Missing Radeon Driver issue after screen going blank?

[Jedimindtrickonyou]

So, I’m not saying what happened to me is because of the game, just that the game is what triggered it to happen to me on two separate occasions. I have an RX 6700XT with the latest recommended drivers in both instances. Last week it happened when playing the demo, the game launched from desktop without issue but from the menu when I selected “new game”, the screen went black as if my monitor no longer had a signal. Upon rebooting the computer, I noticed my AMD graphic drivers were gone and I couldn’t even launch Adrenalin. I did a DDU just to be safe and then reinstalled Adrenaline plus the latest drivers. All games worked without issue for the last seven days, I decided to play System shock which has ran well after the reinstall of my graphic drivers. After selecting “Load Game” the whole thing happened again with the screen going black and a reboot revealed my graphic drivers were gone.

1) Has anyone with a Radeon card experienced anything like this with this game?

2) If not, has this happened to you with other games and can it be prevented? Are AMD drivers the problem or am I doing something wrong?

[Arc]

This is happening for Nvidia cards as well but not as often. Basically when your graphics card is so unstable to the point of it collapsing, WIndows simply disables the device with an error code (see Event Viewer and Device Manager).

And at that point, the drivers won't load. And sometimes, even if you re-enable the device, the drivers won't load anyway.

So now the question is what makes it unstable, for examlple does it run hot, is the clock:voltage ratio unstable, is it clocked too high, is power delivery fluctuating, etc.

Also: It has nothing at all to do with the XYZ game.

[LoveAndPeace]

definitely your hardware failing, this could be a bad psu, motherboard disconnecting or the gpu itself.

check if you have dust build up.
take it to a shop and have them check with another gpu or psu.

[Jedimindtrickonyou]

Originally posted by LegionKIN:

definitely your hardware failing, this could be a bad psu, motherboard disconnecting or the gpu itself.

check if you have dust build up.
take it to a shop and have them check with another gpu or psu.

If it’s the hardware, then it would have to be the card. My system was built less than a year ago, I have a good X570 MoBo and a EVGA 80+ Gold 750w PSU. I reinstalled my 3070 and everything is stable, the 6700xt was bought (new from Amazon, shipped/sold by Amazon) less than 3 months ago. No overclocks or anything like that. It just that the AMD GPU has never done that before or since, only the two times mentioned and only when immediately launching the game/demo from the menu. I’ve put over 80 hours of gameplay on the Radeon card with a dozen or more games and nothing like that has happened. I cleaned my case for dust before installing the AMD card initially.

[Jedimindtrickonyou]

Originally posted by Arc:

This is happening for Nvidia cards as well but not as often. Basically when your graphics card is so unstable to the point of it collapsing, WIndows simply disables the device with an error code (see Event Viewer and Device Manager).

And at that point, the drivers won't load. And sometimes, even if you re-enable the device, the drivers won't load anyway.

So now the question is what makes it unstable, for examlple does it run hot, is the clock:voltage ratio unstable, is it clocked too high, is power delivery fluctuating, etc.

Also: It has nothing at all to do with the XYZ game.

I like this answer more, I’m pretty sure it’s not the temps (at least for the GPU die) because I usually have an MSI or RTSS overlay when games are running, I monitor the temperature of the GPU and it never goes over 70, I have a very well ventilated case with lots of fans. It could potentially be the GDDR6 modules getting hot, as I’ve read somewhere that the Xfx swft 309 doesn’t have adequate/enough thermal pads, but I wasn’t aware it could cause something like this to happen, maybe I should add some if I can determine this is the problem. I’ll also monitor voltage more closely going forward.

[wavinautomaticguns@nuns]

I've never had it happen that frequently but I believe I've had the same issue as you, usually once every few months. Windows seems to either try to force your display adapter to change, or it does so after it fails to respond. If you Google around there should be solutions to force Windows to stop making this automatic change that would require a registry edit.

[Jedimindtrickonyou]

Originally posted by wavinautomaticguns@nuns:

I've never had it happen that frequently but I believe I've had the same issue as you, usually once every few months. Windows seems to either try to force your display adapter to change, or it does so after it fails to respond. If you Google around there should be solutions to force Windows to stop making this automatic change that would require a registry edit.

Thanks for telling me, I’m new to using AMD cards but other than this one issue, I really like the 6700xt. The 12GB of VRAM (for such a low amount, I only paid 340 plus tax) made me want to switch to it from my more powerful 3070. I believe there is an option in DDU to block windows from removing the Radeon drivers now that you mention it, it might just be the same thing you are talking about with the registry.