hardware issue? Have you found any other instances of this happening with 79xx boards or any other 7xxx boards?

I will describe something I had happen and something slightly related to it that seems to be a problem with SOME 7850 boards or their drivers. I built a system for a friend with a 7850. It turned out the 7850 was bad but I was experiencing two probems.

The first was crashes due to (I believe) bad RAM. For this reason, it was returned (and replaced with a GTX 670).

The other issue was possibly related to the board being clocked too low when in idle or non-gaming mode. It was being clocked so low via the drivers that it was crashing. This is alleged but I read a few instances of this on the Sapphire forums. Manually editing some xml files that defined idle or non-gaming clocks seemed to fix this for most users. I think the low clocks are not the problem but perhaps the low clocks are revealing an issue in some videocards. What this all means is that games ran fine. BF3, Crysis, Metro, etc all performed very well but as soon as I did anything modestly demanding in windows (like Flash or dragging a window around quickly), the screen would start to flicker and the driver would crash and reboot. In rare cases, the entire system would crash.

[Fizzzzle]

forsayken, on 31 May 2012 - 12:15 PM, said:

What this all means is that games ran fine. BF3, Crysis, Metro, etc all performed very well but as soon as I did anything modestly demanding in windows (like Flash or dragging a window around quickly), the screen would start to flicker and the driver would crash and reboot. In rare cases, the entire system would crash.

That actually sounds pretty similar to the problems I've been having. I didn't have any issues playing Dirt 3 or Just Cause 2, but Trine and youtube caused the display to cut out, and in some cases crash the whole system.

I'll take a looksy at the sapphire forums in a little bit and see if I can fix it.

[forsayken]

Fizzzzle, on 31 May 2012 - 12:19 PM, said:

That actually sounds pretty similar to the problems I've been having. I didn't have any issues playing Dirt 3 or Just Cause 2, but Trine and youtube caused the display to cut out, and in some cases crash the whole system.

I'll take a looksy at the sapphire forums in a little bit and see if I can fix it.

I'd just RMA. You shouldn't have to increase idle voltage/clocks to get a stable card when everyone else has a stable card out of the box. $450 for a piece of beautiful technology should guarantee you from not having to do things like this.

If you have access to another videocard, try it in the system and see if it's stable. Just rule out the 7950 100% before trying the RMA process.

When you go to a company and say "my videocard crashes my system", there's not a whole lot of proof there. Could be drivers, PSU, motherboard. But if you can say "My system crashes with the 7950 in it but if I remove it and use onboard (Intel HD 3000 or whatever?) or [another videocard] everything is perfect. 10 hours of furmark", you have a much better case and they likely won't even question you. In my case of the 7850, I tried 12.3 and 12.4 on three different systems with the same behaviour.

[Fizzzzle]

Either way, it seems like a pain in the ass.

[forsayken]

Fizzzzle, on 31 May 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:

Either way, it seems like a pain in the ass.

Ya. I think you're amont the 1-5% that got DOA hardware. But I still recommend the RMA route. What if the hardware is not perfect and to get it working now requires more voltage or higher idle clocks then it fails a week after it's out of warranty? Modifying clocks usually voids warranty anyways...(if they can somehow tell that happened).