AMD Adrenaline dGPU 23.40.18.02 (2/22/24) driver vs Current AMD Adrenaline drivers? (Which to Choose)

Framework Laptop 16
, ,
1

Hi all,

I know there was a previous discussion in 2024 about this, but I never saw a clear “answer” to this question.
I’ve been experiencing weird glitches in discord and other apps where half of the application’s window freezes, and then the other half is active / scrolls just fine.

I thought I’d look into updating the 7700S’s drivers to find the above 2024 thread about possible issues with upgrading the drivers vs keeping them the same as the current “bundle”.

Is there any official word / answer on whether we should get the latest and greatest dGPU 7700s drivers straight from AMD, or keep the now over year old dGPU drivers?

Thanks,
Shukero

2

I am currently running the latest version of the drivers for the 7700S (25.3.1 I believe) and I have not personally experienced any issues.

3

I think AMD drivers are a little hit or miss. I’m not using a FW laptop but my laptop with AMD iGPU does literally the thing OP mentioned - portions of the screen freezes in place while other parts scroll or continue to be interactive.

4

The “official” framework driver has a nasty memory leak (every time a program closes, a single handle continues to be locked by the AMD driver, this quickly adds up 30GiB of RAM over a couple days if you use Docker).

There’s another driver bug around the audio subsystem. The audio subsystem can hang (freezing a lot of stuff) when you are using a USB-C dock (disable the AMD Audio CoProcessor for now).

There’s another issue with the GPU drivers around iGPU shared memory usage - the drivers have a lot of issues if you have more than 64GiB of RAM installed.

Newer drivers have other issues. I had to manually remove the drivers in safe mode after Framework support recommended I use AMD’s official drivers when I asked about the memory leak issue (Ugh… horrible support experience there).

5

Is the mem leak still the case for the latest driver? (Released ~last week)

6

Installed that driver this morning! I’ll continue monitoring for that memory leak - being the most annoying thing for me (there’s a reason I have 96GiB installed).

So far, appears better!

Things I’m still looking for (checked means fixed):

  • Driver failing to initialize with +64GiB of RAM.
  • Memory leak of handles on process exit.
  • Audio subsystem hanging, causing explorer to hang, when docked using USB-C.
  • Random GPU hangs (driver recovers, haven’t looked deeply into these).
  • Screen flashing when moving Chromium based Windows.
  • Hardware acceleration issue with JetBrains toolbox (requiring the use of the software rendering flag).
  • Cursor rendering issue on Chromium based apps (weird interaction with DWM layers). Currently using a DWM feature flag to workaround.
1 Like
7

Awesome!

I think I might have the DWM issue - sometimes my text selection cursor is just fully transparent. Could you point me towards the resolution? Thank you!

8

This was my fix, source: mouse text selection cursor turned white on light themes · Issue #204103 · microsoft/vscode · GitHub

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm]
"OverlayTestMode"=dword:00000005

Where a setting of 5 on that feature flag disables MPO (Multiplane Overlay).

1 Like
9

Just installed 24.20.60.01. Can’t see CPU power consumption/temperature in the driver. Only utilization.
EDIT: after using DDU to remove the old ones, all the metrics are back. Performance looks stable, Helldivers 2 and Dying Light work fine for me.
Remember to use DDU before up/downgrading drivers fellas!

10

Looks like the memory leak is gone in the beta drivers (can’t edit my post). I also haven’t had a driver hang yet too.

I’ll likely start removing my workaround and see if the drivers stay stable next week.

I’m still getting weird slowness from WMI, but I think that’s from Vanta (endpoint compliance software) - still trying to root cause that one.

1 Like
11

Hey again all

I went ahead and took the plunge… After using ddu to uninstall the 2/24 drivers and install the latest one, all of my issues have currently gone away; with the exception of one annoyance: whenever scrolling in explorer, when you get to the top of the bottom of a scrollable folder, the first or last file is only half in view; but then a second later, the folder details refresh and you then see the file in full view.

This is only a minor annoyance and one I can stand. I’m gonna mark this as “updated drivers fixed issue” and keep the 16 up-to-date on graphics drivers when asked to do so by the adrenalin driver software.

12

Magnificent! Thank you very much for letting me know!