Fall of the house of Radeon Software

in #gaming6 years ago (edited)

A long time ago, before PCI-E usurped AGP entirely, before the end of any hope for a third choice in the graphics card markets, there was a company called AMD(well, it was ATI that then got bought out by AMD, if you want to be more accurate). They released many products over the years. I have many fond memories of the X1950Pro. A beast of a card that made Bioshock a dream to play. The hardware was strong, the software worked well, and everyone was happy. The good times rolled on all the way to the 5850, another beastly card that ravaged everything set before it, with software support so solid that I didn't need to update it but once every few months, maybe even once a year. The last driver I ever used, the last one released for it, was the Radeon Crimson Software suite. It combined a neat driver with a new software interface that was lightweight, quick and seemed to be comprehensive enough. But so many things would change within just one year. So many things.

At the beginning of 2017 I came upon an Sapphire Nitro+ RX 480. A beautiful Radeon card, that sadly didn't come with a sticker in the box, because Sapphire are skinflints now. Installing it did pose some issues, because of some motherboard problems. But woe was me. I had thought all my problems were over. That I now had the means to play all the games I wanted and the hardware to accelerate all the compute tasks I needed. And yet, from the first day, things were not what they seemed. 

Radeon Software would sometimes crash, not load, hang or work slower than it used to in the 5850 days. The Adobe suite would not recognize the video card, constantly confusing it with the integrated Intel GPU to which I had a VGA monitor linked too. I believed this would be an easy fix, after all, Catalyst had the option to set a primary GPU in it, so it must have also been available in Radeon ReLive, right? It wasn't. It wasn't. No biggie. My second monitor broke anyway and months later I replaced it with an HDMI one, with FreeSync even. I was riding high! High-ish.

There was much promise in ReLive. Much much promise. The promise of a recording software that could rival Shadowplay, an easy to use, fast and really handy video recording software. But then I actually tried using it. Sure, HEVC video was useless for editing on account if it being badly supported in Adobe at the time. But H264 was good enough for me, or so I thought. For you see, ReLive had one flaw that made it constantly useless. The audio was never properly synced. And it wasn't something constant. If the framerate of a game was off even by 1 frame from 60, or it fluctuated in any way, like a game always does, the audio would skip around constantly. It wasn't something I could fix in post, since the delay was ever changing. But, hey, at least I could use instant-replay for just video bits, to keep mementos of funny little incidents in games. Sadly, ReLive Instant Replay would crash constantly, it would sometimes not work, the OSD for the whole thing would fail to load, and it was for the most part something I expected to see from a beta software, not a released part of a Radeon Software Suite.

But, hey, I can always use a third party recorder. One that for some reason would sometimes conflict with the driver, leading to constant blinking of the screen and driver crashes. It doesn't happen all the time, and since Radeon driver version 17.7.2 it's only happened once. 

That driver version was truly refreshing and disappointing at the same time. It added 100Mb/s encoding to ReLive, which made all the video recorded by it totally useless, with hitches and glitches non-stop. But, through some ethereal magic, OpenCL accelerated things that were totally borked before finally worked. I could use Fast Blur again. I was blown away. And then came the announcement of something new.

 A driver and software suite to end all drivers. More features, more options, integrated telemetry, the promise of a working ReLive, a mobile app to track and control things. It looked amazing. 

I installed it.

ReLive wouldn't turn on.

I used the Display Driver Unistaller and reinstalled it. The ReLive tab wouldn't work if accessed from certain regions. Eventually, I did activate it and to my surprise... the desync was still there. OK, fine I could still do without it. The telemetry would be nice, though, it worked in DX12 and Vulkan, so it be great for me. So I tried to turn it on. It didn't work. I tried again, it turned on and showed that my 1304 MHz GPU was running at a flat 650MHz. The same thing was show in the mobile app, and in Trixx Software. After a restart, it was back to normal. After a few minutes, it would be back to 650Mhz. OK, no biggie, I mean, the actual clock doesn't change, it's just being reported wrong, there's no reason to fear that it would also report temperature wrong and fry everything, right? Well, I didn't stick around to find out, since it crashed constantly. Radeon Software would go up in smoke way too often to not be completely irritating. And if that wasn't bad enough, those OpenCL accelerated effects that should be working properly now were broken again. To make things worse, when switching from one game to another, the monitor would sometimes flicker, the driver would crash. And the option to set the default GPU in the software isn't there either, so that the Vertcoin one click miner keeps trying to go for the Intel integrated GPU. 

So, now I'm back to 17.7.2. Still waiting for AMD to get its stuff together, for Radeon Software to be what it used to be. Functional. Good. Not crashing. For ReLive to actually be the Shadowplay replacement I need. For the expensive GPU I own to be usable at its maximum potential. Yet this won't be happening today. And judging by how poor Adrenalin was, the validated, extra effort, extra tested, extra performance driver an software suite, I doubt it will happen again. I'll be switching to a GTX 2070 this fall. Nvidia drivers may often break the Windows start menu and set laptops on fire, but at least the things that you need for work actually work.


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The beauty of being a PC gamer. Driver hell, incompatibility between pieces of hardware, etc. These problems only get compounded when you attempt to run something other than Windows (Linux for instance).

Thanks for the memories. Great article.

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