HD 7xxx drivers for flicker/BSOD fix

Okay time to dig this old thread back up again.

Just to report I have encountered artifacting in Skyrim with the 13.3 beta 2 drivers.
These artifacts are very rare and appear like a cluster of different coloured polygons in the middle of the screen for one frame.

This occurrence may happen in one session of game play and not in another regardless of how many hours have been put in to the session.

On the upside, Skyrim has ceased to CTD randomly (so far) unlike the 13.1 WHQL and the 13.2 betas.

Played planetside 2 and have not noticed anything out of the ordinary which would be ordinary pre 12.11 beta 11 drivers.

Chivalry - Medieval Warfare appears to have artifacting issues at the start of the game in the training grounds.

Borderlands 2 no artifacting observed.

 

Tried Catalyst 13.3.

Quick tests:

Skyrim:
- Smoother again a bit
- DX9 flickering white or black not observed.
- Skin flickering present (i really have to try better version of skyrim )

Civ 4:
Black flickering not observed

Witcher 2 EE:
- Much much smoother without ubersampling. 60fps almost all time
- With ubersampling about same.
- Minor white flicker. Very rare and very random.

Starcraft II
Flickering on the "newkirk" replay present,

Performance:
Frame latency OK, it seems that "input lag" reduced.

No crash or reboot.

 

there was an patch for witcher2 last week, that awful shadow dithering without ubersampling has been fixed. Thats probably why it seems smoother.

ts barely noticeable now, even in Flotsam.

 

*As it turns out, I've written a huge essay and feel I'd really like to apologise at the outset for my bad English; especially to those heroes who are going to read it*


Guys, you know, I'll simply remind you that I'm extremely familiar with this specific issue. I have also confirmed that the flashing -seemingly at least- has disappeared on the games I've been trying. However, I was never 100% convinced that AMD devs have provided a solid fix... Ι suspect they have managed to suppress the flashing/flickering somehow. Currently I'm playing an other game ( War Thunder ), and I'm pretty sure the flashing does appear -just EXTREMELY RARELY. It's the same god damn problem I'm so familiar with.

What does it mean in my humble opinion? We do have defective hardware. The 7000 series is indeed problematic. I seriously have no other explanation afterall.

Also, with a bit further searching, I believe this forum post ( http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/159666 ) that have never been answered, is the root of our defective hardware.

I'm really disappointed. Who cares what am I, though. It's just that in my over 15-years of gaming & personal computers building "career", first time I went with AMD. I was always loyal to Intel/Nvidia duo and the only 'serious' problem I can remember, is since 275.33 until 290.26 drivers that were causing TDR when browsers were being used.

In a nutshell, I still believe this normally could be a reason for a major recall, if someone can prove its validity. But no website has made a serious research on this matter... None has asked specific question in order to get specific answers. For the first year we did have this problem, but AMD didn't even acknowledge the defect. Only when the complains became louder took some sort of action, and as it seems the situation is still somewhat unclear.

I still haven't delete the videos I uploaded ( http://www.youtube.com/user/PCEliT1ST/videos?view=0 ). I keep them as a showcase. The thing is, if I'm going to record currently War Thunder, I need extreme luck, because as I said, it happens so rarely that I might need a lot of disc space, and then... the uploading... brrr!

Anyone who plays War Thunder and is extremely familiar with the flashing? Anyone who knows what is he looking for and is able to spot it in that case? I'd really appreciate it, because I'm tired of this problem and not going to spend my time anymore on this case.

Thank you in advance!

 

how do you know its not just engine specific texture or poly errors?

Almost every engine suffers from this.

Our cards are designed for speed, not accuracy. This is what the fire pro is for. There are going to be math errors.

 

Firepro? Hundreds of DX9 games are using this 'instancing' technique. War Thunder specifically provides an option:



I'm not expert, but with a good research anyone can learn one thing or two... I'd really appreciate a thorough examination from a trusted website, but such a research has never seen the light...

Incidentally, I believe the logic in your phrase might have a flaw; like the hardware we've gotten:

The latter is what matters and should be flawless in every aspect.

 

I can confirm very rare white flicker in Witcher 2 EE. Since the cabling to my harddrive is not as good as it should be it can be only secondary symptom which has been seen previously, so take this observation carefully.

I am sure that latest catalyst 13.3 beta 2/3 reduced input lag in more than one game, and that is very important for game smoothness and "Feeling". Its only subjective observation, but some people confirmed it to me.

the flickering what is commonly described as "DX9 flickering" is surely not only single issue. It had 3 types which have been already fixed (and if not fixed at least greatly supressed.)

1. Black flicker
2. White flicker
3. Transparent flicker.

All those three were observed in both Skyrim and Witcher 2. In skyrim it was possible to find flickerspot for black and white flicker. Transparent flicker was much more rare in skyrim, but it was more visible in some 12.11 betas.

I am sure that there is also 4rth variation that is less visible and was not fixed yet. Its transparent flicker, when objects are fading out (slowly becoming invisible), you can see black or completely transparent blocks.

Since black, white and trasparent flickering disappeared even from flickerspots where they were easy to be repeated and they were not observed for hours from my point of view.

 

I kind of failed to understand what has Geometry Instancing and FirePro in common. Because Main difference between FPro and Rad is ECC memory.

Problem got solved in all games I play and I have over 160games just on steam. But yes, there are some rare ones still present.
(Skyrim, I really do not think bethesda will look into it or any other bug they have in engine for generations. I play it time to time because it's great game w/ lot of content. If I made decision based on engine quality I would never touch it.)

Fact is, it's solved without drop in performance. And if AMD called for recall, hh, no way I am sending my card back, ever.

 

Have continued to play Skyrim since my last report in this post and have not encountered the colored polygon issue since.

I also assumed a render/loading stutter was caused by the AMD drivers which appear to be a result of my HDDs some how reverting to generic MS IDE controller drivers rather than using Intel AHCI drivers.

 

Been playing Guild Wars 2 and Farming Simulator 2013 (yah I know...)

I have observed a white flicker very very rarely, maybe once every hour or two.
It seems to be more likely when I move through some object, such as moving the camera through thick tree foliage.

 

This was kind of what i was hinting at.

The Firepro is designed to be super-accurate. No errors, etc. Super perfect rendering. However its SLOOWWWWW because of this.

The Radeon is designed to run as fast as possible, damn the floating point and memory errors.

Anyone who expects Firepro accuracy out of a Radeon is delusional.

 

I can't confirm any DX9 flickering again. Of course sometimes there are graphic-glitches around. But as long as they are reproduceable i wouldn't call it the "DX9-Flickering". Most bugs now seem to be game/driver related. I even played some really old stuff like Titan Quest or games which are not played by a big community like Truck Simulator 2. Nothing odd appeared again.

THE typical Dx9 flickering as we know it is gone. There may be simelar looking issues in some games but i guess they have a differen reason. For example that Starcraft Newkirk Bug doesn't thave something to do with the DX9 Flickering issue, it's just a graphicglitch which needs to be fixed by AMD.

 

i saw no flickering since 13.2beta3.
there were rare white artifacts in whitcher 2, but they more looked like dynamic LOD problems, and not like our flickering.

 

Experienced flickering on 13.3. This flickering never happened on 12.10 or 13.1. http://youtu.be/j1N0GAIZCl4

Probably it's just a beta driver issue.

Update:

To be more informative here is another example of screen corruption on my XFX Radeon HD7970. Still on Catalyst 13.3 beta. http://youtu.be/svea_maRnjI

 

weird....what is that app?
BTW im playin WarThunder too, like from december, and i saw lill flashing in clouds only(wings flashin) on 13.1, but from 13.2b4 or later(using newest now) their gone. And it was only thing in that game, saw it as i said only in clouds, and few times(playin mostly fighter style, not bombing)

 

Create a new Topic. Thats not the DX9 Flickering issue. The DX9 Flickering Issue was random and mostly hard to catch. The first Video looks a bit like the Bomb Bug on CS:Go on the Map St. Marc (look around and you should found it).

 

It was World of Warcraft.

Thanks for answers, guys!

Yesterday I've installed latest AMD Catalyst Application Profiles and played a lot these two days. Have not detected any artifacts after installation. Don't know how I could miss that CAP contains various fixes for Catalyst drivers and didn't install them earlier.
So now I'm waiting if there will be new artifacts, but it seems like my issue is fixed. If new artifacts will be found, I will describe them in a new thread.

 

The Newkirk bug = Polygon stretching

It happens only on tentacles of the Hive, and only when it was "observed" by another player for a very short time.

Due some reason the "tentacles" stretch "to infinity" and they also drop shadow.

Similar bug has been observed in Microsoft Flight Simulator X and on HD 5850...

Its strange why polygons are changing their shape so I suspect some problem with tesselation.

 

I am getting slightly more dx9 flickering in 13.3 than I was in 13.2. It is enough for me to notice, where as 13.2 was almost never.

I'd say it went from once every 2 - 3 hours in 13.2, to once every 10 - 20 minutes in 13.3b3. Is it possible that the video driver in 13.3b3 is older than the one from 13.2b7?

Guild Wars 2
TrainSimulator 2013

CivV remains flicker free in Dx11 mode.

Also, I tried uninstalling 13.3. It does not uninstall gracefully. Seems like something is blocking the video driver from getting removed properly in Windows 8. I get a fatal crash with the error: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I then attempted to remove stuff by hand and install 13.2 again, and now 13.2 crashes on install.

Had to go back to a restore point prior to 13.3 to actually get it working.

 

If you would like, try War Thunder... It's free to play. In case you want to experience the exact same issue; guaranteed.

Rarely as I said, but it's there.