AMD Unlikely to Fix DX9 Games Bugged by Adrenalin Driver

erek

erek

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"AMD ended 2017 with its year-end mega driver release, the Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition (17.12), which introduced a large number of new features. The drivers, incidentally, also inadvertently caused bugs with some 10-year old games running on the older DirectX 9 API. When AMD Radeon users took to Reddit, and other tech forums to report these issues, AMD responded on its official support forums that it is "unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue."

Among the games affected, old as they may seem, are AAA blockbusters, including "C&C3 Tiberium Wars," "C&C3 Kane's Wrath," "C&C Red Alert 3," "C&C Red Alert 3 Upising," "C&C4 Tiberian Twilight," "Battle for Middle Earth 1-2," and "The Witcher Enhanced Edition." AMD blames its inability to fix these issues to outdated API models. The company's full statement reads "This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules.""
 
if they don't fix this it will be one of the worst mistakes they have ever done as a driver team.

DX9 to DX11, should be easy to do, DX12 has been the one that had major under the hood changes. So if they got DX10 and DX11 games working fine, DX9 is not that much of a far stretch for them.
 
Man. I had been pretty happy with my RX 580 until the driver update that caused black screen crashes in some Blizzard games - Overwatch and Diablo 3 - and after losing a third hardcore character to a system crash I picked up a GTX 1060 to replace it. The 580 has been sitting on the shelf for about 3 months now.

I was planning to switch back to the 580 - I saw they got the issues sorted out and figured I'd swap back this week some time - but if they've just introduced other problems with this latest release, ones they don't intend to fix that weren't an issue the month prior, I'm wondering if I might be better off just selling the card and sticking with the GeForce.

I much prefer the Radeon software but if they crash the games I play (or crash old games I might want to go back and play) and NVIDIA doesn't, well, at that point it isn't even a question of which one has better performance for the price, or DX12/Vulkan advantages for futureproofing (why I bought the 580 instead of a 1060 in the first place). It's pretty black and white: one of them I can use without my games crashing and the other I can't.

I want to support AMD but they're making it difficult. :(
 
Maybe try reaching out to the game devs and see if they will fix it? They have just as much obligation to support their games as AMD does.

AMD may have made the breaking change but it could have just as easily been NV or Microsoft. Backwards compatibility only lasts so long
 
ecmaster76 said:
Maybe try reaching out to the game devs and see if they will fix it? They have just as much obligation to support their games as AMD does.

AMD may have made the breaking change but it could have just as easily been NV or Microsoft. Backwards compatibility only lasts so long
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Yea good luck getting devs to fix issues and release patches for nearly 10 year old games.
 
HAHAHAHAHA #finewine


Fine wine was always bullshit anyways. This is special though. A lot of times my kids will play the entire compliment of a game.... like Starcraft they started with SC1, ect.

This is the exact risk that keeps me from buying anymore AMD graphics materialized.
 
razor1 said:
if they don't fix this it will be one of the worst mistakes they have ever done as a driver team.

DX9 to DX11, should be easy to do, DX12 has been the one that had major under the hood changes. So if they got DX10 and DX11 games working fine, DX9 is not that much of a far stretch for them.
Click to expand...

More people care about them fixing stuff like Overwatch instead of patching up decades old games.
 
vegeta535 said:
Yea good luck getting devs to fix issues and release patches for nearly 10 year old games.
Click to expand...

But you expect the card maker to keep fixing issues and patching till infinity? On the greener side of things, no more 32 bit for yall so ugh, that pretty much kills all them old games too doesn't it? Intel is also planning to kill off bios in the next couple years so all them 16/32 bit systems will become extinct anyways lol. I suppose life can be just as hard at the trailing edge as it is on the bleeding edge.
 
Ocellaris said:
More people care about them fixing stuff like Overwatch instead of patching up decades old games.
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True but still, Dx9 is still supported by Win 10 as default, and any Dx9 game should be able to run on Windows, the only reason other Dx's have been pretty much unsupported now, is cause the OS doesn't really support them, they are now emulated, Dx9 hasn't been emulated yet....

And here are the major changes going from Dx9 to 11,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/gaming/understand-direct3d-11-1-concepts

There isn't much there....

I mean its even smaller going to Dx10. Why can't AMD get them to work via drivers? I think they just didn't have time to do it with this release, the reason they gave, really doesn't make much sense.

The work done by MS's HAL should take care of most of the work for backward compatibility going from Dx11 all the way to Dx6. So AMD shouldn't need to do too much work on drivers for older API's. This goes both ways all the way from the Dev and IHV, work should be minimal to get them to run.
 
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thesmokingman said:
But you expect the card maker to keep fixing issues and patching till infinity? On the greener side of things, no more 32 bit for yall so ugh, that pretty much kills all them old games too doesn't it? Intel is also planning to kill off bios in the next couple years so all them 16/32 bit systems will become extinct anyways lol. I suppose life can be just as hard at the trailing edge as it is on the bleeding edge.
Click to expand...

Not exactly, AMD gave up 32 bit a long time ago but didn't affect these. Old games will run on 64 bit. I think your driver updates are out of luck on 32 bit systems is what that is about.
 
I still play BFME2 1.09 on occasion.

If I had an AMD card atm, I'd be mighty pissed!
 
razor1 said:
True but still, Dx9 is still supported by Win 10 as default, and any Dx9 game should be able to run on Windows, the only reason other Dx's have been pretty much unsupported now, is cause the OS doesn't really support them, they are now emulated, Dx9 hasn't been emulated yet....

And here are the major changes going from Dx9 to 11,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/gaming/understand-direct3d-11-1-concepts

There isn't much there....

I mean its even smaller going to Dx10. Why can't AMD get them to work via drivers? I think they just didn't have time to do it with this release, the reason they gave, really doesn't make much sense.

The work done by MS's HAL should take care of most of the work for backward compatibility going from Dx11 all the way to Dx6. So AMD shouldn't need to do too much work on drivers for older API's. This goes both ways all the way from the Dev and IHV, work should be minimal to get them to run.
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I can tell you how this goes down. The developers of these games fucked up. AMD was building drivers with older tools and an older code add that had a built in workaround for specific titles. AMD never mentions this to anyone because they don’t want to piss off devs, people just play those games fine. Unfortunately including workarounds is bad for any company doing long term driver support since it adds a lot of complexity for small benefit. When AMD does the yearly refreshes, this is also the point in time at which they switch to their newer build tools. So some development team finally gets to kill off some ancient support library they had been including for many years just to work with Command and Conquer. The workaround that was valuable many years ago gets punted in exchange to a more clean codepath for games that actually support Dx9 correctly.
 
Ocellaris said:
I can tell you how this goes down. The developers of these games fucked up. AMD was building drivers with older tools and an older code add that had a built in workaround for specific titles. AMD never mentions this to anyone because they don’t want to piss off devs, people just play those games fine. Unfortunately including workarounds is bad for any company doing long term driver support since it adds a lot of complexity for small benefit. When AMD does the yearly refreshes, this is also the point in time at which they switch to their newer build tools. So some development team finally gets to kill off some ancient support library they had been including for many years just to work with Command and Conquer. The workaround that was valuable many years ago gets punted in exchange to a more clean codepath for games that actually support Dx9 correctly.
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That's fine, except that Nvidia manages to do it, and they do it better. You can't just say Fuck you to existing games for a cleaner code path, unless you wish to go bankrupt, or worse, get into legal issues.

What's to prevent a class action lawsuit against AMD for this? Breaking stuff that's not deprecated is a big no no in any production environment. I highly doubt this list is conclusive.

Whether the devs fucked up or not, it's AMD's fault. They encouraged this kind of behavior by issuing workarounds in their driver instead of working with the devs on patch fixes.

Reading through the comments, it's affecting DX9 games that were released last year, even. Great move AMD. DX9 is still very much relevant.
 
One another reason for me to not pick up an AMD card, I don't play latest games only. This list I suppose might grow further and this is only the beginning.
 
Wow. As more details come out and the game list grows, this is pretty damning. It's not just a handful of old games that are broken - Guild Wars 2, Leage of Legends, Starcraft 2, Skyrim... these are all popular games still being actively played by a lot of people. And Source Engine games, I guess TF2, L4D2? I still drop into those a couple times a week for a quick match. I still play GW2 and SC2 regularly, even!

I have to agree with the sentiment expressed by delphi on reddit (thanks for sharing that horrorshow ) - how does such a large issue get past QA? Either they missed it, which points to... not very good testing, or someone decided it wasn't going to be a problem that current, popular games were going to break, which points to... management more interested in selling cards to miners than gamers?

If they don't get ahead of this quickly and walk back their "we're not fixing it" statement it's going to cost them even more gamer mindshare, and that's just going to send more people to NVIDIA when upgrade time comes.
 
"some users" applies to any game ever with any driver version ever.

For games that actually got broke for everyone though it sucks but its not a huge surprise.
Once the application vendor stops supporting a product there are two eventual outcomes:
  1. You insist on running the latest and greatest OS, middleware, drivers and whatever and eventually have to replace the app
  2. You insist on running that old app and keep a compatible platform locked down to maintain compatibility
I'm sure there are plenty of 10 year old games that wont even run on Windows 10
 
there has to be a fucking way to LEAVE code that works in the driver. This sounds incredible to me since every mod I've ever made to anything sticks, how in the fuck does it make it possible to break anything that worked previously?
come on...I need my yearly HL run throughs

Incompetence and laziness 100%

nah I will not "update" anything until this shitshow is over


edit: I do remember when games shipped in good working order for the system I had at the time why the fuck would you mess with that code
 
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If older games are more important to you then newer games run 17.11.4. Its not a bad driver by any means
 
d8lock said:
Is there a list of all known games that are affected by this?
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I wouldn't be surprised if its one bug that is causing all the issues, the main thing going from Dx9 to Dx11 engines, is that those old DX9 engines still used legacy fixed function code.
 
Quick about face on that one, going from "unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources" to "we are working on a fix asap".

They could have avoided the negative publicity in the first place if they'd not tried to hand-wave it away.

Maybe it all boils down to an uninformed customer support rep and AMD's usual not-quite-there PR team, instead of intentional dismissal of DX9 title support.

Either way, I sold my 580. Not worth the headache to keep trying right now.
 
I have scene 3 AMD Dev's post that they are working on it already. I suspect a number of odd comments about not working on it may have been from some green fanboys. But regardless, I appreciate the community putting some pressure on AMD to get it sorted. Thx Erek
 
SighTurtle said:
It's the holidays, we got a reply in the affirmative to them fixing this, can we wait a few weeks before the pitchforks?

Edit: List of potential impacted games:
Click to expand...
Thanks. I was just wondering if any games I actually play were impacted by this. Turns out, that's a negative.
 
I dont even understand why this is a issue, one can always use a older driver to fix such a issue.
 
Vader1975 said:
I have scene 3 AMD Dev's post that they are working on it already. I suspect a number of odd comments about not working on it may have been from some green fanboys. But regardless, I appreciate the community putting some pressure on AMD to get it sorted. Thx Erek
Click to expand...

It looks like the original AMD poster on reddit has since edited his post to remove the original response, which was quoted in the top post of this thread and also on Reddit. An AMD representative posted that they weren't going to fix it and now they have said they will.

Not fanboys at play, just AMD being AMD and then realizing they'd rendered a foot where a mouth should be.
 
Good to hear they are going to fix it. Most likely they didn't realize how many games were affected when that first comment was made.
 
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