AMD Catalyst 15.8

Just had a full red screen hard lock crash.. never had one of those before, the only thing changed are these drivers.

Windows 8.1 on AMD R9 270.

 

Red screen mostly means unstable CPU, not GPU. It happened to me before...

You touched anything else before driver update?

 

No.. this is pretty much the most stable system I have ever built, I have never had a red screen crash, the only thing changed is this driver which I installed yesterday.

It's strange that's for sure, I will leave it and see what happens for the next few days.

 

for me its always been the opposite..red screen = gpu crash....is your card overclocked? maybe the voltage is a bit low?

 

Workaround for stutter and low fps for some DX8-9 games on Win 10 and 8

I also have very low FPS on my old laptop with GTA 3, VC and San Andreas (GeForce 7600Go).
On my 290X they are running with 60 FPS but with random frame drops.

!!!The problem is the forced 3D accelerated theme!!!

Win 7 used to switch to the basic theme when one of those games was launched to fix this. However since Win 8 this isn't possible anymore unless you use some nasty and mostly impracticable trick:

Use the Sysinternals "Process Explorer" to suspend winlogon.exe (rightklick/suspend). After that you can kill DWM.exe.
This forces Windows to switch to an unfinished basic theme (important parts of the interface will be missing). You can then use Process Explorer to start a game (File/Run...).

This way those old games usually run well.

Sadly I doubt that will ever be fixed since the problem exists since Win 8.

 

The dx8 to dx9 converter improved the performance in GTA VC. I had to copy d3dx9_26.dll too to the game folder (taken from directx_Jun2010_redist\directx_Jun2010_redist\Jun2005_d3dx9_26_x86.cab\). FPS drops to 35 instead of 20-25 like it did before. However overall the performance is still lower than standard on Windows 7. Win7 + dx8 to dx9 converter would push it even further.

Yes, you are right. I used Windows 7 and classic theme. It saves some memory and was just faster. I had two services disabled to keep the classic theme and prevent changing it. To be honest I don't remember which exactly but I'll try to find out.

Thank you both. Nice to see some replies about problems for low end and old cards.

edit@: Ok I've found it. On Windows 7 I used to disable 'Themes' and 'Desktop Window Manager Session Manager' (UxSms) services to keep classic theme.

 

Yeah getting a few freezes and stutters with this driver after a period of play, my card doesn't go over 47 deg and using mantle. Other games seem fine tho.

 

using 15.8 drivers on Windows 10, getting horrendous stuttering and massive GPU usage drops during Mad Max. Game flies along at 120fps most of the time, but every few minutes the games fps drops to 30fps, card clocks drop to 300MHz which results in massive frame drop and frametime. All other games are fine, Mad Max has this strange issue with Crossfire. Single card working fine.

 

With 15.7.1 (1004/1005) I was redscreening like crazy in bf4 under mantle. Was starting to worry about hardware.
Switched to latest 15.8 and bf4 is now perfect, no freezes, lockups or red screens. Can go for hours.

 

I have noticed a few moments of black screens with FreeSync enabled while playing DX11 games under Win 8.1 on a certain BenQ 144Hz display. Guess that was to be expected, giving the known issues.

 

Just finished that game using 3 290x's, and I didn't have that issue at all. Was really happy with dying light performance and visuals. Not one single issue.

 

Same here, switched to single card.

please put in a report, so maybe we can get it fixed.

 

this is my MSI AB log of the Mad Max experience im getting when crossfiring on this game. Scaling is fantastic, the game runs really good, but this stutter out the blue is a game breaker. Check it out, my cards have a spas attack when it happens, usuage, clocks and fps takes a nose dive for a second or two then recovers.

 

It says it's for ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series Graphics.
Is it also for ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series ?

 

no matter

 

Done

 

Win 7:
* Classic theme
* disabled 'Themes' service
* disabled 'Desktop Window Manager Session Manager' (UxSms) service
* unchecked 'Use visual styles on windows and buttons' in "System properties -> Advanced -> Performance options -> Visual options"
results in very low video memory usage. DWM was not running

Win 10 vs Win 7 video memory usage





Now try to go as low in Win10. Using high contrast or classic black doesn't help.
My APU has only 384 MB video memory...

 

Isn't the memory on the APU just using the system memory? I thought you can select the video memory amount in the bios.

 

Yes, it does. Yes, you can... if manufacturer cared and gave you such option. Seems to be unavailable for crappy, low-end netbook like asus 1215b. Bios mods are too serious for me

edit: Offtopic a bit but... I modded the bios today. By default 'Integrated Graphics' option was 'Auto' and 'UMA Frame buffer Size' value was ignored (384MB by default for my APU). Now with 'Integrated Graphics' option set up to 'Forced' I can choose one of the following 'UMA Frame buffer Size' values: 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB or 2GB

 

New XFX 290X owner running Windows 10 Build 10532 and using the Cata 15.8 drivers. I'm having an issue with DirectX titles, I presume DX 10 and 11, crashing after I exit most games. I get a Video Memory Management Internal BSOD, from which it restarts and I'm back. Titles like QuakeLive do not have this issue since it's OpenGL. For me this occurs after Rocket League and just now after Dirty Bomb.

I realize I'm running a preview version of Windows 10 on a beta version of Catalyst, but just wanted to let the group here know this is an issue and if anyone has any information on this to reply here.

Thanks,

Knomik