# PSA: AMD's Graphics Driver will Eat One CPU Core when No Radeon Installed



## W1zzard (Dec 4, 2020)

While I was messing around with an older SSD test system (not benchmarking anything) I wondered why the machine's performance was SO sluggish with the NVIDIA card I just installed. Windows startup, desktop, Internet, everything in Windows would just be incredibly slow. This is an old dual-core machine, but it ran perfectly fine with the AMD Radeon card I used before.



 
At first I blamed NVIDIA, but when I opened Task Manager I noticed one of my cores sitting at 100%—that can't be right.




Digging a bit further into this, it looks like RadeonSettings.exe is using one processor core at maximum 100% CPU load. Ugh, but there is no AMD graphics card installed right now.



Once that process was terminated manually (right click, select "End task"), performance was restored to expected levels and CPU load was normal again. This confirms that the AMD driver is the reason for the high CPU load. Ideally, before changing graphics card, you should uninstall the current graphics card driver, change hardware, then install the new driver, in that order. But for a quick test that's not what most people do, and others are simply not aware of the fact that a thing called "graphics card driver" exists, and what it does. Windows is smart enough to not load any drivers for devices that aren't present physically.



 

 

 
Looks like AMD is doing things differently and just pre-loads Radeon Settings in the background every time your system is booted and a user logs in, no matter if AMD graphics hardware is installed or not. It would be trivial to add a check "If no AMD hardware found, then exit immediately", but ok. Also, do we really need six entries in Task Scheduler?

I got curious and wondered how it is possible in the first place that an utility software like the Radeon Settings control panel uses 100% CPU load constantly—something that might happen when a mining virus gets installed, to use your electricity to mine cryptocurrency, without you knowing. By the way, all this was verified to be happening on Radeon 20.11.2 WHQL driver, 20.11.3 Beta and the press driver for an upcoming Radeon review.

Unless you're a computer geek you'll probably want to skip over the following paragraphs, I still found the details interesting enough to share with you.

I attached my debugger, looked for the thread that's causing all the CPU load and found this:


 

Hard to read, translated it into C code it might make more sense:


 

If you're a programmer you'd have /facepalm'd by now, let me explain. In a multi-threaded program, Events are often used to synchronize concurrently running threads. Events are a core feature of the Windows operating system, once created, they can be set to "signaled", which will notify every other piece of code that is watching the status of this event—instantly and even across process boundaries. In this case the Radeon Settings program will wait for an event called "DVRReadyEvent" to get created, before it continues with initialization. This event gets created by a separate, independent, driver component, that's supposed to get loaded on startup, too, but apparently never does. The Task Scheduler entries in the screenshot above do show "StartDVR". The naming suggests it's related to the ReLive recording feature that lets you capture and stream gameplay. I guess that part of the driver does indeed check if Radeon hardware is present, and will not start otherwise. Since Windows has no WaitForEventToGetCreated() function, the usual approach is to try to open the event until it can be opened, at which point you know that it does exist.

You're probably asking now, "what if the event never gets created?" Exactly, your program will be hung, forever, caught in an infinite loop. The correct way to implement this code is to either set a time limit for how long the loop should run, or count the number of runs and give up after 100, 1000, 1 million, you pick a number—but it's important to set a reasonable limit.

A more subtle effect of this kind of busy waiting is that it will run as fast as the processor can, loading one core to 100%. While that might be desirable if you have to be able to react VERY quickly to something, there's no reason to do that here. The typical approach is to add a short bit of delay inside the loop, which tells the operating system and processor "hey, I'm waiting on something and don't need CPU time, you may run another application now or reduce power". Modern processors will adjust their frequency when lightly loaded, and even power down cores completely, to conserve energy and reduce heat output. Even a delay of one millisecond will make a huge difference here.

This is especially important during system startup, where a lot of things are happening at the same time, that need processor time to complete—it's why you feel you're waiting forever for your desktop to become usable when you start the computer. With Radeon Settings taking over one core completely, there's obviously less performance left for other startup programs to complete.

I did some quick and dirty performance testing in actual gameplay on a 8-core/16-thread CPU and found a small FPS loss, especially in CPU limited scenarios, around 1%, in the order of 150 FPS vs 151 FPS. This confirms that this can be an issue on modern systems, too, even though just 5% of CPU power is lost (one core out of 16). The differences will be minimal though, and it's unlikely you'll subjectively notice the difference.

Waiting on synchronization signals is very basic programming skills, most midterm students would be able to implement it correctly. That's why I'm so surprised to see such low quality code in a graphics driver component that get installed on hundreds of millions of computers. Modern software development techniques avoid these mistakes by code reviews—one or multiple colleagues read your source code and point out potential issues. There's also "unit testing", which requires developers to write testing code that's separate from the main code. These unit tests can then be executed automatically to measure "code coverage"—how many percent of the program code are verified to be correct through the use of unit tests. Let's just hope AMD fixes this bug, it should be trivial.

If you are affected by this issue, just uninstall the AMD driver from Windows Settings - Apps and Features. If that doesn't work, use DDU. It's not a big deal anyway, what's most important is that you are aware, in case your system feels sluggish after a graphics hardware change.

*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## GoldenX (Dec 4, 2020)

FineWine*™*


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## ScaLibBDP (Dec 4, 2020)

"RadeonSettings.exe" is Not a driver and it is the cached process. When a user starts the "RadeonSettings.exe" manually to change settings it speeds up loading of UI part of the software.

>>Looks like AMD is doing things differently and just pre-loads Radeon Settings in the background every time your system is
>>booted and a user logs in, no matter if AMD graphics hardware is installed or not. It would be trivial to add a check
>>"If no AMD hardware found, then exit immediately", but ok. Also, do we really need six entries in Task Scheduler?

It is a well known issue! AMD is one of the companies that secretly (!) creates an entry in Windows Task Scheduler to load "RadeonSettings.exe" every time a Windows OS starts. It actually violates your privacy.

A solution is very simple: Disable it in Windows Task Scheduler or delete. Personally, I disable it and check regularly that it is Not enabled again.


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## Blueberries (Dec 4, 2020)

Mfw Wizzard uses Hex-Rays and is a total nerd like me


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## Khonjel (Dec 4, 2020)

God! The more I browse the internet the more I come to know that AMD software sucks.


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## srsbsns (Dec 4, 2020)

This one simple trick to fix this issue: Don't install drivers and bundled software on a system for a piece of hardware not installed.


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## Jokii (Dec 4, 2020)

I don't even run the driver installer. I just extract it (with 7-zip) and then point to that location in Device Manager.

But I don't need "Radeon Settings" anyway — the few tweaks that I might need to do (like custom refresh rate) can be done with other less intrusive software (CRU, for example).


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## SashoDeBoy (Dec 4, 2020)

This thing happens for installed AMD video cards as well - same process hangs on a i5 6600K + RX470 and needs to be manually cancelled on startup or uses 25% productivity


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## W1zzard (Dec 4, 2020)

Blueberries said:


> Mfw Wizzard uses Hex-Rays and is a total nerd like me




I'm more of an IDA user than Hex-Rays, but yes. Back in the days reverse engineering was the only way to figure out how to make GPU-Z work. Nowadays most vendors have some kind of API, that's more of less useful. Still an extremely useful skill


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## xkm1948 (Dec 4, 2020)

do while loop looking for input. Lazy coding?

Who is writing RTG Graphics driver nowadays?  I remember reading somewhere that almost all of Radeon's current driver at least coming from AMD Shanghai.

It could just be the inexperience of AMD China team that is causing so many problems like this.

OK found it, from one of AMD's Sr. Director of Software Engineering, Zhengsan Jian

So looks like AMD's GPU driver are Made in China after all. Damn



Author: Zhengsan Jian

Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/24684566/answer/29352184 Source: Zhihu The copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization. For non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.

I have been doing graphics driver development for many years at AMD. In fact, I came from ATI that year. AMD's shadow is almost invisible in the code. Most of the binary files are still ati*.dll. AMD is neither a large company nor a small company. There are many branches in the world. Basically, there are people in other continents except Africa and South America. Of course, the North/Arctic is not counted. In such an international company, the perceptions of people in different positions and departments must be quite different. My opinion is for your reference only. As far as the Shanghai R&D Center is concerned, from a technical point of view, GPU driver is very interesting work, anyway, I enjoy it. This is a very narrow field, and the learning curve is very steep. It usually recruits graduates of master's degree from prestigious schools. I have seen that I can't touch it after half a year. When writing an app, you can always Google some clues, but in the field of drivers, Google has no help. The driver works with the OS and requires high stability. It is often necessary to debug the kernel of the OS, and Microsoft bugs can be found from time to time. For those who like to deal with the bottom layer of the system and study a detail (such as the optimization of a structure initialization by the compiler) to the extreme, this is a very suitable field. And in Shanghai AMD GPU research and development work, there is almost no difference between China and the United States. Everyone works on the same source code server and can read all GPU hardware specs, except for some sensitive ones such as video encode/decode related Content, engineers here can see all the driver code. From an operational perspective, for a company with decades of history like AMD, the CEO is no longer the founder. Too many professional managers have the faults of most established companies: low process efficiency and a lot of people who eat too much. . Since Jobs released the iPhone in the mobile Internet revolution, many traditional established companies have had a hard time, including Microsoft, Intel, DELL, HP, SONY and other companies closely related to AMD. Naturally, AMD’s life is also very difficult. But as a technical engineer, the company's hard life does not mean that your life will be hard. As long as the salary can be paid, having an interesting and fulfilling job is actually good.



Another proof

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://www.expreview.com/32270.html











I wonder when did AMD out sourced their driver team out.


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## Vya Domus (Dec 4, 2020)

Or ...

Just remove the driver before changing the GPU ?


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## z1n0x (Dec 4, 2020)

xkm1948 said:


> do while loop looking for input. Lazy coding?
> 
> Who is writing RTG Graphics driver nowadays?  I remember reading somewhere that almost all of Radeon's current driver at least coming from AMD Shanghai.
> 
> ...


 WOW. So much effort just to say AMD bad, China bad. Try to keep it concise the next time please.


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## xkm1948 (Dec 4, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> WOW. So much effort just to say AMD bad, China bad. Try to keep it concise the next time please.




Inexperienced, not bad. The recent RTG driver has not been stellar which is exactly my point: inexperienced programmer paid a tiny amount of salary in a foreign country, most likely to save money for the corporate.


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## W1zzard (Dec 4, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> Or ...
> 
> Just remove the driver before changing the GPU ?


absolutely, yes. but if it happens to me, it can happen to others, too i would like to think



z1n0x said:


> AMD bad


not at all, consider what they pulled off this year alone. beat intel, matched nvidia, beat nvidia energy efficiency. these are tremendous achievements


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## z1n0x (Dec 4, 2020)

xkm1948 said:


> Inexperienced, not bad. The recent RTG driver has not been stellar which is exactly my point: inexperienced programmer paid a tiny amount of salary in a foreign country, most likely to save money for the corporate.


Maybe they can't find good graphics driver engineers in US/CA, they do not exactly grow on trees.


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## Flaky (Dec 4, 2020)

From my observation it's quite common to see around-driver software to misbehave when no related hardware is present.

I recall one serious bug in certain intel's package - when there was no related iGPU present, the dll that hooked to explorer.exe caused whole process to crash. 
After the explorer crashed, the OS kept restarting the process just to let it crash again, and... you know what's next   

I've also seen nvidia's software hog the cpu when there's no card - mainly noticable as stutters during games.


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## Countryside (Dec 4, 2020)

Well i always DDU before changing the gpu but still a good find.


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## xkm1948 (Dec 4, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> Maybe they can't find good graphics driver engineers in US/CA, they do not exactly grow on trees.



Cost saving is most likely the answer. AMD was short on cash before Zen. It works well for them to outsource driver R&D to country with way lower average wage and good educated workforce (India and China. Taiwan, SK or Japan are most likely just as expensive as here in US)


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## Divide Overflow (Dec 4, 2020)

Someone figured out that running a driver for incorrect hardware can be an issue.


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## Nater (Dec 4, 2020)

So are you saying there's potentially millions of machines out there with one core at 100% load 24/7?  I'll have to look at my kids i7 920/RX580 rig tonight.  Losing 25% of his horsepower would be brutal.


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## z1n0x (Dec 4, 2020)

xkm1948 said:


> Cost saving is most likely the answer. AMD was short on cash before Zen. It works well for them to outsource driver R&D to country with way lower average wage and good educated workforce (India and China. Taiwan, SK or Japan are most likely just as expensive as here in US)


Cost saving on something as important as graphics driver, i don't buy it. I maintain my position of them having hard time findng GPU driver engineers in US/Canada.


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## TheUn4seen (Dec 4, 2020)

So, let me get it straight: You really expected corporate code monkeys to write a competent piece of software? 
This strikes me as one of the "our software is too slow, we need to cache some things on system startup so the user will blame Microsoft" type of situations. Consequently, the most junior (so cheapest) intern is tasked with writing "the caching thing" in half a day and it "kinda, sorta maybe works most of the time usually" so everyone is happy.


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## marios15 (Dec 4, 2020)

This is more PEBKAC than anything else. 
Forgetting to uninstall a whole driver suite after a hardware change, lead to problems? 
Who would have thought?!?!


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## mouacyk (Dec 4, 2020)

> At first I blamed NVIDIA...




Next feature in NVidia driver... detect unused AMD software.


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## z1n0x (Dec 4, 2020)

I'm not a programmer my self, but from what i've read, i'd imagine GPU driver engineer have to understand the graphics architectures, low-level kernel stuff, APIs.
It seems like pretty specialized subject, not something for your average programmer. Nvidia probably hoard them all anyway.
Hence why i think finding good graphics programmers is not easy.


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## W1zzard (Dec 4, 2020)

marios15 said:


> This is more PEBKAC than anything else.


absolutely, yes



marios15 said:


> Who would have thought?!?!


i would expect it to do the right thing, especially if it's so trivial


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## damric (Dec 4, 2020)

I recall a similar performance issue I diagnosed for a client back in 2014ish with a dual core i3 and GTX 750, with Nvidia Shadow Play eating up more than its share of CPU and memory performance because it was something that was hidden in the default driver package and enabled by default. I'm sure that wouldn't be an issue with today's many-core machines, but it really crippled that poor old dual-core.


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## B-Real (Dec 4, 2020)

Khonjel said:


> God! The more I browse the internet the more I come to know that AMD software sucks.


1. Remember the WHQL certified NV driver that made Watch Dogs 2 instantly crash on start or even won't allow to start it? 
2. The Chrome video playback problems with WHQL NV driveres not too long ago?
3. The RTX 3000 series drivers at the beginning?


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## mechtech (Dec 4, 2020)

Nice find W1zz.  Did  you submit bug through AMD bug reporter 

edit - dual core - how old is that rig? 

and for rest of the thread - I have seen bad/poor/lazy coding from everywhere.

Doesn't come down to where, so much as
-time
-money
-qa/qc/review/
-experience/good habits

Edit 2 - I actually barely passed C+ programming class, that's ok since I'm mechanical engineer 

Maybe the compiler or something should be stricter and spit the code back if its 'lazy'


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## john_ (Dec 4, 2020)

Reading the news article in here about this bug, and the way it is written, made me to remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine a couple of days ago about some performance numbers in TechPowerUps' reviews. He got a second hand Vega56 and when checking it in Odyssey, he gets way higher frame rates than those reported here. And he is using a simple Ryzen 2600, not an overclocked 5GHz Intel CPU.

I don't know if it relevant. Just remembered that conversation.


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## IbaChiba (Dec 4, 2020)

you exposed AMD's way of punishing those who leave them.


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## R-T-B (Dec 4, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> This one simple trick to fix this issue: Don't install drivers and bundled software on a system for a piece of hardware not installed.



The issue is more that this is a super rookie mistake.

It makes you ask how much else is crap in the driver...


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## 0x4452 (Dec 4, 2020)

Nice investigation! Which tool did you use to convert the assembly to a bit more readable C?


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## windwhirl (Dec 4, 2020)

ScaLibBDP said:


> It is a well known issue! AMD is one of the companies that secretly (!) creates an entry in Windows Task Scheduler to load "RadeonSettings.exe" every time a Windows OS starts. It actually violates your privacy.


OK, no, that's BS. Let me show you what's in my task scheduler:




Have Adobe software? They create at least one entry for software activation and update.
CCleaner? Update and Skip UAC tasks.
Google Chrome, Earth or anything else from the big G? Two update tasks (I imagine that one of them is also for skipping UAC)
Microsoft Edge? Same thingy, update tasks.
MSI Afterburner has its own and if you have the RivaTuner Stat server installed, then it will add the RTSS task,.
Onedrive? More tasks.
Then there is the "User feed sync" task, which frankly I don't know what is it for, and finally the AMD tasks.
I also have BlueStacks around, but that's definitely niche.
And those are the tasks that no-one bothered to "organize", otherwise you better start considering every task hidden in each folder:




Conclusion: every one and their mother use the task scheduler, it's not a secret, and in fact is a service that is required to run a bunch of system tasks. And privacy? Why the hell are you installing the Radeon Software bundle, then, if you don't trust them to agree to you not joining their User Experience Program or not sending your system specs for the upgrade advisor feature? Hell, why would you use Windows for that matter, considering it's a privacy-advocate's nightmare?


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## W1zzard (Dec 4, 2020)

john_ said:


> and when checking it in Odyssey, he gets way higher frame rates than those reported here


FPS depends a lot on the game location, or did he play the benchmark? I use actual gameplay. Cities vs outside huge difference. AC:O is also difficult to repro run-to-run because dynamic weather and other random events



0x4452 said:


> Nice investigation! Which tool did you use to convert the assembly to a bit more readable C?


No tool needed, the assembly is fairly obvious. Typed out in UltraEdit for the syntax coloring. What do you use? Always happy to learn about software to make my life easier


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## xkm1948 (Dec 4, 2020)

mechtech said:


> *Maybe the compiler or something should be stricter and spit the code back if its 'lazy'*



Compiler from ANY brand wont detect lazy code, it will only call out syntax error or null reference at best, as far as I know. Lazy code in lower level language hurts performance a lot more to be honest.

On the other hand, they could have hired another donzen of cheap intern to debug or look through the code.

This is just sloppy implementation, there is no other way to cut it.


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## Vya Domus (Dec 4, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> absolutely, yes. but if it happens to me, it can happen to others, too i would like to think



It can, I've experienced many oddities having to do with drivers.


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## mouacyk (Dec 4, 2020)

xkm1948 said:


> Compiler from ANY brand wont detect lazy code, it will only call out syntax error or null reference at best, as far as I know. Lazy code in lower level language hurts performance a lot more to be honest.
> 
> On the other hand, they could have hired another donzen of cheap intern to debug or look through the code.
> 
> This is just sloppy implementation, there is no other way to cut it.


Technically, once you've uninstalled the hardware, it's unclear whose responsibility it is to clean unused software.  Most of the time, it will fall on admins or the users themselves.  Even our very advanced operating systems these days cannot prune crud for us.


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## ryun (Dec 4, 2020)

I would rate this issue as pretty minor myself, but good find nonetheless and hopefully AMD's software gets better as a result.


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## efikkan (Dec 4, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> …
> You're probably asking now, "what if the event never gets created?" Exactly, your program will be hung, forever, caught in an infinite loop. The correct way to implement this code is to either set a time limit for how long the loop should run, or count the number of runs and give up after 100, 1000, 1 million, you pick a number—but it's important to set a reasonable limit.


While I do commend you for taking the time to debug this, I have to point out that the real problem is whatever is causing the driver to end up in an invalid state. The problem you have spotted is really only the symptom, not the cause. While dealing with system calls may need some handling, it's much more important to catch the invalid state before this system call, probably with an assertion, so they would actually catch this bug during QA (assuming they do QA before shipping).
Just making the code more "forgiving" would just suppress the underlying problem, and depending on the surrounding code it may sometimes actually not be a good idea. I've seen many developers chase "endless" streams of bugs because they just suppress them.



W1zzard said:


> Waiting on synchronization signals is very basic programming skills, most midterm students would be able to implement it correctly. That's why I'm so surprised to see such low quality code in a graphics driver component that get installed on hundreds of millions of computers.


Respectfully disagree.
While 100-line textbook examples are easy to manage, working on synchronization and threading in larger code bases is an expert level skill. Synchronization is also very tough to validate, and bugs may be hard to reproduce, especially when dealing with issues on the scale of microseconds or nanoseconds.
I'm not surprised these drivers are full of "glaring mistakes". In real life code is often stitched together under tight deadlines, bugs are swept underneath the rug, and workarounds are favored over _proper_ rewrites, often by management who thinks "it can be fixed after the deadline". I've witnessed some major screw-ups, such as relying on a completely defective mutex implementation in some military stuff for >20 years… I just hope my loved ones are nowhere near when s*** hits the fan…



W1zzard said:


> Modern software development techniques avoid these mistakes by code reviews—one or multiple colleagues read your source code and point out potential issues.


They certainly _should_, but in reality it's fairly uncommon for someone doing QA to read every line and test every possible outcome.
But I believe critical code should strive for this, such as kernels, drivers, firmware, etc.



W1zzard said:


> There's also "unit testing", which requires developers to write testing code that's separate from the main code. These unit tests can then be executed automatically to measure "code coverage"—how many percent of the program code are verified to be correct through the use of unit tests. Let's just hope AMD fixes this bug, it should be trivial.


Unit tests should be a part of many project's toolchains, but only a small part, as unit tests only can cover a tiny portion of potential problems. Unit tests tests a unit (function, class etc.) in a vacuum, problems such as the one described above are outside the scope of a unit test.
But don't mention code coverage, that gives me chills. A completely useless metric which misleads developers into thinking code is actually tested 

-----

I still enjoyed the article though Wizz, tech websites needs more of this. Even deeper stuff if possible; the deeper the better 
Have a nice evening.



mechtech said:


> Maybe the compiler or something should be stricter and spit the code back if its 'lazy'



If we ever get compilers able to detect stupidity, we would probably not need programmers anymore.


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## Dave65 (Dec 4, 2020)

B-Real said:


> 1. Remember the WHQL certified NV driver that made Watch Dogs 2 instantly crash on start or even won't allow to start it?
> 2. The Chrome video playback problems with WHQL NV driveres not too long ago?
> 3. The RTX 3000 series drivers at the beginning?



Nvidia fan boys always forget. I have had no problems with mine, except once when 5700xt came out and I switched from Nvidia.


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## ZoneDymo (Dec 4, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> Or ...
> 
> Just remove the driver before changing the GPU ?



Right? like isnt running DDU twice in safe mode standard when installing a new gpu? I mean yeah its weird behavior but I mean even if it did nothing its still just bloatware when it goes unused....just weird to leave it there.
Heck I would be afraid it would conflict with the new hardware anyway....


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## authorized (Dec 4, 2020)

marios15 said:


> Forgetting to uninstall a whole driver suite after a hardware change, lead to problems?
> Who would have thought?!?!


I find that attitude a bit odd.
Drivers and utility software should behave properly and not cause issues even if they remain in the system.
It's consumer software and users may not even be aware they need to uninstall after changing the graphics card. Why would it be expected of them to know that? 
This is common sense for users on TPU but not for an average joe.



efikkan said:


> In real life code is often stitched together under tight deadlines, bugs are swept underneath the rug, and workarounds are favored over _proper_ rewrites, often by management who thinks "it can be fixed after the deadline".


So true, happens all the time. Because of deadlines, things are made to work just "for now", for the upcoming presentation or for a particular implementation, and a "proper" fix is saved for later - when there's time. Most often that time never comes because there are already other projects with new deadlines. Those patchwork solutions then remain in place until they rear their ugly head again, causing new problems.

It's just that one could expect (naively I guess) that a company of this size, with such a big consumer base, would take extra measures and utmost care with something as critical as a driver suite.


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## GSDragoon (Dec 4, 2020)

Thanks for posting this. Some of the behavior with Radeon Software is mind boggling. There's a lot more to uncover here and I hope you do some more digging. Making this more known will help put pressure to get it addressed.

The same loop is hit if the Host Services processes don't load, such as when you rename the files. And this isn't old/legacy code either, it started just a month or two ago. The Radeon Host Services load when you open Radeon Settings or on login from a couple hidden Scheduled Tasks. StartCN will load RadeonSettings and the Host Services and StartDVR will load the Host Services. Disabling these and never opening Radeon Setting will prevent these processes from loading.

Another annoying example is with their OpenVR Driver (AMD WVR64). It installs even if you don't have a VR device and is hidden from Programs and Features. When it's installed, it tries to load two configuration files every second. You can see it with Process Monitor. I can't imagine a non-SSD user would appreciate that.


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## v12dock (Dec 4, 2020)

Interesting, I remember a few years ago I found a defect with Nvidia drivers using all my I/O bandwidth for no explainable reason.


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## Frick (Dec 4, 2020)

xkm1948 said:


> Cost saving is most likely the answer. AMD was short on cash before Zen. It works well for them to outsource driver R&D to country with way lower average wage and good educated workforce (India and China. Taiwan, SK or Japan are most likely just as expensive as here in US)



FWIW my cousins brother in law was given a cushy AMD job making drivers in Canada in the 2000's, but I assume they have restructured it a dozen times since then.


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## Xzibit (Dec 4, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> absolutely, yes. but if it happens to me, it can happen to others, too i would like to think



Hopefully it doesn't happen in your testing rigs. That would be awful. AMD makes a cleanup utility incase you didnt know.

*AMD Cleanup Utility*

Overview
The AMD Cleanup Utility is designed to thoroughly remove any previously installed AMD driver files, registries, and driver store from systems running Microsoft Windows® 7 and later.  The cleanup process includes removing AMD display and audio drivers as well as AMD software components but does not remove AMD chipset driver components such as GPIO, SATA, USB, etc.


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 4, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> absolutely, yes. but if it happens to me, it can happen to others, too i would like to think
> 
> 
> not at all, consider what they pulled off this year alone. beat intel, matched nvidia, beat nvidia energy efficiency. these are tremendous achievements


Possibly a little dramatic IMHO.


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## rutra80 (Dec 4, 2020)

Good find, but what are we expecting from a "driver" that has integrated chromium, phone connectivity, streaming app, animated GIFs writer and other steaming-pile-of-horseshit-bloat??


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## windwhirl (Dec 4, 2020)

rutra80 said:


> Good find, but what are we expecting from a "driver" that has integrated chromium, phone connectivity, streaming app, animated GIFs writer and other steaming-pile-of-horseshit-bloat??


Well, someone probably uses that stuff. I myself have used the animated GIF thing.


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## Caring1 (Dec 4, 2020)

No compatible hardware = End Task.
How hard is that?


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## rutra80 (Dec 4, 2020)

@windwhirl okay but driver is not the place for that and it should be optionally installable


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## Xzibit (Dec 4, 2020)

Caring1 said:


> No compatible hardware = End Task.
> How hard is that?



As hard as uninstalling software for hardware you don't use apparently


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## Caring1 (Dec 4, 2020)

Xzibit said:


> As hard as uninstalling software for hardware you don't use apparently


The point is, you shouldn't have to uninstall if the software worked correctly.
That would make swapping components a lot simpler and faster.


----------



## Xzibit (Dec 4, 2020)

Caring1 said:


> The point is, you shouldn't have to uninstall if the software worked correctly.
> That would make swapping components a lot simpler and faster.



Well he did the mistake on a SSD test system. If hes doing that on a test systems i.e. not cleaning it while switching hardware and drivers. Its not far fetched what else has happened we havent had a PSA for.


----------



## john_ (Dec 4, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> FPS depends a lot on the game location, or did he play the benchmark? I use actual gameplay. Cities vs outside huge difference. AC:O is also difficult to repro run-to-run because dynamic weather and other random events


He run the game's benchmark. Ultra settings in game, stock settings for the card and Ryzen, 50 fps at 1440p. Your testing reported 39.6 fps.


----------



## windwhirl (Dec 4, 2020)

Caring1 said:


> The point is, you shouldn't have to uninstall if the software worked correctly.
> That would make swapping components a lot simpler and faster.


I have to agree with this, mostly because of a comment I saw elsewhere:

"Imagine if you had to uninstall drivers every time you plug in a new USB device or it would peg your CPU."


----------



## rutra80 (Dec 4, 2020)

rutra80 said:


> Good find, but what are we expecting from a "driver" that has integrated chromium, phone connectivity, streaming app, animated GIFs writer and other steaming-pile-of-horseshit-bloat??


Also imagine how many vulnerabilities must be in all that crap.


----------



## Emu (Dec 4, 2020)

ScaLibBDP said:


> "RadeonSettings.exe" is Not a driver and it is the cached process. When a user starts the "RadeonSettings.exe" manually to change settings it speeds up loading of UI part of the software.
> 
> >>Looks like AMD is doing things differently and just pre-loads Radeon Settings in the background every time your system is
> >>booted and a user logs in, no matter if AMD graphics hardware is installed or not. It would be trivial to add a check
> ...



A quick look at my Task Scheduler shows 10 entries put there by Nvidia, 4 by Microsoft, 2 by Google (their update service for Chrome), 1 from the developer of the "Control Station" software for my computer and 1 from Adobe (I didn't even realise that I had Adobe Acrobat installed!?).  Pretty sure that Task Scheduler is the new way of starting programs on startup given that I do not even have a "Startup" folder in my Start menu anymore and haven't had one for quite a few years now.  I actually quite like it given that I don't have to drill down into the registry to the "run" key in RegEdit and I can disable the tasks pretty easily if I want to without having to delete anything.


----------



## john_ (Dec 4, 2020)

About Chrome. How about Software Reporter tool ?


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 4, 2020)

theoneandonlymrk said:


> Possibly a little dramatic IMHO.



I consider this completely newsworthy and not at all dramatic.  It makes me wonder what else could be going on in their code, frankly.  No one here seems to be comprehending how amateurish this is.



rutra80 said:


> Also imagine how many vulnerabilities must be in all that crap.



There's already one that was known for 6 months they didn't even patch bother to patch until the 2020 super waterfall release.  I don't imagine they are very strong in that department.


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 4, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> I consider this completely newsworthy and not at all dramatic.  It makes me wonder what else could be going on in their code, frankly.  No one here seems to be comprehending how amateurish this is.


Even though the work-around is simple (uninstall, ddu, etc.), the point of code quality is quite valid considering how many issues they've had with their drivers earlier this year.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 4, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> Even though the work-around is simple (uninstall, ddu, etc.), the point of code quality is quite valid considering how many issues they've had with their drivers earlier this year.



I used an AMD card recently and noticed huge singlethreaded CPU overhead vs NVIDIA.  It really hurt me in Kerbal Space Program, a single threaded game that really needs all that ST performance.

It does make me wonder WTF is going on in there.



Xzibit said:


> As hard as uninstalling software for hardware you don't use apparently



You are missing the point.


----------



## Xzibit (Dec 4, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> You are missing the point.



They point that he was on a test system and didn't clean it properly. He caught the mistake and investigated it.

He can't correct the software side only inform but if hes making similar lapses on a bigger scale well it call into question a lot more things.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 4, 2020)

Xzibit said:


> They point that he was on a test system and didn't clean it properly. He caught the mistake and investigated it.



No the point is this code mistake is so rookie level that it means the drivers likely are chock full of god knows what in terms of code quality.

Or at least, that's what some of us are walking away with.



Xzibit said:


> He can't correct the software side only inform but if hes making similar lapses on a bigger scale well it call into question a lot more things.



lol, no dude.  This one ain't flippable.


----------



## Nephilim666 (Dec 4, 2020)

As someone upgrading from Vega 64 to RTX 3090 (AMD paper launch antics talked me out of 6900XT) I really appreciate this post, I'm terrible at cleaning up unused drivers/apps but I might do a clean win install after seeing this.


----------



## TheGoddessInari (Dec 4, 2020)

It's great that multi-GPU bugs are left in GPU-Z to arm wave about this...?  /s

But seriously, it's the *settings application* getting confused. This has nothing to do with the *driver*, which won't even load if the hardware's not attached. There's nothing stealthy or secret about this. Intel and Nvidia have similar processes that start up.

I like AMD, and they haven't gotten everything right, but at least they support open source, and don't push WBINVD instructions like Nvidia does. Putting all of this hate on them inappropriately is absurd. I really miss when tech journalism was journalism. Investigative, not just someone's personal opinion blog.

TPU is a nice site, but this post is pretty silly. An application that goes with hardware you've uninstalled wasn't removed, and doesn't know the hardware was removed. Big shock. It affects no one in the real world.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 4, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> I consider this completely newsworthy and not at all dramatic.  It makes me wonder what else could be going on in their code, frankly.  *No one here seems to be comprehending how amateurish this is*.
> 
> 
> 
> There's already one that was known for 6 months they didn't even patch bother to patch until the 2020 super waterfall release.  I don't imagine they are very strong in that department.


A few are hammering the message out, it'll get there.

But still.

A few have indeed commented how amateurish it is leaving the installed suite on is too, and yet here we are, last story for the whole weekend and certain to stay on the front page all weekend, interesting time to post it, seems clickbaity and a cry for clicks ,or heated debate but many like that sort of thing eh.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 4, 2020)

theoneandonlymrk said:


> A few are hammering the message out, it'll get there.
> 
> But still.
> 
> A few have indeed commented how amateurish it is leaving the installed suite on is too, and yet here we are, last story for the whole weekend and certain to stay on the front page all weekend, interesting time to post it, seems clickbaity and a cry for clicks ,or heated debate but many like that sort of thing eh.



Maybe.  It is interesting (shocking, rather) to the programmer in me, which may bias me.

But I'd argue that bias is based in knowledge of the issue, which is...  not a good sign?



TheGoddessInari said:


> But seriously, it's the *settings application* getting confused. This has nothing to do with the *driver*



Except they are literally shipped together in the driver installer, which doesn't even provide an option to install them seperately.  That's just trying to play semantics now.  To the end user, it's the same darn thing.



TheGoddessInari said:


> Big shock. It affects no one in the real world.



This might not.  I'm sure based on this finding though there are probably other uglies that really, really do waiting to be discovered.  Makes me glad I jumped.


----------



## ScaLibBDP (Dec 5, 2020)

[ W1zzard ] Wrote:
>>...I wondered why the machine's performance was SO sluggish...

Be careful when doing performance evaluations because such issues could skew results. Please take a look at a Video Technical Report dedicated to performance evaluations and how to do it correctly:

          The Art of Processing Power measurements of a Computer System









Best regards


----------



## srsbsns (Dec 5, 2020)

Here is the problem with this whole thing and the logic involved here. If you don't have an AMD card installed and you try to install the drivers it will stop and not install because there is no compatible device. By installing the drivers using an AMD card then swapping to an Nvidia card you are literally working around what AMD has clearly told you not to do by it's installer giving you a hard stop. Nitpick about code all you want but nothing changes the fact it said "dont do this" and you did it anyway.


You cant fix stupid and this article is just that.


----------



## r9 (Dec 5, 2020)

You better explain yourself what you doing with dual core!


----------



## wiak (Dec 5, 2020)

this reminds me of that time a friend of mine switched from intel 4 core to amd ryzen 1700X 8-core and notice that he didn't get all the performance, it was due to the intel chipset driver had hardcoded the cpu cores to 4 core in msconfig>  boot > advanced


----------



## windwhirl (Dec 5, 2020)

wiak said:


> this reminds me of that time a friend of mine switched from intel 4 core to amd ryzen 1700X 8-core and notice that he didn't get all the performance, it was due to the intel chipset driver had hardcoded the cpu cores to 4 core in msconfig>  boot > advanced


Interesting. I thought the norm was to do a clean install when you switched CPU and motherboard...


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

ScaLibBDP said:


> [ W1zzard ] Wrote:
> >>...I wondered why the machine's performance was SO sluggish...
> 
> Be careful when doing performance evaluations because such issues could skew results. Please take a look at a Video Technical Report dedicated to performance evaluations and how to do it correctly:
> ...



I'm pretty sure W1zzard, who has been doing reviews since before youtube was a thing, is aware.



srsbsns said:


> Here is the problem with this whole thing and the logic involved here. If you don't have an AMD card installed and you try to install the drivers it will stop and not install because there is no compatible device. By installing the drivers using an AMD card then swapping to an Nvidia card you are literally working around what AMD has clearly told you not to do by it's installer giving you a hard stop. Nitpick about code all you want but nothing changes the fact it said "dont do this" and you did it anyway.



So what your saying is: AMD literally tells it's users "never switch brands, it's not supported?"

lol, no they don't and I hope they never do.



r9 said:


> You better explain yourself what you doing with dual core!



Irritating irritable people, aparently?



windwhirl said:


> Interesting. I thought the norm was to do a clean install when you switched CPU and motherboard...



I've also used near all intel cpus and chipset combos and can't recall any doing what he said.  If true, it sounds like a vendor modification.


----------



## Dave65 (Dec 5, 2020)

Vya Domus said:


> Or ...
> 
> Just remove the driver before changing the GPU ?



Not as fun as bashing AMD!


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> You cant fix stupid and this article is just that.



Yeah, no.  He gave a detailed breakdown of what and why it's stupid and I think you just got confused.  That's fine.


----------



## srsbsns (Dec 5, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> Yeah, no.  He gave a detailed breakdown of what and why it's stupid and I think you just got confused.  That's fine.



It doesn't care about the why. Its software. You can explain why you tried using an unsupported graphics card all day but it doesnt change anything. AMD might need to patent some sort of mechanism that comes out of the PC and slaps the GPU out of your hand. Until that time comes software can only stop you from installing when you have an incompatible GPU in.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> It doesn't care about the why. It was boneheaded with good intentions. Software dont care about intentions.



Software should always consider the user.

Software should never use bad coding practices as we just saw.  Waiting for infinity without a timeout or throttle delay can die in a dumpsterfire.  I have no idea what a loop like that is doing in a commercial product of any grade.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 5, 2020)

This will mostly affect benchmarkers, end users changing hardware, or people with laptops


It's a bug not a conspiracy, but making waves about it is the quickest way to get it fixed


----------



## windwhirl (Dec 5, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> It doesn't care about the why. Its software. You can explain why you tried using an unsupported graphics card all day but it doesnt change anything. AMD might need to patent some sort of mechanism that comes out of the PC and slaps the GPU out of your hand. Until that time comes software can only stop you from installing when you have an incompatible GPU in.


I'll just repeat myself here:


windwhirl said:


> "Imagine if you had to uninstall drivers every time you plug in a new USB device or it would peg your CPU."


----------



## zenlaserman (Dec 5, 2020)

I'm really disappointed that this FUD-inducing "PSA" was written up just because RadeonSettings.exe happened to "hang" on a system.

I've used Radeons almost exclusively for over 15 years, and while AMD software is far from perfect, I've never had serious problems with it.  Heck, I've had 3 different All-In-Wonder cards - THOSE were touchy when it came to software.  I had several twin-GPU cards where one GPU had to be disabled to get playable framerates.  I had far more problems with nVidia's software and the GeForces I ran than I ever did with Catalyst and beyond.

It's basic PC to open Task Manager and kill the offending process when one's at 100% (or pegging a core) for no apparent reason.  SMH.


----------



## ityrant (Dec 5, 2020)

xkm1948 said:


> do while loop looking for input. Lazy coding?
> 
> Who is writing RTG Graphics driver nowadays?  I remember reading somewhere that almost all of Radeon's current driver at least coming from AMD Shanghai.
> 
> ...



Ah, the AMD Shanghai team seems to be only responsible for the Linux driver, so why bother to let this Windows culprit go?


----------



## Imsochobo (Dec 5, 2020)

Nater said:


> So are you saying there's potentially millions of machines out there with one core at 100% load 24/7?  I'll have to look at my kids i7 920/RX580 rig tonight.  Losing 25% of his horsepower would be brutal.



I've never had this issue, or any issues apart from the first month coming back to amd in 2017 (came from driver issues on nvidia), first month of vega was brutal.


----------



## marios15 (Dec 5, 2020)

I must be getting old, but everytime i change motherboard/cpu/gpu or windows version i always do a clean install.
Regarding usb...try plugging different types of devices that *require *drivers *on the same usb port *without uninstalling the old drivers.
I will never forget the countless blue screens in old windows(7 and earlier) and even now there can be some odd problems when you make changes.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

zenlaserman said:


> I'm really disappointed that this FUD-inducing "PSA" was written up just because RadeonSettings.exe happened to "hang" on a system.
> 
> I've used Radeons almost exclusively for over 15 years, and while AMD software is far from perfect, I've never had serious problems with it.  Heck, I've had 3 different All-In-Wonder cards - THOSE were touchy when it came to software.  I had several twin-GPU cards where one GPU had to be disabled to get playable framerates.  I had far more problems with nVidia's software and the GeForces I ran than I ever did with Catalyst and beyond.
> 
> It's basic PC to open Task Manager and kill the offending process when one's at 100% (or pegging a core) for no apparent reason.  SMH.



He decompiled the program to show why and how this happens.  Just because it hasn't happened to you (it wouldn't if you are an AMD loyalist) does not mean the problem does not happen.


----------



## hurakura (Dec 5, 2020)

So AMD bad, Intel and nVidia good. This is BS article to make AMD look bad. Why do you have drivers installed for a hardware not in the PC? I guess next to test is nVidia driver on a system whit Intel CPU and AMD gpu?


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 5, 2020)

Looks like Wizzard kicked over a hornets nest before leaving for the weekend.


----------



## Khonjel (Dec 5, 2020)

B-Real said:


> 1. Remember the WHQL certified NV driver that made Watch Dogs 2 instantly crash on start or even won't allow to start it?
> 2. The Chrome video playback problems with WHQL NV driveres not too long ago?
> 3. The RTX 3000 series drivers at the beginning?


That is whataboutism. Realistically speaking Nvidia has few duds in their drivers, yes. But comparatively AMD has few working bug-free drivers. I'm said ut before and saying it again now, if CPUs were driver-dependent like GPUs, Ryzen couldn't do anything to turn AMD's fortune.


----------



## HisDivineOrder (Dec 5, 2020)

Bad drivers has been a bane of the Radeon line for as long as it's been around. ATI had problems and AMD seems to have more. If they want to be taken seriously, they should fix the intangibles like drivers and their encoders and the like. Otherwise, they look great until people start trying to use their cards to do anything except get framerates in benchmarks.


----------



## srsbsns (Dec 5, 2020)

hurakura said:


> So AMD bad, Intel and nVidia good. This is BS article to make AMD look bad. Why do you have drivers installed for a hardware not in the PC? I guess next to test is nVidia driver on a system whit Intel CPU and AMD gpu?



He literally put the system into an unsupported configuration then gets puzzled by issues. The installer stops you from installing if it cant detect a compatible GPU but he found the work around. Rather than admit his mistake he then tries to spin to into some news item. This is some end user level stuff if I ever saw it.


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 5, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> He literally put the system into an unsupported configuration then gets puzzled by issues. The installer stops you from installing if it cant detect a compatible GPU but he found the work around. Rather than admit his mistake he then tries to spin to into some news item. This is some end user level stuff if I ever saw it.


You really think an average user cannot find himself/herself in the same situation?


----------



## Dave65 (Dec 5, 2020)

hurakura said:


> So AMD bad, Intel and nVidia good. This is BS article to make AMD look bad. Why do you have drivers installed for a hardware not in the PC? I guess next to test is nVidia driver on a system whit Intel CPU and AMD gpu?



Exactly right!


----------



## Xzibit (Dec 5, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> You really think an average user cannot find himself/herself in the same situation?



I look forward to the accompanied PSAs.

Logitech G-HUB still running if Logitech mouse isn't being used
Corsair iCUE still runs if Ducky Keyboard is used
Razers synapse still runs after a week of headphones not being used
etc..


----------



## 1sanpedro1 (Dec 5, 2020)

This article is such crap.  Usually I like reading techpowerup, but a professional video card reviewer who doesn't do a DDU when switching GPUs???  Then saying there is a definite performance drop, 150 vs 151, a whole .5%.  That sounds within margin of error.  To top it off, there's no test to see if this is true going from Nvidia to AMD.  

Then there are people on here who seem to believe that there's no need to uninstall drivers for major hardware changes.  I'm sorry, but a GPU is a major hardware change.  Do you guys also not cleanup your systems when you change from CPU vendors or change chipsets?


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 5, 2020)

1sanpedro1 said:


> This article is such crap.  Usually I like reading techpowerup, but a professional video card reviewer who doesn't do a DDU when switching GPUs???  Then saying there is a definite performance drop, 150 vs 151, a whole .5%.  That sounds within margin of error.  To top it off, there's no test to see if this is true going from Nvidia to AMD.
> 
> Then there are people on here who seem to believe that there's no need to uninstall drivers for major hardware changes.  I'm sorry, but a GPU is a major hardware change.  Do you guys also not cleanup your systems when you change from CPU vendors or change chipsets?


Are you suggesting that Wizzard shouldn't have discovered this rogue behavior that could have plagued regular users, who fall within the possibility of your question that some do not clean up their systems, whatever their reason may be?


----------



## srsbsns (Dec 5, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> Are you suggesting that Wizzard shouldn't have discovered this rogue behavior that could have plagued regular users, who fall within the possibility of your question that some do not clean up their systems, whatever their reason may be?



That goal post just keeps moving.


----------



## employee24601 (Dec 5, 2020)

Khonjel said:


> God! The more I browse the internet the more I come to know that AMD software sucks.


I've much respect for AMD given how much they've improved their hardware in recent years, but software-wise they've got a LONG way to go.


----------



## Khonjel (Dec 5, 2020)

employee24601 said:


> I've much respect for AMD given how much they've improved their hardware in recent years, but software-wise they've got a LONG way to go.


I've just accepted that they'll never invest software-wise and will always be lagging behind not just Nvidia but also Intel. They won't disappoint me if I never expect anything.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 5, 2020)

I really don't think AMD did this deliberately. It's got to be an unintentional problem...



Khonjel said:


> I've just accepted that they'll never invest software-wise and will always be lagging behind not just Nvidia but also Intel.


No. Just no. No hardware maker has ever had a perfect track record for their drivers and software suites. However, few have ever failed to to provide fixes and updates.


----------



## wolf (Dec 5, 2020)

hurakura said:


> So AMD bad, Intel and nVidia good. This is BS article to make AMD look bad.


I don't even know where to start with this one... but if your accusing @W1zzard of being a 'shill' and having no intention other than dumping on AMD to make them look bad, you don't know his standards very well.

This sort of constructive journalism gets issues *fixed.*


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 5, 2020)

wolf said:


> I don't even know where to start with this one... but if your accusing @W1zzard of being a 'shill' and having no intention other than dumping on AMD to make them look bad, you don't know his standards very well.
> 
> This sort of constructive journalism gets issues *fixed.*


No one can call W1z a shill, he's way too objective. This is a flat-out weird-as-hell glitch/bug discovery. AMD will fix this, but they needed the nitty-gritty break-down like this to know what to look at and what to fix... 
@hurakura you need to stop that nonsense, you're embarrassing yourself.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> Looks like Wizzard kicked over a hornets nest before leaving for the weekend.



I think maybe that's why he timed it how he did.

Fanboyism can be a vicious, blinding thing.



lexluthermiester said:


> I really don't think AMD did this deliberately. It's got to be an unintentional problem...



Oh it's completely unintentional, but that doesn't make it any less stupid.

For a rather extreme analogy, Chernobyl was unintentional.  It was also completely brought about by lax practices.


----------



## Khonjel (Dec 5, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> I really don't think AMD did this deliberately. It's got to be an unintentional problem...
> 
> 
> No. Just no. No hardware maker has ever had a perfect track record for their drivers and software suites. However, few have ever failed to to provide fixes and updates.


You don't get me. When I see AMD's lacklustre Ray Tracing presentation and support in games I'm not disappointed. If AMD's DLSS counterpart sucks I won't be disappointed. It's AMD after all. AMD never invested in Crossfire so much that SLI is synonymous with multi-GPU, I never cared. It's AMD after all. AMD never had good OpenGL and DirectX 11 drivers but I wasn't disappointed, it's AMD after all. This guy in our forum can't play his games right now. I'm not disappointed cause it's AMD after all. This guy sold his 5600 XT after battling with issues for a year and I'm not disappointed. It's AMD after all. AMD locked 6800 XT to 2.8 Ghz and 6900 XT to 3.0 Ghz when they could literally have overclocking champs. Buildzoid the self-proclaimed AMD fan might be disappointed, der8auer could be disappointed but I'm not.

I just automatically set my expectations and hopes low for any AMD Radeon product.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

Khonjel said:


> I just automatically set my expectations and hopes low for any AMD Radeon product.



And that's not really much wiser than expecting it always to be the best.

I don't expect much of anything.  I research and buy.  And research like this makes me glad I avoided a potential virtual landmine.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 5, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> Oh it's completely unintentional, but that doesn't make it any less stupid.


The more I look at the details the more I think it's an honest mistake, not a stupid one. Probably easily corrected with a quick patch.


R-T-B said:


> For a rather extreme analogy, Chernobyl was unintentional. It was also completely brought about by lax practices.


Yup, that's out there... 


Khonjel said:


> You don't get me.


No, I got you. I think you're not being very objective and holding a grudge.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> Yup, that's out there...



lol, Didn't say it wasn't, but it's the same degree of facepalm inducing error that you know was followed by others.

The shoe fits on the error foot, if not the severity one.


----------



## Khonjel (Dec 5, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> No, I got you. I think you're not being very objective and holding a grudge.


I'm not claiming to be the bastion of objectivity. But yes I know that everyone fucks up software sometimes. And otoh AMD produces good software sometimes. Anyway I'll end this back-and-forth. It's going nowhere.


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 5, 2020)

Xzibit said:


> Well he did the mistake on a SSD test system. If hes doing that on a test systems i.e. not cleaning it while switching hardware and drivers. Its not far fetched what else has happened we havent had a PSA for.


Of course I didn't test (benchmark) anything like that, you think I don't know? I tested a new build of GPU-Z using Remote Debugger, on NVIDIA, to check some code changes. Benchmark performance is irrelevant in this case



john_ said:


> He run the game's benchmark. Ultra settings in game, stock settings for the card and Ryzen, 50 fps at 1440p. Your testing reported 39.6 fps.


The benchmark is useless, it does not represent actual gaming performance. Play the game, stand in Athens, what's the FPS? Turn around, what's the FPS now?



TheGoddessInari said:


> An application that goes with hardware you've uninstalled wasn't removed, and doesn't know the hardware was removed


Of course it can know that the hardware isn't present anymore. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this problem at all. The DVR software does check for AMD hardware and doesn't start, the Settings software does not, and waits forever for the DVR software to start.



TheGoddessInari said:


> multi-GPU bugs are left in GPU-Z


More details please, ideally in the GPU-Z bug report forum.



ScaLibBDP said:


> Be careful when doing performance evaluations because such issues could skew results


They definitely will, which is why I mentioned the 0.5% FPS difference even on a 8c/16t system. I wouldn't be surprised if this affected some less experienced reviewers. As mentioned above I did not benchmark anything on this dual-core machine.



r9 said:


> You better explain yourself what you doing with dual core!


See beginning of this post. It's an old system that's useful to have around, and it works surprisingly well for these tasks.



srsbsns said:


> It doesn't care about the why. Its software. You can explain why you tried using an unsupported graphics card all day but it doesnt change anything. AMD might need to patent some sort of mechanism that comes out of the PC and slaps the GPU out of your hand. Until that time comes software can only stop you from installing when you have an incompatible GPU in.


This is not how it works. Windows enumerates all hardware on bootup and does not load drivers for devices that are not present. Go to Device Manager and check "Show Hidden Devices". All these devices are "installed" in your system, and have the driver ready to go.



Mussels said:


> It's a bug not a conspiracy





lexluthermiester said:


> I really don't think AMD did this deliberately. It's got to be an unintentional problem...


Of course not, this is just a mistake



hurakura said:


> I guess next to test is nVidia driver on a system whit Intel CPU and AMD gpu?


That's a great idea. If I find something, do you want me to post an article?


----------



## _Flare (Dec 5, 2020)

When ReLive was invented it made some problems around 2018 or so.
after quick googling i found this





						AMD Relive: Host Application High CPU Usage
					

Having an issue with high cpu usage on driver 18.4.1. Task manager shows 30% cpu usage. Now the problem persists with previous relive drivers, 18.3.1, 18.2.1. The only solution is to end task or rename dvrcmd.exe so it wont execute. HWInfo64 doesn't install since this issue came up.  Gigabyte...




					community.amd.com
				



back in the day some pointed at this problem only coming up when intel igpu is present. Some needed to delete the DVR exe. in C:/program files/AMD/C Next/Cnext
Some even couldn´t install HWinfo after that problem occured.
i my head was until today my own reminder: Dont install ReLive ever.


----------



## kruk (Dec 5, 2020)

@W1zzard: I somehow can't reply or quote directly, so I'm just pasting it:



> You're probably asking now, "what if the event never gets created?" Exactly, your program will be hung, forever, caught in an infinite loop. The correct way to implement this code is to either set a time limit for how long the loop should run, or count the number of runs and give up after 100, 1000, 1 million, you pick a number—but it's important to set a reasonable limit.



Yes, the segment should definitely stop after reaching a threshold, but what if this check was always performed elsewhere and was removed at some point? Then the programmer that wrote this section didn't do anything wrong. In large codebases with big teams, this can happen. It could be a simple communication error ... Since QA probably doesn't test this on computers without Radeon GPUs, it's easy to see why it went undetected.

I hope you reported the bug ...



> A more subtle effect of this kind of busy waiting is that it will run as fast as the processor can, loading one core to 100%. While that might be desirable if you have to be able to react VERY quickly to something, there's no reason to do that here. The typical approach is to add a short bit of delay inside the loop, which tells the operating system and processor "hey, I'm waiting on something and don't need CPU time, you may run another application now or reduce power". Modern processors will adjust their frequency when lightly loaded, and even power down cores completely, to conserve energy and reduce heat output. Even a delay of one millisecond will make a huge difference here.



That is fine in theory, but what if debounced listener has problems catching the signals? Then this process might take even longer or be stuck in an infinite loop forever even if you have a Radeon GPU. Just a guess ...


----------



## Frick (Dec 5, 2020)

1sanpedro1 said:


> This article is such crap.  Usually I like reading techpowerup, but a professional video card reviewer who doesn't do a DDU when switching GPUs???  Then saying there is a definite performance drop, 150 vs 151, a whole .5%.  That sounds within margin of error.  To top it off, there's no test to see if this is true going from Nvidia to AMD.
> 
> Then there are people on here who seem to believe that there's no need to uninstall drivers for major hardware changes.  I'm sorry, but a GPU is a major hardware change.  Do you guys also not cleanup your systems when you change from CPU vendors or change chipsets?



I've swapped systems entirely without reinstalling Windows (10), sometimes it has worked fine, sometimes less fine. I long for the day I never have to reinstall Windows again, but stuff like this highlights that we're not there yet and may never be.


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 5, 2020)

kruk said:


> That is fine in theory, but what if debounced listener has problems catching the signals?


Not 100% sure what you are asking, but the OS makes certain guarantees about Events, they are unique and thread-safe


----------



## TheGoddessInari (Dec 5, 2020)

> More details please, ideally in the GPU-Z bug report forum.



You commented on the bug several times, and said GPU reporting 0/0mhz values on Vega cards in multi-GPU configs wasn't an issue with your software (and only your software specifically, everything else has no issues), while leaving it unfixed forever.

You're really doing a bang-up job with this "unbiased" thing.

Next are you going to write a hitpiece about ARM and Android, while saying that iOS devices are absolutely not locked down?


----------



## laszlo (Dec 5, 2020)

even an inexperienced user won't install amd drivers for nv card ...only if he really don't know the difference

when changing gpu and manufacturer the old driver usually is uninstalled(by user-edited for any misunderstanding...)  but it may happen to remain...

this issue may affect mostly the reviewers if they just swap the cards in the test system


----------



## john_ (Dec 5, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> The benchmark is useless, it does not represent actual gaming performance. Play the game, stand in Athens, what's the FPS? Turn around, what's the FPS now?



When comparing GPUs the whole story is to compare them under the same conditions and with the same parameters. You said that



W1zzard said:


> FPS depends a lot on the game location, or did he play the benchmark? I use actual gameplay. *Cities vs outside huge difference*. AC:O *is also difficult to repro run-to-run* because dynamic weather and other random events



When you point at those difficulties in getting accurate readings, I believe you have to use the benchmark. Even if you don't like it. Because you want to compare video cards, or cpus under the absolute  same conditions. You do extra performance tests when you are reviewing the game to see how specific hardware, does in all those different situations and how the game's graphic engine performs in different areas of the game. In a city with multiple NPCs visible, in the woods with plenty of vegetation, in an open field with just that dynamic weather. Running the game under a specific scenario, for example in a city, could be making it more CPU bound giving an extra advantage in high IPC CPUs, in the woods maybe it needs higher memory bandwidth from the graphics card favoring those cards and in an open field maybe it can hide in a small degree the differences in performance between different hardware because the scene is less demanding from both CPU and GPU.


----------



## 0x4452 (Dec 5, 2020)

laszlo said:


> this issue may affect mostly the reviewers if they just swap the cards in the test system



I think that's a very good point. If a reviewer just swaps GPUs without uninstalling drivers, the NVIDIA card will be disadvantaged because the AMD driver will hose up a CPU core.


----------



## TheGoddessInari (Dec 5, 2020)

0x4452 said:


> I think that's a very good point. If a reviewer just swaps GPUs without uninstalling drivers, the NVIDIA card will be disadvantaged because the AMD driver will hose up a CPU core.


If a reviewer does this, they're literally not doing their *job*, and would get fired.


----------



## turbogear (Dec 5, 2020)

I always use DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) before I change my GPU especially when switching from AMD to NVIDIA  or vise versa. 

Of course that would be horror cenario for W1zzard who is testing lot of cards and uninstalling drivers after every GPU change will be terrible. 

I did the same when I went from Radeon VII to 6800XT although on the same drive version for both but looking at for example Wattman I see that 6800XT has completely different menu.
I am not sure if the Radeon Software would do proper setting if I would have just switched cards without uninstalling driver first though installing back same version again. 
In any case I did not wanted to take the risk of having unexplained problems.


----------



## efikkan (Dec 5, 2020)

hurakura said:


> So AMD bad, Intel and nVidia good. This is BS article to make AMD look bad. Why do you have drivers installed for a hardware not in the PC? I guess next to test is nVidia driver on a system whit Intel CPU and AMD gpu?


So should we avoid showcasing bugs for AMD then, just in case you fanboys can't handle it? 



1sanpedro1 said:


> This article is such crap.  Usually I like reading techpowerup, but a professional video card reviewer who doesn't do a DDU when switching GPUs???


He provided a disassembly of a bug, then provided a translation to C for clarity along with an explanation.
This is article is far more advanced than most other tech sites would publish, even the renowned Anandtech's "in-depth" articles usually only scratches the surface, and only sound _technical_ to non-engineers.



1sanpedro1 said:


> Then there are people on here who seem to believe that there's no need to uninstall drivers for major hardware changes.  I'm sorry, but a GPU is a major hardware change.  Do you guys also not cleanup your systems when you change from CPU vendors or change chipsets?


You must be kidding, right?
Do you really expect every user to know how to use DDU when switching GPUs? Then at least shouldn't this be shown as a big disclaimer before buying such products?



lexluthermiester said:


> I really don't think AMD did this deliberately. It's got to be an unintentional problem...


In 99.999% of cases such bugs are accidents, negligence, incompetence, etc.
I seriously hope no one in here thinks such bugs are intentional.



laszlo said:


> when changing gpu and manufacturer the old driver usually is uninstalled but it may happen to remain...


What? 
It's not uncommon for developers to have multiple GPUs from different makers.

If a system is "broken" because a driver is not uninstalled, then the driver is broken, end of discussion.


----------



## laszlo (Dec 5, 2020)

efikkan said:


> What?
> It's not uncommon for developers to have multiple GPUs from different makers.
> 
> If a system is "broken" because a driver is not uninstalled, then the driver is broken, end of discussion.



you have on your pc 2 dedicated gpu's one amd and one nv?

we don't know if this behavior also appear on system with amd apu's mixed with dedicated nv gpu  so we need feedback from people in this situation... not valid as hardware is always there so no conflict...


----------



## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 5, 2020)

I gave up trying to read everything, so Ill just say this... Thanks @W1zzard for doing this.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 5, 2020)

Khonjel said:


> You don't get me. When I see AMD's lacklustre Ray Tracing presentation and support in games I'm not disappointed. If AMD's DLSS counterpart sucks I won't be disappointed. It's AMD after all. AMD never invested in Crossfire so much that SLI is synonymous with multi-GPU, I never cared. It's AMD after all. AMD never had good OpenGL and DirectX 11 drivers but I wasn't disappointed, it's AMD after all. This guy in our forum can't play his games right now. I'm not disappointed cause it's AMD after all. This guy sold his 5600 XT after battling with issues for a year and I'm not disappointed. It's AMD after all. AMD locked 6800 XT to 2.8 Ghz and 6900 XT to 3.0 Ghz when they could literally have overclocking champs. Buildzoid the self-proclaimed AMD fan might be disappointed, der8auer could be disappointed but I'm not.
> 
> I just automatically set my expectations and hopes low for any AMD Radeon product.



You think gaming on 8GB of ram is AMD's fault?

Perhaps you're biased and reaching for examples...



laszlo said:


> you have on your pc 2 dedicated gpu's one amd and one nv?
> 
> we don't know if this behavior also appear on system with amd apu's mixed with dedicated nv gpu  so we need feedback from people in this situation... not valid as hardware is always there so no conflict...



I totally have a few times, it's called onboard graphics. i've also done it before testing GPU's, VBIOS flashing, etc etc. It's not common for a home user, but its also commonly problem free


----------



## Flaky (Dec 5, 2020)

wolf said:


> This sort of constructive journalism gets issues *fixed.*


This!

Sad but true - bad press is often the only way to force corporations to fix their products. When contacted directly by user, they'll either not respond, straight up deny existence of a problem, or forward to customer support, with endless loop of "did you try to turn it off and on" and "did you try uninstalling and installing"...
And it doesn't matter if that's a bug affecting performance, or a security vulnerability.
There's no such thing as being nice. Bug? Make it loud. Vulnerability? Send emails to appropriate places, and file a CVE with 90 days disclosure deadline.



laszlo said:


> when changing gpu and manufacturer the old driver usually is uninstalled but it may happen to remain...


"is"? Driver package doesn't uninstall itself automagically. The driver itself (.sys file) isn't loaded by OS when there's no GPU, but the settings app and services are still run in background.


----------



## laszlo (Dec 5, 2020)

Mussels said:


> You think gaming on 8GB of ram is AMD's fault?
> 
> Perhaps you're biased and reaching for examples...
> 
> ...



onboard graphic don't count in this case as hardware wise is always present so driver or not it can't create any issues



Flaky said:


> This!
> 
> Sad but true - bad press is often the only way to force corporations to fix their products. When contacted directly by user, they'll either not respond, straight up deny existence of a problem, or forward to customer support, with endless loop of "did you try to turn it off and on" and "did you try uninstalling and installing"...
> And it doesn't matter if that's a bug affecting performance, or a security vulnerability.
> ...



i'm aware it won't uninstall by itself but user can do it and when changing manufacturer is common sens no?


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 5, 2020)

john_ said:


> When you point at those difficulties in getting accurate readings, I believe you have to use the benchmark. Even if you don't like it. Because you want to compare video cards, or cpus under the absolute  same conditions. You do extra performance tests when you are reviewing the game to see how specific hardware, does in all those different situations and how the game's graphic engine performs in different areas of the game. In a city with multiple NPCs visible, in the woods with plenty of vegetation, in an open field with just that dynamic weather. Running the game under a specific scenario, for example in a city, could be making it more CPU bound giving an extra advantage in high IPC CPUs, in the woods maybe it needs higher memory bandwidth from the graphics card favoring those cards and in an open field maybe it can hide in a small degree the differences in performance between different hardware because the scene is less demanding from both CPU and GPU.


I guess this will end up "agree to disagree", but for everyone else:

I do compare them under the same conditions, using my own test scene. I played through the whole game to pick that scene, and I do claim my results will give you a more accurate representation than the benchmark of what to expect when you play the game. Obviously you can always pick a spot in any game that will give you different results than any other result. If you prefer to play the benchmark, so be it, look at other reviews. Don't you think my life would be MUCH easier if I just tested the benchmark, vs playing the same scene for hundreds of times? Another problem with nearly every integrated benchmark is that you are taking results off a cold card, which will boost much higher. For 30 seconds, and then performance drops. Ask your favorite reviewers about that.

Ultimately you'll have to trust me a little bit to do the right thing, if you don't, then you should absolutely not read my reviews.



Flaky said:


> but the settings app and services are still run in background.


By default, Windows will not start anything in background for non-present devices. You actually have to do work (and not care about your non-customers) to launch something, separately from the OS logic


----------



## laszlo (Dec 5, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> I guess this will end up "agree to disagree", but for everyone else:
> 
> I do compare them under the same conditions, using my own test scene. I played through the whole game to pick that scene, and I do claim my results will give you a more accurate representation than the benchmark of what to expect when you play the game. Obviously you can always pick a spot in any game that will give you different results than any other result. If you prefer to play the benchmark, so be it, look at other reviews. Don't you think my life would be MUCH easier if I just tested the benchmark, vs playing the same scene for hundreds of times? Another problem with nearly every integrated benchmark is that you are taking results off a cold card, which will boost much higher. For 30 seconds, and then performance drops. Ask your favorite reviewers about that.
> 
> ...



@W1zzard  is this "bug" present in older driver also or it can be pinned exactly from when appeared if case?


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 5, 2020)

laszlo said:


> @W1zzard  is this "bug" present in older driver also or it can be pinned exactly from when appeared if case?


I haven't checked, discovered it on 20.11.2 and only verified the newer drivers in case AMD fixed it in the meantime


----------



## xantippe666 (Dec 5, 2020)

Divide Overflow said:


> Someone figured out that running a driver for incorrect hardware can be an issue.



Ha, you won the Internet for today, sir.


----------



## Vayra86 (Dec 5, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> Maybe they can't find good graphics driver engineers in US/CA, they do not exactly grow on trees.



Mhm yeah they also totally havent been making and hopefully nurturing a driver team since forever, right?

This is inexcusable for such a big company. The only reason is what we have always suspected: lack of talent is cheaper. Its how they have kept both AMD and RTG afloat with minimal expense.

Its a trend, not an occurrence. And AMD condones the shit quality code. Driver and microcode oopsies happen all the time. *Fix* *forward* seems to be the approach and overall strategy. It is for that reason also that such anomalies in code exists. The impossible was forced to possible with dirty tricks. If you roll back and fix, you dont need those.









						Service Recovery: Rolling Back vs. Forward Fixing
					

This post addresses two different methods, fixing forward and rolling back, to recover from failures and errors, in production and during development. First, let's establish a set of tenets that pertain to service recovery: Do It Right the First Time Recovery should be an event rather than business




					www.linkedin.com


----------



## RainingTacco (Dec 5, 2020)

I see hiring cheap indians really paid off AMD! ᕙ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕗ


----------



## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 5, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> This is inexcusable for such a big company. The only reason is what we have always suspected: lack of talent is cheaper. Its how they have kept both AMD and RTG afloat with minimal expense.


I think thats called outsourcing here.


----------



## Vayra86 (Dec 5, 2020)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> I think thats called outsourcing here.



Yep and we are as customers way too lenient on the results of that business approach. Complexity = up, overall quality = down.

We see this with *many* software suppliers... and it fits well with us doing beta testing for  free or even at cost, if you consider early access.

Ridiculous and Im not accepting it. Shit code? No buy


----------



## GreiverBlade (Dec 5, 2020)

oh well, not uninstalling driver lead to issues... who knews ... 



more seriously, hummm not a good thing indeed but nothing to scream at AMD who is doing quite fine this year and compared to Nv i will write it again : on AMD i had never to rollback a driver but once (the famous "ZOMGZOMG TEH NEW DIRVER WIL KEEL JOR R9 290!!!!" although not really a rollback ... as usual with drivers i let 3-5 weeks before updating, so, if any issues pop up, i stay on the previous one) on Nvidia? CTD TDR whatever you name it... always using a 6 month older driver than the current new one ... cool right? 


well once the price madness will settle down ... i still think a 5600X (or above) and a RX 6800 (XT or heck even a RX 5700 XT would be an upgrade in my case ) are still in order ... 


(for the fanboy calls ... please read my sys spec before blurting ineptness  )


----------



## medi01 (Dec 5, 2020)

So this is settings software, not driver, tested in a weird condition (card by another manufacturer).

I doubt QA of any of any of the 3: Intel, AMD, Nvidia would bother checking that weird  use case, mostly applicable to a small group called reviewers (and no, not to PC enthusiasts as those tend to reinstall entire windows system, and certainly the drivers)

Let's bitch about "AMD drivers" now, shall we, *green FUD* was not as intense recently, let's make up for it.

Something something, DLSS is better than 4k if you ignore blur and detail loss, something, something but RT in a handful of games is so very important, something.



W1zzard said:


> I'm more of an IDA user


That stuff was always from "way too expensive" territory for me (on top of lack of reverse-engi-ng x86 code skills).
I know people who wrote decompilers of ECMAScript like language by just examining ARM code disassembly... to me it is some unholy magic.


----------



## BiggieShady (Dec 5, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> By default, Windows will not start anything in background for non-present devices. You actually have to do work (and not care about your non-customers) to launch something, separately from the OS logic


It seems like they chose a complete wrong part of the boot process to do any kind of initialization of a feature such as video streaming... the lifecycle part when you don't know either if device exists and it's not yet loaded, or it doesn't exist and it will never be loaded. I thought that's why drivers are separated into modules/containers, so that one module at the last boot lifecycle step initializes/activates everything safely.


----------



## Cidious (Dec 5, 2020)

I'm so confused about the point of this issue.. why would you have the driver installed without a radeon card? Drama queen...


----------



## cueman (Dec 5, 2020)

amd gpu drivers are usual BETA ones, but nvidia WHQL certified.


sure if drivers are beta, they are not ready,they are under testing and finalysing...

also dont waiste your time to get your 3Dmarks score for HOF table or any table there. cant,must be WHQL certified.

just thinking, why release out beta drivers? why??


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

That’s so typical of AMD drivers...
They have excellent hardware engineers, but very poor software developers.



Cidious said:


> I'm so confused about the point of this issue.. why would you have the driver installed without a radeon card? Drama queen...


Easy. You had a Radeon card (i.e. an old 480) and upgraded the system with an Nvidia GPU (i.e. a GFX 1660 Super).


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 5, 2020)

cueman said:


> amd gpu drivers are usual BETA ones, but nvidia WHQL certified.
> 
> 
> sure if drivers are beta, they are not ready,they are under testing and finalysing...
> ...


To support new game's and fix issues.

And so that driver change can be further tested by a larger demographic, you aren't forced to use betas and of course AMD releases whql driver's like wut the fff.

So a few external Devs loose work over this hyperbolic tension, just uninstall the driver's, it's not rocket science.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Dec 5, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> It seems like pretty specialized subject, not something for your average programmer. Nvidia probably hoard them all anyway


Apparently Nvidia is just hoarding them, as you say, instead of actually having them write code, because they have had numerous bad drivers the last 5 years...on the order of 3 or 4 a year.



srsbsns said:


> You cant fix stupid and this article is just that


For you to think that, you literally have no clue about him.


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

theoneandonlymrk said:


> So a few external Devs loose work over this hyperbolic tension, just uninstall the driver's, it's not rocket science.



it's not rocket science maybe, except AMD developers aren't able to fix a very basic issue (you don't have the hardware, don't load the driver).
Not every user is aware of this problem. But AMD developers should be.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Dec 5, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> Rather than admit his mistake he then tries to spin to into some news item. This is some end user level stuff if I ever saw it.


Apparently you have reading comprehension issues. His article clearly said he made a user-level mistake. Go back and try again. His investigation, code breakdown, and further, the programs he has written as well as his history of testing clearly show he is well above a standard level of intelligence and competence.

This is the kind of thing that average users do in large numbers every year.  So yes, this information is useful, worth reading, and hopefully educating some of those many users who will do internet searches for the exact same type problem.


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 5, 2020)

Max(IT) said:


> it's not rocket science maybe, except AMD developers *aren't able to fix a very basic issue *(you don't have the hardware, don't load the driver).
> *Not every user is aware of this problem*. But AMD developers should be.


Hyperbolic Bs in bold, aren't able ,,balls they weren't aware and should definitely now be.

Hell no most, like 90% of users couldn't tell you what GPU is in the prebuilt they bought.
Out of the 10% that do how many are getting tripped over by this issue?! , Not many at all like in the few 0.0001%, probably less, Drammaaa.

AMD need to fix this shit no doubt but get a grip ,of that 10% , those that do upgrade GPU ,do typically do so correctly.

Not like this.


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

theoneandonlymrk said:


> Hyperbolic Bs in bold, aren't able ,,balls they weren't aware and should definitely now be.
> 
> Hell no most, like 90% of users couldn't tell you what GPU is in the prebuilt they bought.
> Out of the 10% that do how many are getting tripped over by this issue?! , Not many at all like in the few 0.0001%, probably less, Drammaaa.
> ...


why do you fell the need to defend AMD on every matter, even when they clearly are wrong like this, is something beyond my understanding...


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 5, 2020)

Max(IT) said:


> why you fell the need to defend AMD on every matter, even when they clearly are wrong like this, is something beyond my understanding...


I said they need to fix this issue.

I took issues with your hyperbolic statement.

Why do you feel the need to throw hyperbolic statements out?.


And wtaf anyway I don't even post in every AMD thread unlike your neg AMD pro Intel self.


----------



## JMccovery (Dec 5, 2020)

Max(IT) said:


> Easy. You had a Radeon card (i.e. an old 480) and upgraded the system with an Nvidia GPU (i.e. a GFX 1660 Super).



Who swaps things like GPUs without uninstalling the drivers and/or software first? That should be basic knowledge for people who know how to change parts.


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

theoneandonlymrk said:


> I said they need to fix this issue.
> 
> I took issues with your hyperbolic statement.
> 
> ...




from the article itself:



> _If you're a programmer you'd have /facepalm'd by now_



quite clearly you are not.
This is an amateurish mistake. There is no "hyperbolic statements" pointing this out.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Dec 5, 2020)

JMccovery said:


> Who swaps things like GPUs without uninstalling the drivers and/or software first? That should be basic knowledge for people who know how to change parts.


You’d be surprised at the vast numbers of people who want to upgrade their GPU and just do it, without knowing any of this. Many of these average users luck out and nothing gets screwed up (that time), while others are left scratching their heads.


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

JMccovery said:


> Who swaps things like GPUs without uninstalling the drivers and/or software first? That should be basic knowledge for people who know how to change parts.


it really takes 2 minutes to swap a video card.
Everyone is able to do that. Most of the new cases are tools free.

But an uninformed user could think "Windows will take care of the software, once I install the right drivers" since Windows is supposed to be plug&play since a while. And in this case Windows really is, but AMD developers messed thing up nevertheless...


----------



## wiak (Dec 5, 2020)

windwhirl said:


> Interesting. I thought the norm was to do a clean install when you switched CPU and motherboard...


i taught soo too, it depends on the person, some people dont use dual separate pcie cables to their graphics card either



B-Real said:


> 1. Remember the WHQL certified NV driver that made Watch Dogs 2 instantly crash on start or even won't allow to start it?
> 2. The Chrome video playback problems with WHQL NV driveres not too long ago?
> 3. The RTX 3000 series drivers at the beginning?


i think amd also had chrome video playback issues too, so its more of a google problem


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 5, 2020)

Xzibit said:


> I look forward to the accompanied PSAs.
> 
> Logitech G-HUB still running if Logitech mouse isn't being used
> Corsair iCUE still runs if Ducky Keyboard is used
> ...


How did you manage to miss that none of your analogs are running a rogue infinite loop?


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 5, 2020)

Max(IT) said:


> from the article itself:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


See YOUR post for the hyperbole, amateurish it may be , worth more of mine or 90% of the public's time it isn't.

Your times yours, use it how you wish.


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 5, 2020)

theoneandonlymrk said:


> See YOUR post for the hyperbole, amateurish it may be , worth more of mine or 90% of the public's time it isn't.
> 
> Your times yours, use it how you wish.


Funny.  This PSA does exactly that, save the public community of home-grown IT from having to deal with questions/confusion related to this.  It leads ultimately to the point, that so many have made:
1) Uninstall drivers/software for removed hardware
AND one that few also realized:
2) Hardware programmers (looking at you AMD), fix your shit so others don't get blamed when average Joe doesn't know WTH (1) is


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 5, 2020)

medi01 said:


> That stuff was always from "way too expensive" territory for me


There's a free version of IDA that's really wonderful, not that many limitations.


----------



## RedelZaVedno (Dec 5, 2020)

LOL, RADEON ADRENALINE DRiVERS at it's best


----------



## hurakura (Dec 5, 2020)

This is the new Kardashians. Fake drama galore.
Nothing bad to write about AMD now they are doing ok, so you have to come up with something like this. True, it's bad coding practice, but it won't affect 99% of PC users. Because even beginners now know to uninstall drivers before swapping the graphics card.


----------



## IceShroom (Dec 5, 2020)

rutra80 said:


> Good find, but what are we expecting from a "driver" that has integrated chromium, phone connectivity, streaming app, animated GIFs writer and other steaming-pile-of-horseshit-bloat??


If AMD didnt included those, you will be first say Nvidia has this and that and AMD has nothing.

Funny thing is that, whenever AMD releases a new GPU this kind of thhings appear. Looks like AMD did better thing by focusing on Consoles APU, rather than this stitty DIY GPU market.


----------



## the54thvoid (Dec 5, 2020)

It's appalling how many ill-informed and shallow people have commented in a disparaging manner at what is a well-considered investigation into a software 'curiosity'. As a member - not a moderator - I'm amazed at the infantile reactions to the piece by W1zzard. There are no scathing critiques from the author, there is no call to arms. What has happened is a technical 'blip' has caused someone to take a closer look. And they found something unusual, rare, but worth posting about.

For the trolls and shitposters that think W1zzard and by extension, TPU, is a biased site, I suggest you look at the reviews for the Zen3 processors and the RDNA2 GPU's. Those reviews are glowing and that is pretty much the sum of AMD's fruit. If there was an anti-AMD agenda, it would be outwardly obvious. I'm sure this post will just rile people up more, but before you do get all antsy and start foaming at the mouth - go back and read the reviews. 

TPU is a tech site and the material within should be tech based. When 'blips' happen, it can be good to see what's at the source. It's telling that so many people who rejoiced at Intel's security mishaps (which affected few in the consumer world), are up in arms over this piece. If we all just dropped the childish attitudes to hardware companies and saw tech as a uniform consumer product, we'd have so much less vitriol in the forums.


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

the54thvoid said:


> It's appalling how many ill-informed and shallow people have commented in a disparaging manner at what is a well-considered investigation into a software 'curiosity'. As a member - not a moderator - I'm amazed at the infantile reactions to the piece by W1zzard. There are no scathing critiques from the author, there is no call to arms. What has happened is a technical 'blip' has caused someone to take a closer look. And they found something unusual, rare, but worth posting about.
> 
> For the trolls and shitposters that think W1zzard and by extension, TPU, is a biased site, I suggest you look at the reviews for the Zen3 processors and the RDNA2 GPU's. Those reviews are glowing and that is pretty much the sum of AMD's fruit. If there was an anti-AMD agenda, it would be outwardly obvious. I'm sure this post will just rile people up more, but before you do get all antsy and start foaming at the mouth - go back and read the reviews.
> 
> TPU is a tech site and the material within should be tech based. When 'blips' happen, it can be good to see what's at the source. It's telling that so many people who rejoiced at Intel's security mishaps (which affected few in the consumer world), are up in arms over this piece. If we all just dropped the childish attitudes to hardware companies and saw tech as a uniform consumer product, we'd have so much less vitriol in the forums.


Quite on the contrary TPU is one of the few website that are not worshipping AMD not-matter-what.
 AMD surely deserve  many compliments lately, because of their hardware, but they are terrible in software support. Many reviews are just ignoring that, because it’s not cool to speak against AMD nowadays. It doesn’t matter if their pricing now is worse than Intel and their gpu launch is worse than Nvidia. They are AMD and they must be “the good one”.


----------



## Voluman (Dec 5, 2020)

Approx 1 year ago i did the same, but with win 8.1, at that time i didnt experience this.
I had intel, radeon and nv drivers installed at same time, and swapping gpus frequently, like every hour 
But that was a b150 mobo with celeron g3930.


----------



## medi01 (Dec 5, 2020)

employee24601 said:


> but software-wise


People need to stop repeating FUD.


----------



## zlobby (Dec 5, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> Next feature in NVidia driver... detect unused AMD software.


Meh! Nvidia should initiate AMD driver uninstall at boot level!


----------



## Diverge (Dec 5, 2020)

AMD's crappy drivers is why I switched to Nvidia back in the day... and I'm not the only one who switched for those reasons.

edit: the GPU in my sig might be the last time I used one...lol


----------



## wiak (Dec 5, 2020)

Diverge said:


> AMD's crappy drivers is why I switched to Nvidia back in the day... and I'm not the only one who switched for those reasons.
> 
> edit: the GPU in my sig might be the last time I used one...lol


have you even used a amd gpu in the last decade?


----------



## Max(IT) (Dec 5, 2020)

wiak said:


> have you even used a amd gpu in the last decade?


I did. 5700Xt still in my second PC.
Lately things improved but it was a nightmare over one year of usage.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

medi01 said:


> People need to stop repeating FUD.



There is literal evidence of shitty coding practices in the OP of this article.  It's not FUD at this point, it's a question of how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You SHOULD be asking yourself how much "fine wine" could be gained by fixing all the sure-to-be-found similar crap in the driver.  It could be extraordinary.



wiak said:


> have you even used a amd gpu in the last decade?



Me too.  My experience (and attempt to help others) with the 5700 XT is well documented here on the forums.  In particular, DX11 cpu overhead is absurd.



Max(IT) said:


> Lately things improved but it was a nightmare over one year of usage.



Same.


----------



## Caring1 (Dec 5, 2020)

cueman said:


> amd gpu drivers are usual BETA ones, but nvidia WHQL certified.
> sure if drivers are beta, they are not ready,they are under testing and finalysing...
> just thinking, why release out beta drivers? why??


AMD release Beta driver's because they acknowledge their drivers have faults and try to fix them.
Unlike the "game ready" WHQL certified Nvidia drivers that are really Betas and need patches and fixes with constant updates.


----------



## BiggieShady (Dec 5, 2020)

the54thvoid said:


> ill-informed and shallow people


they'd like to know how to facepalm over a bad code too


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

BiggieShady said:


> they'd like to know how to facepalm over a bad code too



I'd advise learning programming, and then reading some bad code.  It will then just magically happen!


----------



## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 5, 2020)

the54thvoid said:


> If we all just dropped the childish attitudes to hardware companies and saw tech as a uniform consumer product, we'd have so much less vitriol in the forums.


Raising the minimum age to join the forums would go a long way.   I digress...


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 5, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> There is literal evidence of shitty coding practices in the OP of this article.


Evidence of a mistake, yes. However, the problem that exists strikes me as one that is fairly complicated and not something that could have been anticipated as a potential issue. This was an honest mistake much like the ones Intel, NVidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc, etc have made. Computer code is extremely complicated. People really need to stop making mountains out of mole-hills.

This situation, simplified down(as best I can manage, @W1zzard feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood things), is a set of instructions intended to perform a function erroring out and failing to truncate the process it's attached to, getting caught in an infinite loop and as a result pegs the CPU it's thread is running on at full processing cycles. This unfortunately continues until the process is terminated by system or user command.

People offering negative comments really need take a step back and think about how complicated things really are and try a bit of understanding. This is an example of something slipping passed those in charge of testing & debugging. Little more.


----------



## Caring1 (Dec 5, 2020)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> Raising the minimum age I.Q. to join the forums would go a long way.   I digress...


Fixed that.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 5, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> However, the problem that exists strikes me as one that is fairly complicated and not something that could have been anticipated as a potential issue.



With all due respect, no commercial programmer should make a mistake like this ever.  It's...  I guess you just have to be a programmer to understand.  It's like trying to hard boil an egg without water.  It shows you have no business in the kitchen.



lexluthermiester said:


> People offering negative comments really need take a step back and think about how complicated things really are and try a bit of understanding.



It's actually less complicated than you think.


----------



## z1n0x (Dec 5, 2020)

This thread sure went places over a edge case.
But hey, it's driving weekend traffic, plus we can shit on RTG drivers, so life's good.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 6, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> With all due respect, no commercial programmer should make a mistake like this ever.


That's an opinion. I appreciate your passions and expertise in this area. However I think you are being a little less than objective here.


R-T-B said:


> It's actually less complicated than you think.


No it isn't. I've recently been dipping into ASM coding for the 65C02 CPU. That is 8-bit code in a total code package of less than 128kb. THAT is very complicated and we are way beyond all of the 8bit stuff with modern PC code.


----------



## z1n0x (Dec 6, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Mhm yeah they also totally havent been making and hopefully nurturing a driver team since forever, right?
> 
> This is inexcusable for such a big company. The only reason is what we have always suspected: lack of talent is cheaper. Its how they have kept both AMD and RTG afloat with minimal expense.
> 
> ...


I'm sure, you will be able to share with us, some personal stories about the talentless AMD employees and how they condone shitty quality work.
Driver oopsies happens with everyone. Many WHQL Nvidia drivers have Hotfix releases.
I don't know about microcode problems with AMD, what i do know is that, i had to update my Intel chipset firmware yet again, because of 20+ CVE's.
The amount of times i had to update IME firmware because of CVE's is mind-boggling.


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 6, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> Evidence of a mistake, yes. However, the problem that exists strikes me as one that is fairly complicated and not something that could have been anticipated as a potential issue. This was an honest mistake much like the ones Intel, NVidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc, etc have made. Computer code is extremely complicated. People really need to stop making mountains out of mole-hills.
> 
> This situation, simplified down(as best I can manage, @W1zzard feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood things), is a set of instructions intended to perform a function erroring out and failing to truncate the process it's attached to, getting caught in an infinite loop and as a result pegs the CPU it's thread is running on at full processing cycles. This unfortunately continues until the process is terminated by system or user command.
> 
> People offering negative comments really need take a step back and think about how complicated things really are and try a bit of understanding. This is an example of something slipping passed those in charge of testing & debugging. Little more.


Wizzard mentioned specifically already that in cases where a loop can get stuck executing infinitely, any seasoned programmer would have put in thresholds to terminate the abnormal behavior.  The only way this would have been caught is with a code review.  Testing would not have caught this, because the situation of not having the hardware installed with the software falls out of coverage scenarios.  The fact that there were no attempts at any safeguards is puzzling and lends concern towards risky programming behavior, as evidenced by the plague of RDNA driver problems.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 6, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> THAT is very complicated



From a code branching perspective and decompiling (or lack thereof) perspective it's actually less.

You're not the only one who has played with asm.  I used to write and make eeprom replacement games for my NES. 



z1n0x said:


> This thread sure went places over a edge case.
> But hey, it's driving weekend traffic, plus we can shit on RTG drivers, so life's good.



...

you know what, never mind.


----------



## OneMoar (Dec 6, 2020)

O look amds software team being utter shiet again
more news at 11

psa: to the non programmers when you see errors like this its indicative of a programmer not knowing what the fuck they are doing
no good programmer would make this mistake, It leaves one to wonder if they made this error..... What else did they fubar that may be causing unnecessary performance penalty's


----------



## nguyen (Dec 6, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> I'm sure, you will be able to share with us, some personal stories about the talentless AMD employees and how they condone shitty quality work.
> Driver oopsies happens with everyone. Many WHQL Nvidia drivers have Hotfix releases.
> I don't know about microcode problems with AMD, what i do know is that, i had to update my Intel chipset firmware yet again, because of 20+ CVE's.
> The amount of times i had to update IME firmware because of CVE's is mind-boggling.



Look what coding oopsies did to the 737 MAX   . After a whole year AMD has managed to iron out the oopsies from their previous drivers, only to make new ones.


----------



## z1n0x (Dec 6, 2020)

nguyen said:


> Look what coding oopsies did to the 737 MAX   . After a whole year AMD has managed to iron out the oopsies from their previous drivers, only to make new ones.


Quite a leap you took there, from GPUs to 737 Max. Also are you saying that, Nvidia writes infallible code?

Alot programming gurus in this comment section, maybe you should apply for a job at AMD. Explain to them, how you're going to save them from themselves.


----------



## TheGoddessInari (Dec 6, 2020)

Max(IT) said:


> it's not rocket science maybe, except AMD developers aren't able to fix a very basic issue (you don't have the hardware, don't load the driver).
> Not every user is aware of this problem. But AMD developers should be.



The *driver* isn't loading at all. Calling the settings application a hardware driver shows how knowledgeable you are about this so-called "issue". This is hyperbole at best, but realistically, it's another pathetic hitpiece against AMD that has no basis in fact or reason.

People keep making drama about this, but there's effectively no issue. Prattling on and beating a dead horse over nothing is just childish behavior. TPU should strive to be better than to devolve to such pettiness, in any event. This is making me really miss HardOCP.


----------



## CoUsT (Dec 6, 2020)

I have Radeon GPU and it still puts one thread at 100% usage. Check following image. 



http://imgur.com/XEbMEW2

i.imgur.com/XEbMEW2.png

You can clearly see I can use Radeon settings just fine and it even picks up GPU but it still takes one thread for itself. I just DDU'ed system again and it didn't change anything. I have to kill Radeon Settings process every time I use it.

Might as well downgrade to like 19.something version, at least it was nice and stable and not bloated.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Dec 6, 2020)

TheGoddessInari said:


> The *driver* isn't loading at all. Calling the settings application a hardware driver shows how knowledgeable you are about this so-called "issue". This is hyperbole at best, but realistically, it's another pathetic hitpiece against AMD that has no basis in fact or reason.
> 
> People keep making drama about this, but there's effectively no issue. Prattling on and beating a dead horse over nothing is just childish behavior. TPU should strive to be better than to devolve to such pettiness, in any event. This is making me really miss HardOCP.



I'm glad you think W1zzard did a "hitpiece" against AMD.  Just go ahead and ignore the very positive reviews of Ryzens and their latest GPU's. It also means you are completely ignorant of his early days, which were very much ATI related. Do I need to tell you what ATI was? What he did do was use his very good technical knowledge and investigate, then write a clear, level-headed post which would hopefully help one or two people.  

I can tell you from experience helping people, regular people don't know squat and do this kind of thing all the time, and don't know how to fix it. This post will explain it and tell them what to do, since it will now like be a search engine result.


----------



## nguyen (Dec 6, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> Quite a leap you took there, from GPUs to 737 Max. Also are you saying that, Nvidia writes infallible code?
> Alot programming gurus in this comment section, maybe you should apply for a job at AMD. Explain to them, how you're going to save them from themselves.



Yeah I should offer AMD a piece of advice: "stop asking your customers to beta test your drivers and hire real beta testers"  .

Well I had some small bugs with Nvidia driver too but they only last for a very short time, like a week or two before a hotfix come out, didn't have to send email to Nvidia or anything.


----------



## warrior420 (Dec 6, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> This one simple trick to fix this issue: Don't install drivers and bundled software on a system for a piece of hardware not installed.


  Basically this.

Breaking news: Software installed on computer, does stuff on computer, news at 8.


----------



## TheGoddessInari (Dec 6, 2020)

CoUsT said:


> I have Radeon GPU and it still puts one thread at 100% usage. Check following image.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Doesn't occur here, you might try reinstalling as you suggested.



rtwjunkie said:


> I'm glad you think W1zzard did a "hitpiece" against AMD.  Just go ahead and ignore the very positive reviews of Ryzens and their latest GPU's. It also means you are completely ignorant of his early days, which were very much ATI related. Do I need to tell you what ATI was? What he did do was use his very good technical knowledge and investigate, then write a clear, level-headed post which would hopefully help one or two people.
> 
> I can tell you from experience helping people, regular people don't know squat and do this kind of thing all the time, and don't know how to fix it. This post will explain it and tell them what to do, since it will now like be a search engine result.



I've been buying products since the very first Radeon 32SDR became available, so no, you don't have to do the whole condescending attitude and assume. People can make mistakes, they're allowed. Publishing this ridiculous farce was a mistake, though, and admitting mistakes is the first step on the road to admitting problems that may exist.


----------



## Mussels (Dec 6, 2020)

Just confirmed i have this bug on my server - i did a GPU swap from an RX 570 to a GT 610 to save on idle wattage, and it's been sitting at 6.7% CPU usage for almost 10 days now....











oops.


edit: i tried clicking the tray icon only for it to vanish and stop wasting CPU power, somethings definitely weird on this one.


----------



## nguyen (Dec 6, 2020)

Mussels said:


> Just confirmed i have this bug on my server - i did a GPU swap from an RX 570 to a GT 610 to save on idle wattage, and it's been sitting at 6.7% CPU usage for almost 10 days now....
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Hey, it could be using your CPU for mining purposes for all you know


----------



## OneMoar (Dec 6, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> Quite a leap you took there, from GPUs to 737 Max. Also are you saying that, Nvidia writes infallible code?
> 
> Alot programming gurus in this comment section, maybe you should apply for a job at AMD. Explain to them, how you're going to save them from themselves.


*cut the I am not a expert so you can't be one either* bullshit please if you don't understand the gravity of why this is bad and your only focus is on *MaH UnDerDoG* please just show your self out

This is  not going to have a job tomarrow bad if they find who ever signed off on this (assuming anybody at AMD cares about code quality which we know they don't ) =\

nobody mentioned Nvidia you did so you can stop with the bias crap

if I was AMD I would hire a reputable code auditing service and have them check there entire code for errors like this odds are there is more


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 6, 2020)

Mussels said:


> Just confirmed i have this bug on my server - i did a GPU swap from an RX 570 to a GT 610 to save on idle wattage, and it's been sitting at 6.7% CPU usage for almost 10 days now....


That's exactly why I made this post. So people are like "oh wait, could this affect me?" and spend 30 seconds looking at Task Manager. Guess those idle power savings from GT610 were used up by the CPU


----------



## vega22 (Dec 6, 2020)

so the take away from this are;

1. coders are lazy and, 
2. remove software for hardware no longer in the system.

in other news, the sky is blue, grass is green and rain is wet :lol:

before the flames start, i think amd not doing their job is just as bad as leaving software on your system for hardware you removed. both to blame like.


----------



## mb194dc (Dec 6, 2020)

AMD bloatware installed with the drivers is very buggy and annoying.

Yesterday I put all OC settings directly in to the bios of my card so don't need use it anymore. Tried using afterburner but it was messing stock bios fan profile up.

Bit extreme maybe but feel much better just using the driver.


----------



## Hattu (Dec 6, 2020)

As a "hobby programmer"(*), i've made similar coding mistakes regarding timeouts with unplugged hardware that i made. I think this article was very informative and as i see it, unbiased.

But things escalate quickly. 

(*) I started with C64 basic and asm. Then moved on to PCs and Pascal. After that Delphi and AVR asm. It was very hard to learn Windows programming and while i loved coding, every now and then i needed something new that i had to learn. And part of me hated that. Haven't coded a line like in 8 or 10 years, and now, if i want to start again, i must learn a new language, like C...


----------



## b1k3rdude (Dec 6, 2020)

What am I missing here? @Wizzard you forgot to remove the driver and the software before pulling the gfx card or the coding in the associated driver application is crap. *YOU* as the user are always supposed to uninstall driver...!!! This WHOLE article could have been condensed down a single line - 

"When removing a gfx card remember to always uninstall the driver & associated application, if that doesn't work, use DDU. "


----------



## Mussels (Dec 6, 2020)

Are people not getting that this is just reporting a bug?


Like.... it's a PSA not a call to arms.


----------



## efikkan (Dec 6, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> There is literal evidence of shitty coding practices in the OP of this article.  It's not FUD at this point, it's a question of how deep the rabbit hole goes.
> You SHOULD be asking yourself how much "fine wine" could be gained by fixing all the sure-to-be-found similar crap in the driver.  It could be extraordinary.


Like I argued in #40, the problem Wizz found here is just a symptom of something bigger, the tip of the ice berg if you will. In terms of debugging, we are actually "lucky" when bugs cause consistent stalls or crashes, those are easy to attach a debugger and find, and should be found by AMD if they did proper testing. Most synchronization issues are often much harder to reproduce consistently, and often disappear when you attach a debugger.

I disagree about AMD just fixing similar crap and getting extraordinary results. Don't get me wrong, every bug should be fixed, but the inconsistent reliability issues I've seen over many years with AMD drivers tells me there is probably some larger "design flaw". If this was easily fixable, AMD would have fixed it a long time ago.



R-T-B said:


> Me too.  My experience (and attempt to help others) with the 5700 XT is well documented here on the forums.  In particular, DX11 cpu overhead is absurd.


Perhaps the overhead is "absurd" if you make an isolated test case, but it's not absurd in practice.
Nevertheless, AMD could easily do what Nvidia did, by bringing most of the driver side improvements of DirectX 12 to 11, but that would ruin the image of AMD being better at DirectX 12 though.



R-T-B said:


> With all due respect, no commercial programmer should make a mistake like this ever.  It's...  I guess you just have to be a programmer to understand.  It's like trying to hard boil an egg without water.  It shows you have no business in the kitchen.


Really?
Have you worked at code bases of 100.000s or millions of lines of code, possibly with an awful complex structure?
Keep in mind that we are talking about a minor "glitch" here, which could be either a careless mistake or even the result of a bad merge. All programmers do small mistakes, and I'll be the first one to admit doing some embarrassing ones, but what really shows programming skills (or lack thereof) is _how_ problems are solved, not a tiny mistake. And I mean no disrespect here, but having such attitudes as an engineer is not healthy.

One of the bigger problems I've had in development teams over the years is that lesser coders don't dare to challenge my work, even when I've strongly encouraged them to try to break it. So getting good QA can sometimes be challenging.



lexluthermiester said:


> Evidence of a mistake, yes. However, the problem that exists strikes me as one that is fairly complicated and not something that could have been anticipated as a potential issue. This was an honest mistake much like the ones Intel, NVidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc, etc have made. Computer code is extremely complicated. People really need to stop making mountains out of mole-hills.


Mostly true, yes.
But regarding anticipating issues; all such software projects should have routines designed to validate that a release is working reasonably well. While I don't expect anyone to never make a bug, it is astonishing that they didn't test if the driver behaved erratically in a system with a different GPU present, this *should* certainly be in their test suite.
Edit: Let me take another example; some years ago AMD managed to ship two drivers in a row, both failing to compile most GLSL shaders, even basic ones. I still don't understand how it's "possible" to ship a driver without validating basic stuff like this.



b1k3rdude said:


> What am I missing here? @Wizzard you forgot to remove the driver and the software before pulling the gfx card or the coding in the associated driver application is crap. YOU as the user are always supposed to uninstall driver...!!! This WHOLE article could have been condensed down a single line -
> 
> "When removing a gfx card remember to always uninstall the driver & associated application, if that doesn't work, use DDU. "


This nonsense has been debunked several times, there are many reasons to have different GPUs present, such as;
APU + GPU
Developers or other engineers having multiple GPUs for various compute and simulations

Even APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan is designed to work with multiple GPUs from different makes. There is simply no excuse when a driver suite don't handle this.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 6, 2020)

vega22 said:


> 1. coders are lazy and,


Nope. Do we really need the insults?


vega22 said:


> 2. remove software for hardware no longer in the system.


Yup. That's just a good rule of thumb.


Mussels said:


> Like.... it's a PSA not a call to arms.


Exactly!


----------



## b1k3rdude (Dec 6, 2020)

efikkan said:


> there are many reasons to have different GPUs present, such as - APU + GPU. Developers or other engineers having multiple GPUs for various compute and simulations
> There is simply no excuse when a driver suite don't handle this.



Correct and I have done this myself on a few occasions.
There is never an excuse for poorly behaving software, but leaving the driver & associated application installed after the relevent GPU is no longer present is just asking for trouble.


----------



## efikkan (Dec 6, 2020)

b1k3rdude said:


> There is never an excuse for poorly behaving software, but leaving the driver & associated application installed after the relevent GPU is no longer present is just asking for trouble.


These are contradictory statements.
If your software can't handle other hardware being present, then your software is broken.
And as I said, both DirectX 12 and Vulkan is designed to have a mix of GPUs, so they should be aware of this and test it before shipping a new driver.


----------



## Nater (Dec 6, 2020)

No time to read the whole thread, but I get a sense of the back and forth now...

Has anyone here independently reproduced the issue?


----------



## TheoneandonlyMrK (Dec 6, 2020)

efikkan said:


> These are contradictory statements.
> If your *software can't handle other hardware being present*, then your software is broken.
> And as I said, both DirectX 12 and Vulkan is designed to have a mix of GPUs, so they should be aware of this and test it before shipping a new driver.


Clearly not worked in a test department.
That's a Op reading fail right there.

The problem occurs when hardware ISN'T there but the software for it IS.

Who uses Mgpu with multiple cards missing and how?.

To test for this AMD's test department would have had to do similar, remove their GPU and use Dgpu or fit a competition GPU while leaving their software on, I have done application testing ,you stick to thing's you expect to happen not such outliers typically.

Now a code review could find these issues and really is required at this point but some of your expectations for testing are ridiculous IMHO.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Dec 6, 2020)

Nater said:


> No time to read the whole thread, but I get a sense of the back and forth now...
> 
> Has anyone here independently reproduced the issue?


Yes, if you read the thread: @Mussels did on his server.



TheGoddessInari said:


> Doesn't occur here, you might try reinstalling as you suggested.
> 
> 
> 
> I've been buying products since the very first Radeon 32SDR became available, so no, you don't have to do the whole condescending attitude and assume. People can make mistakes, they're allowed. Publishing this ridiculous farce was a mistake, though, and admitting mistakes is the first step on the road to admitting problems that may exist.


No way of knowing if you knew what ATI was, that’s why I asked. Forums get filled with new members who are young and think anything from 5 years ago is ancient history, and know nothing of the past while thinking they have all the answers.  So no, not condescending.

Second, the only reason this is a “farce” to you is because you’re obviously acting defensive. It was a clear, in depth investigation into a problem, using coding skills, and published as a bug report and advisory. I’m sorry you live in such a perfect world that no one should ever learn anything from other’s mistakes (W1zzard’s and AMD’s both). There, now THAT was condescending.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 6, 2020)

efikkan said:


> Perhaps the overhead is "absurd" if you make an isolated test case, but it's not absurd in practice.



In the sense that it impacts actual fps in a non-cpu bound game, no, it's not.

In the sense that it is in actual cpu usage vs the competition (and that will hurt cpubound games), yes, it most certainly is.  I've looked into this a lot.  dxvk outperforms their dx11 driver in cpu overhead.


----------



## Vayra86 (Dec 6, 2020)

z1n0x said:


> I'm sure, you will be able to share with us, some personal stories about the talentless AMD employees and how they condone shitty quality work.
> Driver oopsies happens with everyone. Many WHQL Nvidia drivers have Hotfix releases.
> I don't know about microcode problems with AMD, what i do know is that, i had to update my Intel chipset firmware yet again, because of 20+ CVE's.
> The amount of times i had to update IME firmware because of CVE's is mind-boggling.



Its very well possible AMD has talented engineers on those drivers, but if they do, they sure don't get to do their job right. Mismanagement can be a cause of bad software releases as much as lack of talent. Or both. Who knows, I just judge the results. AMD driver issues happen and they're often pretty influential on the experience, and fixes don't always come as quickly as you'd want. Nvidia has its oopsies too, but fixes a lot faster, and the magnitude of those oopsies is often less impactful.


----------



## medi01 (Dec 6, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> on those drivers


It is page 9 and the piece of code in question is still referred to as "drivers".
Good job.


----------



## windwhirl (Dec 6, 2020)

medi01 said:


> It is page 9 and the piece of code in question is still referred to as "drivers".
> Good job.


We know the difference, but for the average user it might as well be all the same thing.


----------



## zlobby (Dec 6, 2020)

When the shit goes down, you better be ready! And I think W1zz was not.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 6, 2020)

Just so ya know Nvidia is not so innocent with bad coding either, despite consistent driver updates. 









						Old GeForce Experience Bug Won’t Let Some PCs Sleep But There’s A Fix
					

An old bug in NVIDIA's GeForce Experience grabs input from game controllers and stops the PC from going to sleep. Here's how to cure it.




					hothardware.com


----------



## jayseearr (Dec 6, 2020)

Vayra86 said:


> Its very well possible AMD has talented engineers on those drivers, but if they do, they sure don't get to do their job right. Mismanagement can be a cause of bad software releases as much as lack of talent. Or both. Who knows, I just judge the results. AMD driver issues happen and they're often pretty influential on the experience, and fixes don't always come as quickly as you'd want. Nvidia has its oopsies too, but fixes a lot faster, and the magnitude of those oopsies is often less impactful.


well said^ at the end of the day results are the most important thing, how many of these issues actually reach/affect the end user? Myself personally, i've had multitudes of issues with AMD software/drivers/firmware whereas my issues with nvidia have generally been not only much less consistent but less impactful. I like AMD just as much as anybody else, but it doesn't mean I can't/won't admit that they have(had) issues on the soft-ware side of things. 

Kinda sad to see how some people have so much of their being/soul attached and invested into a particular brand that they feel the need to get insulted and take every criticism as a direct attack rather than appreciating the fact that it could it potentially improve the thing that they already love SO much.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 6, 2020)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> Just so ya know Nvidia is not so innocent with bad coding either, despite consistent driver updates.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



True.  I'd like to see what's making that happen too.


----------



## Mescalamba (Dec 6, 2020)

As for those multiple entries. Noticed that on PC from 2009. So AMD/ATi drivers dont change since then. Also it loves to load drivers multiple times, to the point that hybrid sleep and start is broken (some AMD driver just cant cope with it).


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## WeeRab (Dec 6, 2020)

I didn't realize W1zzard was such a novice.
 Even a novice knows to use DDU or summat similar to uninstall previous graphics drivers before installing new ones.
  Strewth!!


----------



## zlobby (Dec 6, 2020)

Mescalamba said:


> As for those multiple entries. Noticed that on PC from 2009. So AMD/ATi drivers dont change since then. Also it loves to load drivers multiple times, to the point that hybrid sleep and start is broken (some AMD driver just cant cope with it).


I guess we are pretty far from lean, concise and robust drivers. Basically, they need to get everything from the ground up. There is simply no way for them to refactor such a mess of spaghetti.


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## wolf (Dec 7, 2020)

I'd say I'm blown away by how far people will go to insinuate this is a witch hunt, downplay it as a foolish user, white night for AMD, shit on AMD etc, but unfortunately I can't say that hand-on-heart.

The software should *not *act like this, period. That's really all there is to it.

This PSA will help people (as it already has in this comments section) and hopefully, lead to the issue being fixed for all.

Put down the pitchforks...


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 7, 2020)

WeeRab said:


> I didn't realize W1zzard was such a novice.
> Even a novice knows to use DDU or summat similar to uninstall previous graphics drivers before installing new ones.
> Strewth!!



Yes, because novices totally know how to disassemble a program and assemble a PSA like this...

/s, if it isn't obvious.  You "fans" are honestly giving AMD a bad name.


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## rtwjunkie (Dec 7, 2020)

WeeRab said:


> I didn't realize W1zzard was such a novice.
> Even a novice knows to use DDU or summat similar to uninstall previous graphics drivers before installing new ones.
> Strewth!!


You display your ignorance on your shirt like it’s a badge of honor.


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## Mussels (Dec 7, 2020)

Nater said:


> No time to read the whole thread, but I get a sense of the back and forth now...
> 
> Has anyone here independently reproduced the issue?



Yep, it was affecting my games server


----------



## OneMoar (Dec 7, 2020)

./thread


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## lexluthermiester (Dec 7, 2020)

WeeRab said:


> I didn't realize W1zzard was such a novice.
> Even a novice knows to use DDU or summat similar to uninstall previous graphics drivers before installing new ones.
> Strewth!!


Wow! That really says infinitely more about you than W1zzard. Would you like to offer any more gems of insight to amuse the rest of us?


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## Mussels (Dec 7, 2020)

God i love this

"BUT YOU CAN FIX IT"


yes.... we know. we all know. a PSA is to make people aware that they need to fix it...


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## DeathtoGnomes (Dec 7, 2020)

rtwjunkie said:


> You display your ignorance on your shirt like it’s a badge of honor.



Wait, what badges? I have one here somewhere....


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 7, 2020)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> I have on here somewhere....



Not anymore.  W1zzard siphoned all our knowledge-badges and combined them to give himself superpowers.

Or at least, that's how I'm going to explain my incompetence at work today (OT, don't ask).


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## Aoyagi (Dec 7, 2020)

It's not just when there's no AMD GPU either. It's doing the exact same thing on my 2700U.


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## Mussels (Dec 7, 2020)

Aoyagi said:


> It's not just when there's no AMD GPU either. It's doing the exact same thing on my 2700U.



wait really? does that system have an IGP and a DGPU?


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 7, 2020)

Aoyagi said:


> It's not just when there's no AMD GPU either. It's doing the exact same thing on my 2700U.



Interesting.  Have you tweaked the driver in any unusual way or something that may have contributed to this (not blaming, just curious how it happened.  The software should not do this at all.)


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## Aoyagi (Dec 7, 2020)

Mussels said:


> wait really? does that system have an IGP and a DGPU?



Yes, really. As I said, it has a Ryzen 2700U, which has a (Radeon) Vega 10 in it. No dGPU, I think I would have mentioned that, haha.



R-T-B said:


> Interesting.  Have you tweaked the driver in any unusual way or something that may have contributed to this (not blaming, just curious how it happened.  The software should not do this at all.)



No, I just updated from an old 18-something driver.


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## R-T-B (Dec 7, 2020)

Aoyagi said:


> Yes, really. As I said, it has a Ryzen 2700U, which has a (Radeon) Vega 10 in it. No dGPU, I think I would have mentioned that, haha.
> 
> 
> 
> No, I just updated from an old 18-something driver.



Maybe a clean install would fix it.

Still pretty weird.  And given what we see here, you probably aren't alone.  That's why we do PSAs people.


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## Mussels (Dec 7, 2020)

I'll have to check on my dads RX580 system when he wakes up, and see if this new driver is just bugged out

unless you look losing just one core of performance doesnt stand out too well, when task manager has 16 panels for your CPU


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## b1k3rdude (Dec 7, 2020)

efikkan said:


> These are contradictory statements.
> And as I said, both DirectX 12 and Vulkan is designed to have a mix of GPUs, so they should be aware of this and test it before shipping a new driver.



As a computer engineer of 20yrs this is a perfectly valid statement.
Call me pessimistic, but your expecting too much as this has never been the case.


----------



## Vayra86 (Dec 7, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> Not anymore.  W1zzard siphoned all our knowledge-badges and combined them to give himself superpowers.
> 
> Or at least, that's how I'm going to explain my incompetence at work today (OT, don't ask).



Yeah I got infinitely more stupid ever since I lost those


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## Yukikaze (Dec 7, 2020)

Man this thread is a dumpster fire.

Something to note, there is a (very small) subset of users who will feel this adversely.

eGPU users with AMD cards who disconnect from their docking station will be in this state: All the AMD software installed, but no card present. Running a single core this hard on battery is also going to suck for battery life.


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## lexluthermiester (Dec 7, 2020)

Yukikaze said:


> Something to note, there is a (very small) subset of users who will feel this adversely.
> 
> eGPU users with AMD cards who disconnect from their docking station will be in this state: All the AMD software installed, but no card present. Running a single core this hard on battery is also going to suck for battery life.


This is an excellent point. Illustrates a perfect use-case scenario where the drivers and software are needed but not always in use.


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## Octopuss (Dec 7, 2020)

Isn't there a guy from the Radeon driver testing team or something here in the forums who should be notified and rely the information to AMD?


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## remixedcat (Dec 7, 2020)

srsbsns said:


> This one simple trick to fix this issue: Don't install drivers and bundled software on a system for a piece of hardware not installed.


Well if you flip flop a lot like testing and development then tho..


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## windwhirl (Dec 7, 2020)

Octopuss said:


> Isn't there a guy from the Radeon driver testing team or something here in the forums who should be notified and rely the information to AMD?


There is one or two AMD guys on the company's subreddit, I think. And I know this article was posted there.


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## Bitgod (Dec 8, 2020)

LOL AMD drivers


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## vega22 (Dec 8, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> Nope. Do we really need the insults?
> 
> Yup. That's just a good rule of thumb.
> 
> Exactly!



insult?

as a lazy coder i would say it's an accurate statement 

i only learned how to code so i could be lazy and not have to do things repeatedly like


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## rtwjunkie (Dec 8, 2020)

Octopuss said:


> Isn't there a guy from the Radeon driver testing team or something here in the forums who should be notified and rely the information to AMD?


I thought in one of these posts in the 10 pages W1zzard said he also submitted it as a bug report to AMD.


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## TheGoddessInari (Dec 9, 2020)

Mussels said:


> Are people not getting that this is just reporting a bug?
> 
> 
> Like.... it's a PSA not a call to arms.


AMD literally includes a bug reporting tool in their software. That'd be more constructive.


rtwjunkie said:


> Yes, if you read the thread: @Mussels did on his server.
> 
> 
> No way of knowing if you knew what ATI was, that’s why I asked. Forums get filled with new members who are young and think anything from 5 years ago is ancient history, and know nothing of the past while thinking they have all the answers.  So no, not condescending.
> ...



My software is open source so other people can find bugs and get them fixed upstream. When GPU-Z has bugs with multi-GPU AMD, they've been left to rot over a year because proprietary, otherwise I'd fix it myself, as I have before with other software.


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## rtwjunkie (Dec 9, 2020)

TheGoddessInari said:


> AMD literally includes a bug reporting tool in their software. That'd be more constructive


And if your reading comprehension was passable you would know he submitted a bug report as well. How does that get the word out to people it can help?

It doesn’t, so see yourself out of here will you? Instead of having a modicum of rational thought you have been hyper-polarized on this, as if someone insulted your family.

And tell me why, or tell @W1zzard know why you think you should be allowed access to GPU-z coding? It has the recognition it does because it is not left out there for anyone to mess with. If something was “left to rot” in it for a year, you should have contacted him.


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## Mussels (Dec 10, 2020)

TheGoddessInari said:


> AMD literally includes a bug reporting tool in their software. That'd be more constructive.
> 
> 
> My software is open source so other people can find bugs and get them fixed upstream. When GPU-Z has bugs with multi-GPU AMD, they've been left to rot over a year because proprietary, otherwise I'd fix it myself, as I have before with other software.



this PSA wasnt about getting it fixed, it was about getting people to see if it was affecting them in the meantime. the power and heat of my server running one core at max over a month or two is not inconsiderable... and the driver application *WOULD NEVER SELF UPDATE WITHOUT THE GPU REINSTALLED* - this could have hit my server for months and months.


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## R-T-B (Dec 11, 2020)

TheGoddessInari said:


> AMD literally includes a bug reporting tool in their software. That'd be more constructive.



And help no one but AMD...


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## mouacyk (Dec 15, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> And help no one but AMD...


And be ignored when they see that on the report, their hardware isn't detected/present.


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## Rei (Dec 15, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> And be ignored when they see that on the report, their hardware isn't detected/present.


Unlikely though. They should be able to respond to any manner of scenario concerning their products including their driver. This behavior should apply to any company really...


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 15, 2020)

Rei said:


> Unlikely though. They should be able to respond to any manner of scenario concerning their products including their driver. This behavior should apply to any company really...


How is that?  In any ticketing system, an issue goes through tiers of filters (even automatic filters).  The very first one is relevance, and if they don't ignore it, it will go into the least important bucket.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 15, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> And be ignored when they see that on the report, their hardware isn't detected/present.





mouacyk said:


> How is that?  In any ticketing system, an issue goes through tiers of filters (even automatic filters).  The very first one is relevance, and if they don't ignore it, it will go into the least important bucket.



That would be wholly irresponsible of them.


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 15, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> That would be wholly irresponsible of them.


If you had paid for the software that's malfunctioning, I'd see how they may treat it differently.


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 15, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> If you had paid for the software that's malfunctioning, I'd see how they may treat it differently.



Just because the hardware isn't present at the time of report doesn't mean you don't own it, or use the software.


----------



## mouacyk (Dec 15, 2020)

R-T-B said:


> Just because the hardware isn't present at the time of report doesn't mean you don't own it, or use the software.


If a rep had to choose between working an issue where the hardware is present and one where the hardware is only presumed present, which one do you think has higher priority?


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## Rei (Dec 15, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> How is that?  In any ticketing system, an issue goes through tiers of filters (even automatic filters).  The very first one is relevance, and if they don't ignore it, it will go into the least important bucket.


While they won't immediately respond to it, I doubt they'd wholly ignore it either. Especially if the issue is spotted to be coming from a reputable individual or review site & since @W1zzard likely seems to know someone from AMD personally, the bug report will likely go up the chain.


mouacyk said:


> If you had paid for the software that's malfunctioning, I'd see how they may treat it differently.


Since a driver is bundled with a paid product, I could see it being a priority fix.


R-T-B said:


> That would be wholly irresponsible of them.


Then again, no one is responsible for being irresponsible... Except their boss or associates maybe.


mouacyk said:


> If a rep had to choose between working an issue where the hardware is present and one where the hardware is only presumed present, which one do you think has higher priority?


Both, as I stated above.


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## mouacyk (Dec 15, 2020)

Splitting hair... bug reports don't work that way, just because you say so.  They go through a predetermined flow, such that the most impactful ones are worked on first and some do get flagged as irrelevant.  Anyway, why would they care that Wizzard's reports are of more importance, unless Wizzard is a dedicated (and compensated) bug hunter for AMD?  You, yourself, claim that all reports have equal importance and should prioritize the same.  Bit of contradiction there.


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## Rei (Dec 15, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> You, yourself, claim that all reports have equal importance and should prioritize the same. Bit of contradiction there.


Who me? Looking back at my post, did I claim that?


mouacyk said:


> Anyway, why would they care that Wizzard's reports are of more importance, unless Wizzard is a dedicated (and compensated) bug hunter for AMD?


You'd know if you have been following W1zzard's post as well as reading ALL THE POST throughout this thread.


mouacyk said:


> bug reports don't work that way, just because you say so.


The same could be said about your "say so".


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## R-T-B (Dec 15, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> If a rep had to choose between working an issue where the hardware is present and one where the hardware is only presumed present, which one do you think has higher priority?



Both should be serviced or the company needs to take a serious look at it's priorities.

Issues are issues, and this one is fairly large with ample evidence.  This isn't an "all other things being equal" scenario.


----------



## W1zzard (Dec 16, 2020)

mouacyk said:


> Anyway, why would they care that Wizzard's reports are of more importance, unless Wizzard is a dedicated (and compensated) bug hunter for AMD?


I consider the relevant project managers friends and talk to them directly all the time for various GPU-Z related things. Good friends with their boss and their bosses boss, who I've met in person many times, last year on my bday.

Would be easy to silently report this and get it fixed, without ever showing up in the driver changelogs. But that doesn't make people aware who might be affected.


----------



## INSTG8R (Dec 16, 2020)

W1zzard said:


> Would be easy to silently report this and get it fixed, without ever showing up in the driver changelogs. But that doesn't make people aware who might be affected.


It has been fixed should be in next driver


----------



## R-T-B (Dec 16, 2020)

INSTG8R said:


> It has been fixed should be in next driver



Appreciate the update.


----------



## 300BaudBob (Dec 16, 2020)

Ok AMD back to BASICs for you
10 print x
20 x=x+1
30 goto 10
40 print "I am lost forever"
See how easy it is to spot the mistake?

Seriously w1azzard nice spotting of a bug and figuring out the underlying issue.
Wish I had a dime for everytime I've seen a newbie who needs to be told it's highly recommend to remove the old drivers to try and fix some problem or to avoid problems to begin with..here's a nice easy example to point them to as to why.


----------



## flowirin (Dec 22, 2020)

Yukikaze said:


> Something to note, there is a (very small) subset of users who will feel this adversely.



it also hits normal users with amd cards. many reporting 100% core usage with 2020 software.

like me.

this article tied together all clues.


----------



## INSTG8R (Dec 22, 2020)

flowirin said:


> it also hits normal users with amd cards. many reporting 100% core usage with 2020 software.
> 
> like me.
> 
> this article tied together all clues.


Patience next driver it’s gone so I would guess after the holidays


----------



## lexluthermiester (Dec 23, 2020)

300BaudBob said:


> Wish I had a dime for everytime I've seen a newbie who needs to be told it's highly recommend to remove the old drivers to try and fix some problem or to avoid problems to begin with..


Except for those usage scenario's that require the software and drivers to remain on the system.


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## zlobby (Dec 23, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> Except for those usage scenario's that require the software and drivers to remain on the system.


Yes, I see an ever-increasing trend in these scenarios. /s


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## lexluthermiester (Dec 23, 2020)

zlobby said:


> Yes, I see an ever-increasing trend in these scenarios. /s


Save the sarcasm. Those situations do happen and while not everyone needs that functionality, some do and it is important for them. Therefore it is important that hardware makers ensure that their software is fully inactive and does not interfere with normal operations when the matching hardware is not present.


----------



## zlobby (Dec 23, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> Save the sarcasm. Those situations do happen and while not everyone needs that functionality, some do and it is important for them. Therefore it is important that hardware makers ensure that their software is fully inactive and does not interfere with normal operations when the matching hardware is not present.


Yes, I agree that software should be well-written and with every scenario in mind. It just sounded like the one you were talking about is generally important, hence my sarcasm.


----------



## 300BaudBob (Dec 23, 2020)

lexluthermiester said:


> Except for those usage scenario's that require the software and drivers to remain on the system.


Which is why I feel vindicated in making a joke at AMD's expense and calling it a bug... still could use those dimes-- I don't run across many running AMD and Nvidia in the same system


----------



## Adam Krazispeed (Dec 27, 2020)

Khonjel said:


> God! The more I browse the internet the more I come to know that AMD software sucks.




if using an nvidia gpu the shit should have been uninstalled?? so bahh



300BaudBob said:


> Which is why I feel vindicated in making a joke at AMD's expense and calling it a bug... still could use those dimes-- I don't run across many running AMD and Nvidia in the same system


I did?

I had AMD Ryzen 1st 2nd and 3rd now 5th gen with a  GTX 1080Ti 11Gb so bahh

also a 5700 XT and a XT bios flashed 5700 (NON XT) ALL REFERENCE cards? Baaahhh for comparative testing


----------



## 300BaudBob (Dec 27, 2020)

Adam Krazispeed said:


> if using an nvidia gpu the shit should have been uninstalled?? so bahh
> 
> 
> I did?
> ...


Like I said not many.  I've known some software developers who did for comparison/testing purposes.


----------



## Mussels (Feb 18, 2021)

Did this get resolved in newer drivers?


----------



## GSDragoon (Feb 18, 2021)

Mussels said:


> Did this get resolved in newer drivers?


Yes


----------



## windwhirl (Feb 18, 2021)

GSDragoon said:


> Yes


About that...


> AMD is currently investigating end user reports that Radeon Software may sometimes have higher than expected CPU utilization, even when a system is at idle. Users who are experiencing this issue are encouraged to file a bug report in Radeon Software.


----------



## GSDragoon (Feb 18, 2021)

windwhirl said:


> About that...


The issue brought up in the article has been addressed. Are there other issues causing high CPU usage from Radeon Software? Based on community feedback, yes. That is what AMD is still investigating. If you are running into them, submit a bug report for it so AMD can hopefully identify and fix the issue.


----------



## B_Bang (May 4, 2022)

Why didn't you use DDU to clear out team red properly before switching to team green?  Software works for both ways.....


----------



## windwhirl (May 4, 2022)

B_Bang said:


> Why didn't you use DDU to clear out team red properly before switching to team green?  Software works for both ways.....


... Why are you reopening a thread that was dead for a whole year for no good reason??


----------



## lexluthermiester (May 4, 2022)

windwhirl said:


> ... Why are you reopening a thread that was dead for a whole year for no good reason??


To be fair may not be aware that necro-posting without good reason could be considered trolling..



B_Bang said:


> Why didn't you use DDU to clear out team red properly before switching to team green?  Software works for both ways.....


Please review Forum Guidelines as they will be helpful for you in future. It is also helpful if you read through a thread before commenting as your suggestion was already offered earlier in the thread.


----------



## windwhirl (May 4, 2022)

lexluthermiester said:


> To be fair may not be aware that necro-posting without good reason could be considered trolling..


That's why threads have this warning when they have been inactive for quite some time (both on desktop and mobile)


----------



## zlobby (May 4, 2022)

windwhirl said:


> ... Why are you reopening a thread that was dead for a whole year for no good reason??


Chill, dude may be on IE. It managed to load the page just now.


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## lexluthermiester (May 4, 2022)

zlobby said:


> Chill, dude may be on IE. It managed to load the page just now.


And that would be their own fault for using a browser that is extremely and woefully out of date, not to mention ill advised.


----------

