AMD Adrenalin Driver Is Causing DirectX 9 Games to Be Unplayable on PC

Megalith

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Many are reporting that AMD’s latest driver package breaks older titles. Some of the games affected include Command and Conquer Red Alert 3, Battle for Middle Earth 1 and 2, and The Witcher Enhanced Edition. Judging from AMD’s responses thus far, gamers can deal with it by finding something else to play.

The good news with these issues is that it doesn't seem as though all DirectX 9 games are affected. The bad news is that AMD stated in their support forum (concerning the Command and Conquer titles), "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2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules."
 
One of the reasons why I want to build a vintage PC. Just so I can play all my old stuff without Windows or the drivers taking a dump over my love affair of Command and Conquer games.



Long live Westwood Studios. Before EA acquired them and... they be gone.
 
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Cheapo laptops FTW, easiest way to get old PC's for retro games
 
Media Player Classic is dead, ClassicShell is dead, now DirectX 9 games are getting killed off as EOL... The Windows desktop is dying.
 
Apparently there are also some compatibility issues with Source engine games, and Skyrim.

Although not hard crash on launch, Skyrim doesn't really need more bugs.

https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/software/113720-amd-adrenalin-driver-dx9-issues-unlikely-fixed/

As much as I paused AMD for adding all the new features in the Adrenalin update, losing compatibility for DX9 is a big loss IMO. There's a lot of great content from that era. They spent their development money wrong IMO.
 
As much as I paused AMD for adding all the new features in the Adrenalin update, losing compatibility for DX9 is a big loss IMO. There's a lot of great content from that era. They spent their development money wrong IMO.
That era is basically 2003 - 2012, a huge chunk of gaming life. Moreover, this is a pretty audacious precedent. On Nvidia, I haven't run into driver updates actually breaking compatibility for older games before. Hell, I can still run DirectX 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 games today. This is a shitty, shitty move.
 
Media Player Classic is dead, ClassicShell is dead, now DirectX 9 games are getting killed off as EOL... The Windows desktop is dying.

Why do you say that ClassicShell is dead? Personally, I use Startisback.

Thankfully, Media Player Classic is still open source, so anyone can pick it up and continue it. There's still the Black Edition of MPC being developed, with the latest release being in October 2017.

Other than those things, I share your concern about the Windows desktop. Windows 10 is an abomination, and it takes some notable modding and tweaking to get it on the level of functionality of Windows 7, and it takes turning of Windows Update and various other services to get it to be as reliable and consistent as Windows 7. Microsoft's continued destruction of Windows cannot continue forever, I think.


As for the topic subject, this means that I won't be buying an AMD GPU to go with my FreeSync monitor, and I'll instead have to buy a G-sync monitor to go with my Nvidia GPU. Legacy game support is crucial, as a large number of the best games yet made are DX9 and earlier. And a large amount of my gaming time is spent playing those older games.
 
Why do you say that ClassicShell is dead?

Development ended last month. The dev says Microsoft keeps breaking it with each update and with their changes it's become much more difficult to tinker and tweak things like you could in the past. It's up on sourceforge... but yeah, it's dead.

I abandoned Windows for Linux about a year ago because I saw this coming. Windows 7 isn't going to be around a whole lot longer and Windows 10 is a disaster. This driver situation will only get worse if Microsoft continues to pressure AMD/Intel to only support Windows 10 and depreciate the old APIs.
 
Why can't AMD hire some competent driver guys already, or is Nvidia paying these guys to stay away? Inb4 "but I never had problems running cod/battlefront so they've obviously never had driver issues ever."
 
wow - I ditched AMD after the R9 290 days when driver after driver would fix A but cause new bug B. I see that even 4 years later it's pretty much the same story.

Was my last AMD card used for gaming, that's for sure.
 
wow - I ditched AMD after the R9 290 days when driver after driver would fix A but cause new bug B. I see that even 4 years later it's pretty much the same story.

Was my last AMD card used for gaming, that's for sure.

Ditto, I had my r9 390 for a long time before finally saving up and getting a 1080 ti. Amd saying "eh, whatever" is a stupid response. Terry Makedon did the right thing here.
 
I think AMD understands that gamers really want a sense of pride and accomplishment when they get a game to load without crashing.

It goes with that "Tinkerer's GPU" appeal of undervolting to boost performance.
 
This is why i have stayed away from AMD grfx cards. Not that they were terrible at performance but the sheer amount of driver issues they have had over the years. Nvidia has always had decent enough drivers for their cards. I haven't had any game breaking issues that were not fixed quickly.
 
"which is most likely caused by outdated API modules"

This sounds like a guess and others are clearly do not have this problem.
 
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This is why i have stayed away from AMD grfx cards. Not that they were terrible at performance but the sheer amount of driver issues they have had over the years. Nvidia has always had decent enough drivers for their cards. I haven't had any game breaking issues that were not fixed quickly.

Sounds like a person that was not around for the bad old days of Riva 128 and TNT/TNT2 with Super 7 Platforms... You literally had to have four or five different drivers to play your games on this platform. 3DFX was hands-down better in the stability department, but I had a friend who insisted on running this abomination - it turned me off to nVidia products pretty hard. My experiences with AMD are that they've had rough patches (never really THAT bad), but they at least pay attention and pull it through, and I've also (personally, YMMV) found AMD cards to have a longer usable lifespan in comparison to comparable (at the time of purchase) nVidia cards (a GeForce 560 was my most recently terrible). 3DFX still rules my heart, but AMD generally gets my check.
 
AMD's gotta AMD.

You would think after all this time that they could write proper drivers.

They do, and bugs happen. AMD fixed crash problems with NieR Automata far faster than nVidia got around to fixing the same bugs, for example. nVidia doesn't really get a lot of press when their drivers screw something up, but AMD sure does. They both fix these problems eventually, so drivers in general are a non-issue in choosing your card. This has been true for a while now.
 
Witcher EE issues predated Adrenalin. It's the primary reason that I never finished the game because it was so unstable on all the crimson edition drivers.

That being said, every game being affected is at least 5 years old. If they're only just now seeing issues using Adrenalin, there's nothing stopping them from using the previous ReLive driver set. It's not like both green and red teams haven't had issues in the past where you just picked a 5-10 revision old driver set and stuck with it because it was the most stable for what you played.
 
... so drivers in general are a non-issue in choosing your card. This has been true for a while now.
AMD has managed to bork online playback of DRM protected video (Netflix, Amazon prime, etc...) on the R9 380 cards. It started with the Win10 2017 Fall Creators Update and has quite a few people rolling back drivers and swearing to buy NVidia in addition to cursing the name of Microsoft. They claimed in release notes to have fixed it, but didn't, and are trying again. Caveat 380 emptor.
 
Both sides have annoying driver issues. NVIDIA has had a lot of crap pop up the last year too.

I'm sure this will be fixed pretty shortly.
 
That era is basically 2003 - 2012, a huge chunk of gaming life. Moreover, this is a pretty audacious precedent. On Nvidia, I haven't run into driver updates actually breaking compatibility for older games before. Hell, I can still run DirectX 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 games today. This is a shitty, shitty move.

Tried F.E.A.R series on my 1070, 1920x1080 ran at 7 FPS

MechWarrior online, drops FPS like crazy, or would run at 8FPS with Gsync enabled non full screen

etc etc.
 
Sounds like a person that was not around for the bad old days of Riva 128 and TNT/TNT2 with Super 7 Platforms... You literally had to have four or five different drivers to play your games on this platform. 3DFX was hands-down better in the stability department, but I had a friend who insisted on running this abomination - it turned me off to nVidia products pretty hard. My experiences with AMD are that they've had rough patches (never really THAT bad), but they at least pay attention and pull it through, and I've also (personally, YMMV) found AMD cards to have a longer usable lifespan in comparison to comparable (at the time of purchase) nVidia cards (a GeForce 560 was my most recently terrible). 3DFX still rules my heart, but AMD generally gets my check.
I had a TNT never had any problems with it playing the games I played. The detonator drivers were pretty dang solid for me back in the day.
 
I had a TNT never had any problems with it playing the games I played. The detonator drivers were pretty dang solid for me back in the day.

No kidding. Ran a TNT2 on my Celeron 300a with no issues whatsoever. And I certainly never had to switch between drivers.

I like how the AMD guys head back to mention a card from nearly 20 years ago as evidence that Nvidia also has issues. Lol, comical.
 
Yeah it's weird hearing revisionist history here. I had both nVidia and ATi equipment back in the day. There were requisite driver installation guides on Rage3d and I tolerated that as an owner of the 8500LE and 9800 Pro. I also owned a TNT2, helped other college roommates with Geforce 4 builds. Usually their issues were OCZ ram kits, of all things.

Other duties at the time were ridiculing the iMac owner down the hall. Ah, those were the days.
 
Tried F.E.A.R series on my 1070, 1920x1080 ran at 7 FPS

MechWarrior online, drops FPS like crazy, or would run at 8FPS with Gsync enabled non full screen

etc etc.
Never blame the hardware what you can blame on Windows. You test it on Windows 7 v. 10?

EDIT:

Apparently logitech devices can interfere with it also:

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/F.E.A.R.#Low_frame_rate

I'm too lazy to reinstall FEAR right now on my 1080 on Windows 7, but if you really want to press the matter, I could.
 
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I dunno

my 1080ti randomly drops the right hand (DVI connected) monitor when Alt-Tabbing in or out of gamestate, they all have their glitches
 
Many are reporting that AMD’s latest driver package breaks older titles. Some of the games affected include Command and Conquer Red Alert 3, Battle for Middle Earth 1 and 2, and The Witcher Enhanced Edition. Judging from AMD’s responses thus far, gamers can deal with it by finding something else to play.

The good news with these issues is that it doesn't seem as though all DirectX 9 games are affected. The bad news is that AMD stated in their support forum (concerning the Command and Conquer titles), "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."
One of many reasons I run Nvidia cards.
 
I had a TNT never had any problems with it playing the games I played. The detonator drivers were pretty dang solid for me back in the day.

Were you running on the Super 7 Platform? If no, then this post would naturally have nothing to do with you. Problems with nVidia cards on Super 7 platforms were legendary. Intel chipset and 3DFX users had no problems.

Edit: Came off a little harsh. Sorry about that. You will note that I explicitly called out the Super 7 platform in my original post. I liked my Super 7 stuff a lot, but nVidia and VIA/SIS did NOT see eye-to-eye at all.
 
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