AMD Unlikely to Fix DX9 Games Bugged by Adrenalin Driver

[Romulus2K4]

It's very similar to what we've seen when Ryzen launched. AMD fans yelling that it's software developers fault that it's not utilizing 16 threads.

So AMD should add a $0.1 "premium" to each card and employ better reps. Such things don't happen as often in the Blue and Green camps. Or other large companies, for that matter.

In a properly organized corporation any information that goes outside is carefully analyzed. I work in finance and every message prepared for media or financial supervisor is read by at least 2-3 people beside the author - usually including a board member.

Also, don't underestimate how important these kind of messages are - especially in case of a publicly traded company.

Eh, no. The GTX 970 is a good example of nvidia making a similar mistake.

If you talk about the blue team.. that one is just pure evil. From fabricating benchmarks to strong arming, they have done it all. In recent times, Intel told people not to overclock their 7700K SKUs, blocked overclocking locked Skylake SKUs on Z170 motherboards through ME updates, and Skylake is essentially Kabylake meaning you're being locked out from overclocking locked Kabylake SKUs too. The whole 8th Generation Coffee Lake requiring Z370 motherboards turned out to be utter BS too, as folks have managed to run 6th and 7th gen CPUs on Z370 as well as 8th Gen CPUs on Z170/Z270 motherboards, not perfectly of course, but Steve over at GamersNexus and an Asus rep have said that it's due to intel they can't provide backwards compatibility or otherwise, they had 8th Gen SKUs working on older motherboards.

AMD wasn't wrong about games not being optimized for their architecture. Intel suffers the same thing in gaming too, don't believe me? Check out how the Skylake 7800X fares against the RyZen 5 1600 in gaming.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider is the perfect example of how optimizations can help a specific CPU architecture to gain performance. But there are lots of older titles out there that won't see anymore updates, and I guess AMD RyZen owners will have to deal with getting sub par performance considering what these CPUs are capable of. And there is something funky going on between nvidia cards DX12 and AMD RyZen, and do we need a reminder of the whole intel's compiler ordeal?

None of these companies are saints, and we are at times left to choose between the lesser evil.

I would wait for something more official from AMD at this stage then to jump the gun because of a lousy response from one of their forum reps. If they officially declare that they won't be supporting older games, the pitchforks need to come out.

 

[notb]

AMD wasn't wrong about games not being optimized for their architecture. Intel suffers the same thing in gaming too, don't believe me? Check out how the Skylake 7800X fares against the RyZen 5 1600 in gaming.

You didn't get it. I know games are not optimized for 16 threads. The issue is: Intel makes low-core gaming CPUs. HEDT stuff is marketed for workstations. AMD made a 16 thread CPU and marketed it for games, when they knew it won't be utilized very well. And then they blamed game developers.

I would wait for something more official from AMD at this stage then to jump the gun because of a lousy response from one of their forum reps. If they officially declare that they won't be supporting older games, the pitchforks need to come out.

The guy who wrote this is a support technician on their official forum (BTW: he locked the topic! :-D). Not enough? You want a press conference?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

This news is not about how many games don't work. It's mostly about how AMD responded. "It's old, we don't care."
So today it's maybe 5 games. In a year it could be dozens. What then?

So they should just sell the graphic part - something they shouldn't have bought in the first place. They're the second largest dedicated GPU manufacturer. It's a big and important role. It should be given to someone who cares.

I think the funnier part is how AMD fans used to say that red cards age much better and so on. It's often the first argument that appears in discussions.

This I didn't know. https://pro.radeon.com/en/product/radeon-vega-frontier-edition/
I'm still laughing!
Literally, they've put mining before productivity and gaming. At least it's finally official...
"High Efficiency Performance for Coin Mining, Content Creation and Gaming"

BTW: it's not "developing blockchain solutions", but "coin mining". That's "pioneering" in the AMD's alternative reality.

People make mistakes all the time. But lifetime of games is longer than of GPUs. Some game studios might not exist anymore. Games are not being patched for years. Yes, it's AMD's role to make it work.

It's very similar to what we've seen when Ryzen launched. AMD fans yelling that it's software developers fault that it's not utilizing 16 threads.

So AMD should add a $0.1 "premium" to each card and employ better reps. Such things don't happen as often in the Blue and Green camps. Or other large companies, for that matter.

In a properly organized corporation any information that goes outside is carefully analyzed. I work in finance and every message prepared for media or financial supervisor is read by at least 2-3 people beside the author - usually including a board member.

Also, don't underestimate how important these kind of messages are - especially in case of a publicly traded company.

Starting to look like a true hater notb ,are you ever on the positive about something or on topic.

AMD need to make their consumer driver more like their Founders edition driver, thats all, then drivers can easily be loaded to accommodate older tech and cleaner more futuristic APIs.

I don't think a computer in 2040 needs to run pong or digger in legacy with my retro gamer pads drivers still working.

You all chat like you didn't see the 32bit generations occour ,shit stops working with evolving tech thats life.

I saw win 3.1-now though, and lost much software and hardware along the way to ,what the hell why doesn't this workitus ,as i call it.

 

[xkm1948]

The fact that a guy named GenericAmdFan just said this is frankly, disturbing. As it should be to AMD fans. This simply cannot be defended... or so I'd hoped. But TPU has a way of proving me wrong, it seems... very sad

Yeah we have a few of those members lacking proper emotional control for anything AMD related. They are beyond fans i would say, they treat AMD like a cult.

 

[qubit]

AMD are taking the piss. If these old games worked fine in the previous release, then just how hard can it be to fix these problems? They just don't care by the looks of it and who are they to tell their customers not to play old games?! Some of them one can still buy, so they're hardly abandoned games. Is it any wonder I stick to NVIDIA when I see garbage like this?

 

[RejZoR]

AMD are taking the piss. If these old games worked fine in the previous release, then just how hard can it be to fix these problems? They just don't care by the looks of it and who are they to tell their customers not to play old games?! Some of them one can still buy, so they're hardly abandoned games. Is it any wonder I stick to NVIDIA when I see garbage like this?

When Midtown Madness 1 universally stopped working on GeForce cards and same for MechWarrior 3 on AMD I was disappointed, but it's just one game. When you declare that majority of games from most widely used API will stop working entirely, you stop and start questioning their mental health.

 

[Romulus2K4]

The driver might impact how it performs but, just because it's in a modified Fury driver for pre-release and both cards use HBM (remember, Vega has HBM2 not HBM1,) doesn't mean Fury has the hardware to handle it. HBM likely has very little to do with it and probably boils down more to the memory controller effectively handling where and how video data gets stored based on a driver setting. Also my mistake, it was added in GCN 1.4, not 1.3 but, that is beside the point. There are likely hardware limitations that prevent applying this to older GPUs. It's like asking why GCN 1.1 cards don't support delta color compression and why the driver can't be updated to use it: because the hardware doesn't support it.

I encourage you to re-read through the AMD rep's response, please. Are you making up GCN revision numbers as you go, btw?

VSR is a very different thing though because it was more of a matter of "how well will the GPU drive it," not a "can the GPU even do it."

I was in the right place at the right time, I saw how it happened.

"How well the GPU drive it" you say? The HD 7000 cards are fine for up to 4K on older DX9 games like Aliens Vs. Predator, Even 5K is playable at steady 30 FPS, using GeDoSaTo. Do you honestly believe that people would want 4K VSR on older cards to play latest DX11 titles? Before Fiji came on to the scene, the R9 290/290X were AMD's go to cards for 4K. How in the hell are they not playable if you had two of them in your system and they scale in CrossFire? What's funny is, people managed to edit the registry and inject older driver .dll files that enabled them to use 4K VSR on 290X cards, which later AMD blocked.

Changes to how video data gets stored tends to require hardware changes due to the latency-sensitive nature of DRAM whereas with VSR, it was more of a "how well will it perform and do we want to expose a setting if it's likely going to run like crap every time."

ROFLMAO. I believe you have no clue regarding what you're talking about. I explained the use case clearly above. nvidia had DSR out first, ranging from their GTX 400 series of cards to the current gen GTX 1080 Ti, and they didn't impose any artificial limitations like this whatsoever.

It's kind of like async compute on GCN 1.0. Sure, you can run it but, if it's not going to help and sometimes could cause performance regressions when it is used, why bother enabling it?

Async Compute on GCN 1.0 does help with performance, btw. AMD re-enabled it once the cat was out of the bag, and it gave a performance boost as was seen on older drivers prior to the point they disabled it. Probably trying to do a planned case of obsolescence, which didn't work out.

 

[Vayra86]

Honestly if they keep this up I will be surprised if Navi is even going to hit the shelves.

They can't get their driver model up to scratch and keep it lean and functional across several generations of APIs, but they seem intent on spreading their support even thinner across three wildly different architecture tweaks (GDDR5, HBM1/HBM2, MCM).

I honestly do hope their GPU division is going to another, stronger company yesterday. They no longer deserve credit for anything they've done the past years and going forward. Its becoming a joke and meanwhile, the market suffers. If you still support this, I cannot see what arguments you could pull in to defend it.

 

[qubit]

When Midtown Madness 1 universally stopped working on GeForce cards and same for MechWarrior 3 on AMD I was disappointed, but it's just one game. When you declare that majority of games from most widely used API will stop working entirely, you stop and start questioning their mental health.

+1 to that. This behaviour is consistent with their underperforming Vega cards becoming hard to find and the rumours that AMD want to get out of the gaming market.

I guess if I were them and my cards were so good at mining that sales exploded, then I might think along the same lines. It would be a folly to abandon the gaming market, though. In particular, these cards are very expensive, so making them stop working with significant amounts of games could well lead to a class action lawsuit eventually. The least they can do is to keep properly supporting their customers who have invested in them, but this is AMD. People should remember this next time they think of them as the "poor underdog".

 

[Vayra86]

+1 to that. This behaviour is consistent with their underperforming Vega cards becoming hard to find and the rumours that AMD want to get out of the gaming market.

I guess if I were them and my cards were so good at mining that sales exploded, then I might think along the same lines. It would be a folly to abandon the gaming market, though. In particular, these cards are very expensive, so making them stop working with significant amounts of games could well lead to a class action lawsuit eventually. The least they can do is to keep properly supporting their customers who have invested in them, but this is AMD. People should remember this next time they think of them as the "poor underdog".

Really if you look at the time ever since they acquired ATI, its been a very troublesome time, up to and including bringing AMD to the brink of collapsing. The only saving grace after all these decades of blood sweat and false powerpoint slides, has been that they kept moving units around all the time. Revenue and volume is the only concrete advantage they've gained, profits however, are simply nonexistant. To then follow that up with 'leading technologies' to me speaks volumes of how NOT to do business.

Then again, AMD's downfall has been predicted on a yearly basis since forever, who knows what they manage to twist out of RTG next year to stay in business... But honestly, I really do hope they sell it off and let a new giant take on Nvidia. Because there is no doubt in my mind that there WILL be a competitor. Look at the immense pie Nvidia has created for itself the past couple years, RTG's licensing and tech is the key to taking a piece of it.

 

[rtwjunkie]

It wouldn't even be so bad if they decided to move on and not support DX9 in general. It could be explained. But that isn't what happened here.

Despite there being thousands and thousands of older games running DX9, many probably even older and less well played than the few titles listed, the Rep's response was nope, those are old games, we won't support them. So how does that jive with RTW, a 2004 game still being runnable by their hardware and drivers?

I will chalk this up right now to the untrained in public response guy who drew the short straw to work the holiday period being the problem. "Don't worry", they probably said "it will be easy. The peasants never get worked up during the Christmas to New Year period."

Edit: I see the crazy new forum decided mid stream to change my entire final 2/3 to bold. Lmao.

Edit2: Fixed. really weird.

 

[newtekie1]

When I read the title I thought it was 50% of DX9 titles. Turns out it's 5 games. Install older drivers when you want to play those titles and case closed.
Although I would hate it if I had to rollback drivers every time I wanted to play these games, and the fact that they managed to screw it somehow is inexcusable, it's also not the end of the world.

It's not really a big issue that they broke it, that happens and I guarantee no camp is testing 10 year old games with their drivers before deployment.

The inexcusable part is the response that they won't even attempt to fix the issue. But right now I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, because the response was from a tech support person, not directly from the driver team(who I assume is probably all on vacation until after new years). So I think it'd be stupid to not have one person put a few hours into figuring out and fixing the issue.

nvidia has there share of incompatible games, we just cry less about it.

I can't think of any DX9 games that don't work with nVidia drivers. I'm not saying there aren't, I just can't think of any or haven't come across any. Yeah, games older than that, but nothing DX9. DX9 should work with modern hardware and drivers.

 

[GamerNerves]

AMD rules and FineWine is real. Let's hope for a new Command & Conquer.

 

[MuhammedAbdo]

I can't think of any DX9 games that don't work with nVidia drivers. Yeah, games older than that, but nothing DX9. DX9 should work with modern hardware and drivers.

Not even DX8 or DX7 or DX6. I have a lot of old games and I test them regularly, on my 1080 every damn title works.

What AMD is doing is terrifying truly, I bet if people started testing DX8 or DX7 with the Adrenalin driver they'd be shocked, they are probably not funtioning as well. That's an auomatic 2000 games "at least" not working.

 

[R-T-B]

The guy who wrote this is a support technician on their official forum (BTW: he locked the topic! :-D). Not enough? You want a press conference?

I want someone from the driver department to comment...

 

[notb]

I want someone from the driver department to comment...

LOL what?!
Driver department is in deep back-office. They're role is not to give official statements.

Or maybe AMD went for Zen organization? Each department doing its stuff, connected to a network without a clear supervisor? That would explain A LOT!

 

[ManofGod]

For those who claim they are going to run to Nvidia over 5 games, good luck with that. After all, I am sure you will have no problem finding 5 or more games that do not run right under Nvidia as well but hey, they will get right on it.

 

[Aquinus]

I encourage you to re-read through the AMD rep's response, please.

I did. It was short and wasn't articulated very well. Some forum moderator isn't going to be able to speak to the problem as a driver dev would.

Are you making up GCN revision numbers as you go, btw?

Are you trying to change the topic?

"How well the GPU drive it" you say? The HD 7000 cards are fine for up to 4K on older DX9 games like Aliens Vs. Predator, Even 5K is playable at steady 30 FPS, using GeDoSaTo. Do you honestly believe that people would want 4K VSR on older cards to play latest DX11 titles? Before Fiji came on to the scene, the R9 290/290X were AMD's go to cards for 4K. How in the hell are they not playable if you had two of them in your system and they scale in CrossFire? What's funny is, people managed to edit the registry and inject older driver .dll files that enabled them to use 4K VSR on 290X cards, which later AMD blocked.

None of which changes my previous statement:

VSR is a very different thing though because it was more of a matter of "how well will the GPU drive it," not a "can the GPU even do it."

ROFLMAO. I believe you have no clue regarding what you're talking about. I explained the use case clearly above. nvidia had DSR out first, ranging from their GTX 400 series of cards to the current gen GTX 1080 Ti, and they didn't impose any artificial limitations like this whatsoever.

We're not talking about DSR here. Perhaps you forgot but, we were talking about HBCC.

Async Compute on GCN 1.0 does help with performance, btw. AMD re-enabled it once the cat was out of the bag, and it gave a performance boost as was seen on older drivers prior to the point they disabled it. Probably trying to do a planned case of obsolescence, which didn't work out.

The performance boost was very minor (when it did exist which was not all the time,) and once again, like DSR, wasn't a matter of the technology not being there but rather, not necessarily being optimal to drive it.

Perhaps you need your memory refreshed, I was talking about what you said several posts ago which has nothing to do with DSR.

If TechPowerUp wants another scoop, I can give them one right now. Some keen soul tried asking AMD to add HBCC support for the Fury/Fury X cards.

 

[Romulus2K4]

And I say you don't know jack regarding what you're talking about, and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop. HBCC and Delta Color compression are miles apart as far as features go.

You have that distinct smell of a Fanboy, which I am very familiar with.

GCN 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4

 

[qubit]

Really if you look at the time ever since they acquired ATI, its been a very troublesome time, up to and including bringing AMD to the brink of collapsing. The only saving grace after all these decades of blood sweat and false powerpoint slides, has been that they kept moving units around all the time. Revenue and volume is the only concrete advantage they've gained, profits however, are simply nonexistant. To then follow that up with 'leading technologies' to me speaks volumes of how NOT to do business.

Then again, AMD's downfall has been predicted on a yearly basis since forever, who knows what they manage to twist out of RTG next year to stay in business... But honestly, I really do hope they sell it off and let a new giant take on Nvidia. Because there is no doubt in my mind that there WILL be a competitor. Look at the immense pie Nvidia has created for itself the past couple years, RTG's licensing and tech is the key to taking a piece of it.

Indeed, I remember ATI always played second fiddle to NVIDIA, other than around the 2003 era with the 9700/9800 cards. How AMD buying them out didn't improve the situation with their much improved resources I don't know.

Agreed about a competitor. If AMD throw their toys out of the pram and ragequit this market, then there will be a vacuum there, which is guaranteed to be filled. It wouldn't surprise me if Intel buys AMD's graphics business and becomes that competitor. They're already integrating AMD GPUs into their upcoming CPUs, which lends credibility to this possibility.

With nonexistent competition like this, no wonder NVIDIA has the gall to release the TITAN V at a ridiculous $3000. I dread to think how much the GTX version will cost. Those days of improved tech at every decreasing prices are gone.

@rtwjunkie It could well be a customer service droid issue and hope it is, but I suspect that it goes deeper than that. We just have to wait and see.

@newtekie1 All my DX9 games work properly too.

Not even DX8 or DX7 or DX6. I have a lot of old games and I test them regularly, on my 1080 every damn title works.

What AMD is doing is terrifying truly, I bet if people started testing DX8 or DX7 with the Adrenalin driver they'd be shocked, they are probably not funtioning as well. That's an auomatic 2000 games "at least" not working.

What OS are you running those old games on. I know that W10 doesn't run anything below DX9 properly, so is it W7 perhaps?
It would be interesting to see how broken those older games are. I suspect that since W10 no longer properly supports DX8 and older, that those games are being slowly abandoned as W10 increases its market share over those older operating systems that do support it. And that's a real shame. I got lucky with the DX8 Unreal Tournament 2004, since it can be switched to OpenGL in the .ini file, but that's dodging a bullet, not solving the problem.

 

[R-T-B]

LOL what?!
Driver department is in deep back-office. They're role is not to give official statements.

Or maybe AMD went for Zen organization? Each department doing its stuff, connected to a network without a clear supervisor? That would explain A LOT!

They've issued statements before. Fact is, none of them check in on the holidays.

For those who claim they are going to run to Nvidia over 5 games, good luck with that. After all, I am sure you will have no problem finding 5 or more games that do not run right under Nvidia as well but hey, they will get right on it.

If it's a DX9 API issue, its going to be a helluva lot more than just these reported AAA titles...

And as I have said, I CAN'T name one game, so much for 5...

What OS are you running those old games on. I know that W10 doesn't run anything below DX9 properly, so is it W7 perhaps?

Wut? I run a number of DX8 games (SH3, Jedi Knight/Academy ) and even a DX5 game (SW: Rebellion) no problem.

 

[ManofGod]

Indeed, I remember ATI always played second fiddle to NVIDIA, other than around the 2003 era with the 9700/9800 cards. How AMD buying them out didn't improve the situation with their much improved resources I don't know.

Agreed about a competitor. If AMD throw their toys out of the pram and ragequit this market, then there will be a vacuum there, which is guaranteed to be filled. It wouldn't surprise me if Intel buys AMD's graphics business and becomes that competitor. They're already integrating AMD GPUs into their upcoming CPUs, which lends credibility to this possibility.

With nonexistent competition like this, no wonder NVIDIA has the gall to release the TITAN V at a ridiculous $3000. I dread to think how much the GTX version will cost. Those days of improved tech at every decreasing prices are gone.

@rtwjunkie It could well be a customer service droid issue and hope it is, but I suspect that it goes deeper than that. We just have to wait and see.

@newtekie1 All my DX9 games work properly too.


What OS are you running those old games on. I know that W10 doesn't run anything below DX9 properly, so is it W7 perhaps?
It would be interesting to see how broken those older games are. I suspect that since W10 no longer properly supports DX8 and older, that those games are being slowly abandoned as W10 increases its market share over those older operating systems that do support it. And that's a real shame. I got lucky with the DX8 Unreal Tournament 2004, since it can be switched to OpenGL in the .ini file, but that's dodging a bullet, not solving the problem.

I just played UT2004 without issues, other than it does not support 4k out of the box. Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit FCU.

 

[Aquinus]

And I say you don't know jack regarding what you're talking about, and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop. HBCC and Delta Color compression are miles apart as far as features go.

They both necessitate changes to the GPU and memory controller to be implemented whereas DSR doesn't, that's my point.

You have that distinct smell of a Fanboy, which I am very familiar with.

Perhaps I can guide you to the forum guidelines.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/forum-guidelines.197329/

Behavior that is inappropriate/should be reported

• Insulting other forum members (calling someone makes you look stupid anyways)

 

[OneMoar]

you know if 3/4 of your game libary is DX9
then you probably don't need a RX580 ...
or anything better then a i3 and a few generation old 2gb card
christ people most of the D3D9 code path is from 2003 get over it nobody cried when nvidia killed OGL 1.5 support a few months ago and thats a newer api

and @Romulus2K4
shadup god everytime you post I want to cut my self

 

[lexluthermiester]

Wow.. Fanboy's are out in force on this one. Just Wow. It shouldn't be surprising at all, but yet this kind of fanboyism never ceases to amaze.

AMD should at least look at this problem as A LOT of great games run on DX9. The solution might very well be simple. However, DX9 is a retired API. Devoting resources to it is not and should not be a priority for them anymore than it would be for NVidia.

Folks, the solution is simple. Built an inexpensive retro gaming rig and install the mainstream OS of the time. Most systems built in 2012 have support for WinXP, which is a great OS for the games affected and anything else DX9.

Alternatively, you could dual boot on the same system with either a second partition or a second SSD/HDD and use the older drivers without the bug.