Games freezing on W8.1 and newer drivers

Discussion in 'Videocards - AMD Radeon Drivers Section' started by Bloodred217, Apr 29, 2016.

  1. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    I've been having severe stability issues on W8.1 with any driver newer than 16.2.1. First I'd like to say that I dual boot W10 and W8.1 and on W10 there are no issues with any driver version, so I'm pretty much certain this is not a hardware issue.

    This happens basically:
    1. Game image on main monitor freezes, but sound is still playing normally and the other 2 monitors aren't frozen
    2. I open Task Manager on one of my other monitors and attempt to kill the game process
    3. At this point, the other 2 monitors freeze as well, but my PC doesn't crash (programs running in the background still work, for instance I can still talk on TeamSpeak normally)
    4. There's no way to recover other than resetting the system

    This happens on all driver versions above 16.2.1. So far I've seen this in Battlezone 98 Redux, Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen, Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II. There's not much in common on that list, different game engines, both DX9 and DX11, some 32b and some 64b, some even with CF disabled (Battlezone).

    I've tried the usual things like reinstalling the drivers and doing clean installs with DDU, using stock settings on everything, disabling MSI AB and other in-game overlays, etc., but nothing changes. Reverting to 16.2.1 fixes the freezing.

    Has anyone else run into this sort of problem? Any idea what might be causing it or how to get the newer drivers working properly on W8.1?
     
  2. primetime^

    primetime^ Master Guru

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    is your pc bullet proof stable with heavy duty stress tests like occt, prime95, IBT, or asus realbench? Your oc is on the top end of clock speeds i see people usually using....people often forget there overclock or bios settings might need some tweaking.
     
  3. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    Yeah, it is as far as I can tell, I've been running IBT and prime95 and haven't had any crashes or errors. W10 is stable on exactly the same settings and W8.1 is stable with 16.2.1 (or older) so I really doubt this is a hardware instability. The only thing that changes is the driver version.

    Everything else keeps running too, I can use everything on my other monitors as normal, just the game image freezes. I can even hear the game responding in the background, i.e. if I shoot or move around I can hear the sounds from the game itself, so not even the game really crashes, but the image isn't updating anymore. It looks like there's something else failing, lower in the abstraction layer I assume.

    I wonder if it's something related to running in full screen (and maybe FreeSync, it's been iffy on newer drivers too), I've played some BZ98R in windowed mode and it didn't freeze for hours, it happens in <5min in full screen.
     
  4. primetime^

    primetime^ Master Guru

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    have you explored dropping the clocks a tad to see if it has any effects? Does it only happen in CF? Single gpu usage is fine?
     

  5. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Sounds like the GPU isn't stable, core/vram

    IBT and P95 only stress the CPU
     
  6. primetime^

    primetime^ Master Guru

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    he knows that...i was just ruling out the other possibility's:) God only knows how many cards are blamed when its something else..better safe than sorry
     
  7. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Yea, just with the machine still running behind the frozen display, if it was CPU, the machine would crash too
     
  8. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    That's the first thing I tried, doesn't do anything. Furthermore when some games freeze the GPUs are often at 500-700 MHz, like Dragon's Dogma freezes while loading at a black screen 90% of the time, it doesn't even get in-game for actual 3D rendering.

    Single-GPU fullscreen is not fine, but single-GPU windowed seems to be. I think it may be FreeSync failing (it doesn't work in windowed mode). For instance if I reset my PC, the last image remains stuck on my screen, it doesn't go to black like a normal monitor. This seems to be exactly what's happening.

    I know about IBT and P95, I've been using them for a long time. :) I don't think the GPUs aren't stable, because:
    1. They are rock solid on W10, played the same games for 8-10h yesterday, not one freeze, all in fullscreen and no issues at all.
    2. The other 2 monitors do not freeze and they're driven by the same GPU. They only freeze if I try to kill the game, but at first they work fine and I can "alt-tab" and use any program I want. I can even see the GPU load going down, clocks drop to idle/desktop speeds, fans slow down, temps drop, etc. Everything seems to work fine except the obviously frozen game.
    3. W8.1 works fine on 16.2.1 or older, exactly the same hardware settings for everything else

    Yeah, exactly my thinking. I considered some sort of weird RAM issue, but it's too easily reproducible and happens too consistently to be random hardware failure, plus it would be essentially impossible for W10 to work flawlessly if my RAM was bad.
     
    Last edited: May 1, 2016
  9. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Different GPU drivers between 8.1 and 10, could easily be an unstable GPU

    Is it OC'd? Run it at stock if it is to test, try different drivers

    Disable CF

    Motherboard BIOS up to date?

    Checked event logs?
     
  10. primetime^

    primetime^ Master Guru

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    When exactly is the issue happening? This part doesn't seem very clear.
     

  11. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    GPUs are OC'd, but I already tried stock settings as well as lower clocks (950MHz), nothing changes.

    I tried disabling CF, doesn't help. Playing windowed does though.

    Yeah, BIOS is up to date.

    Haven't checked event logs, I'll have a look at those. I haven't used the Event Viewer much, is there any specific section I should be looking at for GPU-related information?

    LE: Not sure where I should be looking, but I checked the most conspicuous places, Hardware Events and System. There was nothing in Hardware Events at all and all I could find in System were errors about not shutting down cleanly (to be expected since I have to reset the system), absolutely nothing about anything related to AMD or graphics drivers.

    I did find some messages about driver crashes from last year, but I'm sure those aren't related since that's before this issue appeared.

    When I'm playing fullscreen games on W8.1 on any driver version newer than 16.2.1.

    Exactly when depends on the game. Battlezone or Vermintide I might get to play for ~5m, in Dragon's Dogma it almost always freezes when the game starts up, sometimes even before displaying the menu.

    The complete freeze happens immediately as I kill the game process.
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2016
  12. DeltaBrainwave

    DeltaBrainwave Guest

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    Glad to see it's not just me, I thought it was something specific to my setup but I have exactly the same symptoms. I had also just worked out the trick of running windowed instead of fullscreen.

    Thank you for narrowing down the driver versions, I will narrow down that it's not crossfire or freesync since I don't have the necessary hardware. I don't see anything suspicious in the event log.
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2016
  13. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    In a way it is good to know that I'm not the only one running into this problem. I thought it might be specifically related to my probably uncommon setup too (CF, FreeSync, 3 monitors, 4K), but it's probably something else.

    Sadly for me running things windowed is hardly a solution, that disables both CF and FreeSync and 1 290X at 4K isn't really an option. I'm stuck on W10 for the time being.
     
  14. primetime^

    primetime^ Master Guru

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    Well you guys should definitely report it to amd on their report form. seems to be an issue they need to fix in the next driver
     
  15. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Windows Logs > System are where my driver crashes are listed

    If you check around the time of the freezes, or a few mins before, if there are no logs for driver crashes, you can probably rule out the drivers

    "Display driver stopped responding" are common events when that happens

    [​IMG]

    So windowed mode stops the freezing... haven't had enough coffee to click my brain into gear, I think that would stop CF from working though, iirc it has to be full screen for CF to work?
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2016

  16. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    Yeah I'll do that. I kind of already have, I reported that Dragon's Dogma was freezing, since that was the only game I had tried at the time. I'll report it again, knowing that everything freezes should be higher on their priorities.

    @Extraordinary
    Yeah that's what I've looked for, there's nothing like that around the freezes.

    You're right that windowed mode disables CF. Thing is it freezes in fullscreen even if CF is disabled, so it's not because of CF. There's also DeltaBrainwave who doesn't even have CF in the first place.

    I thought it was CF at first too, but apparently not.
     
  17. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Have you tried physically removing one of the cards and testing each on their own?

    If it was the other way around, and the problem was with 10 only, I'd be more inclined to think it was a Windows issue, but 8.1 is fairly well established and bug free in that department now

    Older drivers than 16.2.1 are working fine?

    Check the changelog of drivers
    16.2.1 and upwards and see what they changed for 8.1, but as there are no driver errors in event log, that seems strange that it would be a driver fault, unless Windows isn't recognising the freeze
     
  18. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    Haven't tried testing the cards on their own, but it seems like wasted effort considering DeltaBrainwave has the same problem with 1 card only.

    I haven't specifically tested older drivers than 16.2.1, but I have never encountered the issue before, so I'm inclined to say they would work fine.

    I'm not so sure on "well established" really. There is absolutely nothing about this in any changelog, but after 16.2.1 they most definitely changed something in regards to FRTC and/or FreeSync. FRTC on W10 after 16.2.1 is much smoother (visibly) and FreeSync is no longer compatible with 3rd party FPS limiting software (setting a FPS limit in RTSS causes severe tearing). There's absolutely something different in newer drivers on my system, but nothing is mentioned in the changelogs. So it's either a bug or they simply did not mention it. I doubt a bug would make FRTC work better though.

    There's also something different with the way forced CF is handled. Vermintide for instance had mediocre performance since launch, but on newer drivers with forced AFR compatible CF it runs much, MUCH better, so I'm quite sure they changed something to improve it but for some odd reason never mentioned it. It used to drop under 40 FPS frequently and suffer from severe flickering on distant objects, now it's pretty much flawless and almost always holds 60FPS, with a few drops in the ~50 range. I even increased the settings and it still runs better than before. This is great of course, my point is that they're most definitely changing things that don't make it to the public changelog.

    I can't see how Windows should recognize the freeze, actually. 2 out of 3 monitors are working fine, so clearly the driver (and GPU) can't be crashed dead, right? For all I know the game could be rendering just fine as well, maybe something breaks regarding monitor refreshing.
     
  19. Extraordinary

    Extraordinary Guest

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    Didn't you say that the other screens are fine until you click on them, and then they freeze too?

    Is there a specific reason why you're hanging onto the 8.1 install? (I don't blame you, I only moved to purely 10 only a couple weeks ago), I was dualbooting too, but 10 seems to have ironed out all the things that was stopping me moving to it originally, so I moved across permanently

    Well, Windows is designed to log hardware/Software errors, so long as it gets the chance before crashing, which it sounds like it does, it's just a case of if Windows even sees the freeze as an error or not, like you say, if it's not a driver bug it won't log driver stopped responding errors, but it has to be either software or hardware, no two ways about it

    I'd try an older driver and if it still does it, just to eliminate things, test each card on their own

    There's also a slim chance it's the 8.1 install itself, maybe try a fresh install
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2016
  20. Bloodred217

    Bloodred217 Master Guru

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    The other screens are fine until I attempt to kill the game process (via Task Manager on these other screens). At that point all monitors freeze, but things still run in the background. If I don't kill the game they seem to work indefinitely, though I haven't actually waited more than a few minutes.

    I have some practical issues with W10 and I also don't like some of its EULA, which is why I don't particularly want to use it as my main OS. On the practical side:
    1. It does something weird to my NIC on shutdown that makes it stop working in any other OS unless I power cycle the machine
    2. The start menu search broke randomly, it cannot launch control panel applets anymore. Hitting Enter or clicking them simply does nothing
    3. It does something to my disks, after I boot into W10, W8.1 always wants to scan them.
    4. Some games actually run much worse, like Dragon's Dogma. I get 45FPS on W10 in some areas where W8.1 gets 60

    Some of those could probably be solved, with a clean install maybe, but I've just been using it for testing so I haven't bothered (yet). The NIC issue is particularly annoying, because I use W8.1 and Linux too. Instead of just rebooting into a different OS I have to shut down, turn the power off, wait for a while and then turn it on again.

    I guess I'll try some of the more laborious things to see if anything helps (removing cards, reinstalling Windows, trying even older drivers). If I find a solution I'll post it here, but by the looks of things I'm going to end up settling on an older driver and using W10 for newer drivers for CF profiles and such. New cards should be out in a few months, maybe it'll magically go away when I upgrade.

    As for error logging, I guess Windows would first have to know that something is wrong to log an error. I've never worked on a GPU driver, but I don't see why it would be technically impossible for it to fail in such a way that the OS can't tell it has failed. This really seems to be happening, as it's obviously not working but Windows is completely oblivious. This actually gave me an idea, I believe there was an utility that you could use to force a driver reset. I'll look that up and force the reset while a game is frozen and see what happens.
     

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