There is a new gpu bios for Sapphire R9-290, http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/sapphire-releases-performance-boost-for-r9-290.194909/
Well the good news Is the driver helps a lot. The bad news is it's not completely fixed or I just randomly got unlucky. I have managed to get one black screen hard lock in the BF4 campaign just after getting BAKU gold on hard about 15 minutes ago but that's it. Other than that ARMA 3, BF4, GW2, RO2 and Wargame ALB have been stable. Now I just need to find out if that was a fluke.
The driver has helped me. I had 1 bf4 crash in the last couple days, but we know there are small issues with the game as well.
I was pushing my card hard before for just 30 minutes or so no blsc at all but i made it hardlock a few times that i could recover so it looks promising.
I just got black screen (no sound) while playing Arma 3. That's one black screen since Friday, which is "OK", let's hope this doesn't happen again any time soon.
It really seems that the problem is driver related, not all cards are made equal (i know they have the same componentes since they aare reference) so they have to find the perfect balance. And this was the first version of driver fix, it will stabilize in future releases.
So, just reinstalled Windows 7 64 Bit again and installed the new Beta 9.4-driver. So after configuring the new system, I launched BF4 Shanghai-mission (SP-campaign) @ 200% Res-Scale @ Ultra @ 4xMSAA (FHD). It crashed the same way it has used to with the other drivers, right after three minutes. And yes, I get the identical issue everyone else is getting and both the VRMs & GPU stay very cool while gaming. Since the issue got better for most of you guys I'm still hoping for the 'final' WHQL respectively future beta-releases.
Does it crash to desktop with error or it's non recoverable Black Screen and you have to do hard reset of PC? Because this thread is about later.
So I've not had a single crash since in the new beta drivers. Not tried any sort of OC yet as I wanted to make sure the problem was fixed
That's good to hear. I'm still seeing sporadic black screen issues across a few forums I frequent. But for the most part, it seems AMD is on the right track to kicking this thing in the butt for good.
Here is what I've figured out so far since the new driver. I only get black screen hardlocks when I overclock my memory. Elpida memory is horrible to overclock and isn't stable above stock clocks for my card anyways. I bought a premium brand Asus to get shafted with Elpida, oh well thats life, lesson learned. I've overclocked gpu to 1165mhz and 1.355vcore. Ran 3dmark firestrike in a loop for 30+ minutes no crashes. Ran Unigine valley test for an hour no crashes. Playing BF4 I still get crashes where sound loops, I can hit con+alt+del and kill the BF4 process and everything is normal. Seems launching a new card with a new game where BOTH had their own issues that make them crash is not the best idea and confuses people as to what is the issue hahaha.
I am good for Battlefield 4 at 1125/1350 on stock volts. But this is on water, on Air I couldn't do more than 1100 or it would artifact, looks like lower temperatures helped me a lot. As for memory, previous card could do 1400MHz, this one can do 1350MHz on Battlefield 4, but it black screened on Arma 3, not sure if it was a coincidence or unstable, I'll keep it at 1350MHz and see. Not like Memory helps anyways, with a 512 BUS you won't get any benefits of OC'ing the Memory.
What are you guys using to oc? the built in CCC thingy doesn't seem to do anything no matter what I set it to.
I use MSI AB, but make sure you have Overdrive disabled else it will conflict and when you add Voltage it will not stay at constant speeds, instead it will downclock all the time.
Strange, I just got the black screen hard lock without a usable crashdump. From an idle system. It had been idle for the past 11hr and just decided to crash.... BTW no OC on this system and completely stable before the R9 290x it used to have a GTX 480 OCd to all hell. I usually had greater than 30 days uptime.
how is your guys performance with batman arkham origins? with vsync its game breaking for me on single or crossfire when gliding about outside i get judders isit just me or do r9 290x users get this to?