Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.10.2

It's a excellent card and can also undervolt well though the GPU silicone or how to call it varies a lot so maximum overclock and undervolt results can be very variable and the VRAM can be especially volatile plus from reading up on it the voltage for the memory is for the base clock and it can increase further when pushed higher in addition to instabilities on certain speeds around or above 900 Mhz but then pushed higher via software it can stabilize again.

A week of testing with 19.10.2 without gaming or hardware accelerated media playback hasn't shown a single black screen or the cursor corruption that often comes before the driver entirely destabilizes and since it's entirely stable on 19.7.5 it's looking purely like a driver and software problem and one I hope can then be fixed entirely soon in a upcoming driver release.
(Is it power related, something when it clocks down or merely another software bug that changed so still too many variables but this narrows it down a bit more.)

Certainly a recommended GPU considering it exceeds even the Radeon VII in many titles despite being the initial "mid-range" variant of AMD RDNA and Navi card though stock settings and some of the custom designs kinda are a mixed bag.
Goes for the Nitro and Pulse too with the Pulse dual fan design and aggressive fan profile plus differences in oscillation or how it's termed meaning different RPM values for each fan and slightly different dimensions same with Nitro but not as severe with the resulting "noise" often being considered bothersome even if the fan itself is reasonably quiet up until 50% or thereabouts plus the fans ramp up quickly past 60 degrees C and also shoot up and then throttle down instead of curving so expect sudden noise increases compared to other models even if the cooling solution is pretty solid. VRAM thermals and junction temps are a bit higher on the Pulse, junction core can hit near 85 - 90c though the edge temperature will be around 70c just the way the sensor and readings work it reports the hot-spot or hottest part and that's also what the thermal throttling and such and fan profiles work against.

Power draw can go up to 200w for the GPU core plus some extra but I'd carefully compare if pushing the power slider in Wattman higher for just how much power it starts drawing and where the boost speeds end with my own testing often landing at 50Mhz lower than the target boost temp from 10% up to 50% additional power supplied so you just increase power draw for no further benefit unless you target a higher clock speed and core voltage where this then comes into play.

Once into negatives though even a small decrease quickly drops clock speeds down although it can also reduce power draw by a nice amount sitting at 1600 to 1700Mhz instead of 1900 to 2000Mhz but with a higher performance penalty.
(Whereas a slight decrease in clock speed boost target and a nice decrease in voltage depending on what is stable might only be a 2 - 3% performance difference for a 100mv core voltage drop and resulting 20 degrees core junction temperature drop or more.)


Still more to try, unless the undervolt is unstable which I've been pushing a bit high also then gaming is completely stable for my own results, corruption and black screen only happens on idle and can still take some hours to manifest often with blinking or flickering first or a mouse cursor looking a bit like a display artifact moving around and then which can still take hours the display driver will crash but often recover but it won't be stable.
(Mouse cursor corruption goes away here but it will continue to crash around once a day at random until rebooted.)

Aside from Wattman settings that takes some testing to dial in 19.7.5 was entirely stable other than the known driver issues and later discovered bugs and for the rest well something changed but I can't quite narrow it down but I can definitively recommend the hardware though if anything does happen make sure it's covered by warranty and return periods and don't take a chance on waiting for a driver for a product you bought to use immediately and either go for a Polaris 580 in the meantime (590 clocks a bit higher but AMD's pushing it beyond normal sane settings for power draw and such to achieve this.) or a higher end NVIDIA GPU whether it's a 2060, 2070 or 2080 variant depending on price and newer models like the S versions.


EDIT: Think the GPU compares up to a NVIDIA 2070 performance wise sometimes a bit faster sometimes a bit weaker though not the newer variants although overclocking can get it a bit higher but then that goes for NVIDIA's products as well to cover that too.

RDNA and Navi is looking like a exciting turn for AMD being able to push ahead a bit more in the gaming segment instead of what GCN ran into for various architecture limits and hardware constraints even though they could be fast though scaling wasn't optimal.

The driver situation needs some attention still though and if there's uncertainty or if there are any problems on picking up the card I wouldn't try waiting for driver fixes but go for something else and then see what AMD and NVIDIA unveils in 2020 thus the recommendation for a less costly though still good Polaris from AMD or a non-2080 for NVIDIA Turing possibly a 1000 series even depending on what the price ends up being.


EDIT: Well I suppose it's stating the obvious here but 400 - 500 US Dollars or thereabouts for a 5700 XT with regional differences and then custom models which could be used for something else as it's still a fair bit of money even if it's not the 600+ US Dollar range for the high-end enthusiast GPU segment or well I think it's pretty clear so something else that costs a bit less but still gives good performance and a bit more VRAM than the 4 GB in the 970 or just keep the current card and wait on what AMD or NVIDIA announces but it could be months even something like the later half of 2020 before anything is actually out on the market.
(Going a bit circular here but it'll either work and then it's a excellent card but if anything does show up like the reported issues then yeah there's alternatives.)

 

Does anyone else have that bug?

 

Holy cow, Jonas, awesome analysis, much appreciated!

I'm a bit creeped up by the fact that I finally hit a seemingly stable RAM overclock on my Ryzen 3900X: 2x16 GB Micron Rev-E at 3800 MHz CL16 - that's actually a brilliant result given the circumstances. Ran 1500% worth of error-free HCI memtest again overnight.
Yesterday I even got an instant reboot under Linux 5.3, but I'm fairly certain it was related to amdgpu there, as I was messing with the HDMI audio and pulseeffects.

Thing is, I'm convinced I don't want to buy something other than Vega now. The performance is exactly what I need for 240 Hz gaming and the amdgpu support under Linux is spot-on for Vega, at least feature-wise.

My setup is rather finnicky, as I have an HDMI display, my main DP display and an HDMI audio-video receiver daisy chained with an HDMI TV: this setup stresses the hell out of the video stack, especially when I turn off and on the TV or AV receiver. I used to have a 30% BSOD upon just runing the AV receiver on on my old Radeon 290 until circa driver 18.6. To add onto that, I generally play Overwatch with true full screen, disabled full screen optimizations and anti-lag too, because ofc I do!

 

I finally upgraded to a RX 480 Red Devil 8gb, what a beast, im really happy T.T Ris is supposed to be under display settings?

 

For those of you with Navi cards who play Destiny 2, run away from these drivers. Terrible performance, including major stuttering, which I could only manage to fix by rolling back to a previous driver, in my case 19.10.1.

Let's see if they can pull off a better driver next time, because I'm getting quite tired of how long it takes them to get a new product to work as expected.

 

No, avoid the 5700 XT until the drivers get sorted. If you can handle you system restarting itself mid-game and the screen going black, or your monitor telling you there is no input while the game's sounds play in the background then go for it. If that frustrates you, cough up the extra and get a 2070 Super. I sure wish I got myself one of those 2070 Supers, I can tell ya.

By the way my 5700 XT is a Red Devil and apparently one of the best you can get. Shame about the drivers.

 

Yeah that's the weird thing with this black-screen problem and some other crash issues it's something during load and higher activity and something else during idle and then either a full crash or just the display going off but the GPU recovering plus it's happening to most models and across a multitude of systems and the card when running stock or undervolted should draw less than Vega too so while some probably hit issues with PSU's and cabling it's not the only problem that needs to be resolved. (Moving to a earlier driver and having everything work just fine also puts it at more of a software/driver issue than the hardware.)

That's in addition to a few D3D11 titles and most D3D9 titles hitting problems with the boost algorithm where it keeps a much lower clock speed instead of near the max set speeds due to what appears to be the GPU aggressively downclocking on anything that isn't putting it at a higher workload even if the in-game results or including applications or benchmarks show noticeable performance drops or frequent stuttering from this behavior.

Driver issues with blue screen problems and stability in a few games is also another issue but it's quite random so probably not the easiest to troubleshoot and fix but four months in these issues really need to be resolved if it's purely software.
Branching code and the existing splits between release drivers, internal and the Vanguard program already do this but something like a frequent hotfix driver until this gets sorted wouldn't be a bad thing instead of waiting two weeks or so and hoping the next driver resolved the issue(s) particularly these longer standing open issues and unlisted but tested and verified problems but then there's also issues and potential regression on other GPU models that would need to be dealt with.

Linux side of the drivers are hitting some problems as well so it's not only the Windows drivers so yeah it's a nice GPU but the driver situation is what it is and that makes it harder to recommend.
Can't be good long term for AMD to have users question the driver stability and overall quality or just return or skip Navi for a equal performant NVIDIA card though I can't say anything on how the internal situation is with AMD but I do hope the problem can be resolved with the 19.11 drivers and that the upcoming Navi GPU's will have a smoother launch from then on compared to the current situation.

EDIT: Well question and question it's pretty clear there's outstanding issues with the driver both on Navi, Vega and Polaris so there's work to be done still though I do hope these remaining problems can be fixed up sooner rather than later, half a year is a bit of a long time to wait for stabilized drivers after all and it's nearing five months now already.

 

Red Dead Redemption tomorrow, we should have a driver.

NFS Heat in 4 days.

 

Anyone noticed the new driver --- 19.11.1 popped up during the online check for new drivers?
I tried to install the 19.10.2 on a new rig that I am setting up for a friend and the Installer found an update --- the 19.11.1 !
Checked the infs --- released on 4.11.2019, so a "real" 19.11.1 !

EDIT:
RELEASE NOTES:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-19-11-1

Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.11.1 Highlights
Support For

• Red Dead: Redemption II®

Added Vulkan® Support

• VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore
  • This extension introduces a new semaphore type that uses an integer payload to identify a point in a timeline. The extension supports querying the semaphore, host wait/signal operations, and device wait/signal operations.
• VK_KHR_shader_clock
  • This extension allows a shader to query a real-time or monotonically incrementing counter at the subgroup level or across the device level.
• VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types
  • This extension enables the nonuniform group operations in SPIR-V to support 8-bit integer, 16-bit integer, 64-bit integer, 16-bit floating-point, and vectors of these types.
• VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties
  • This extension allows debugging and performance tools and applications in general to query properties and statistics about the pipeline compilation process.
• VK_KHR_spirv_1_4
  • This extension allows the use of SPIR-V 1.4 shader modules, which in turn allows easier translation from high level languages into spirv.
• VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control
  • This extension enables an implementation to control the subgroup size by allowing a varying subgroup size and also specifying a required subgroup size. The optional feature to allow full compute subgroups is enabled.
• Clustered Subgroup Operations
  • This feature bit allows invocations to perform cluster operations such as add, mul, min, max, and, or, xor among partitions of a subgroup. The operations are only performed within the subgroup invocations within a partition.

Fixed Issues

• Some users may be unable to connect their Twitch™ account through the Connect page in Radeon Settings for live streaming.
• The Outer Worlds™ may sometimes experience an application crash when opening the characters inventory screen.
• The Outer Worlds™ may experience character models being rendered incorrectly on the inventory screen.
• Frame Rate may cap or remain limited to 60 fps in some Vulkan® API games.
• OBS streaming may experience heavy frame drops when using AMF encoding..

Known Issues

• Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products may experience stutter in some games at 1080p and low game settings.
• Performance Metrics Overlay may cause stutter or screen flashing on some applications.
• Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products may experience display loss when resuming from sleep or hibernate when multiple displays are connected.
• Toggling HDR may cause system instability during gaming when Radeon ReLive is enabled.
• Stutter may be experienced when Radeon FreeSync is enabled on 240hz refresh displays with Radeon RX 5700 series graphics products.
• AMD Radeon VII may experience elevated memory clocks at idle or on desktop.
• Performance Metrics Overlay may report incorrect VRAM utilization.
• Invoking Radeon Overlay may cause games to lose focus or become minimized when HDR is enabled within Windows®.

 

Yes, this is the worst time to think about a new graphics card. Next year will be the time for next generation graphics. And likely a good time to spend a little bit more then i am used to. Still running my first card.
But i dont think AMDs cards are not for enthusiasts. They are very much. For hardware enthusiasts in terms of tinkering, try and error, and digging with notepad in the registry.
With a graphics card you cannot seperate the hardware from the software and the drivers. The hardware is absolutely nothing without a software that switches it on. This is what makes the diffence in pricing between Nvidia and AMD. Nvidia is just having much more focus on it. And only in that they are smarter.
Todays grafics hardware already has enough horsepower. It lacks of software. Also on Nvidias side.
And todays semi-enthusiasts customer cards can already have very good raytracing-like implementation just by programming it into it and leaving the rest to the drivers. It not needs additional cores or better architecture. Meanwhile the bottleneck is the software.

 

I think I found the culprit today and it shames me a bit I made AMD responsible. I had a hidden GPU miner installed, apparently.

I was cleaning my Windows partition by using WinDirStat to help me find clutter and noticed a folder in AppData related to Edge cookies with about 500Mb of occupied space but seemingly empty in explorer, but WinDirStat showed some dlls and an exe. So I deleted those, ran registry cleaner and Malwarebytes etc. updated to 19.11.1 and the issue is gone. I forgot to make a picture of the folder.

My power supply is a bit on the lower end, a 580W be quiet! Straight Power E9 CM 80+Gold. But that one worked well with alot of OCing through the last year. It may be a bit old and on the lower end. But I really don't think its the issue. As I said, it only happened on idling.

So now, that the miner seems to be gone, I'll do a bit more testing and possibly will reinstall Windows, just to be sure.

 

Format.

Start Over..