The AMD driver often stops working unexpectedly on the XFX 7900xt.
The AMD driver often stops working unexpectedly on the XFX 7900xt.
I recently replaced most of my components. I upgraded the motherboard, installed a new CPU, and added a fresh AMD GPU XFX 7900XT. A clean Windows installation was performed, which should eliminate driver conflicts. The issue remains: when launching demanding games or applications with video on the secondary monitor, the AMD drivers frequently fail. Problems occur intermittently—sometimes after an hour, other times after minutes or even just ten minutes. There are four distinct scenarios:
1. A black screen lasts three seconds, followed by game and Chrome crashes (Chrome often reports an access violation).
2. The game freezes briefly but recovers quickly, while Chrome stops working.
3. The entire system crashes; the PC restarts but no blue screen appears—Event Viewer shows only a Kernel Power 41 event.
4. Chrome stops working, but the game continues normally.
I initially suspected a power supply issue since I was using an older 850W unit. I upgraded to a 1500W PSU, yet the problem persists. Outside gaming sessions, I can play videos and browse without issues.
My troubleshooting steps included:
- Updating all drivers
- Running a clean AMD driver installation (even using tools to remove traces)
- Disabling Surface Format Optimization
- Performing RAM and CPU stress tests—no errors after an hour
- Disabling Chrome extensions (only a few used)
- Testing various games, which consistently triggered the crash
Despite these efforts, the issue continues across multiple drivers. I’m leaning toward replacing the GPU with a new NVIDIA model since this has never happened before. Do you have any suggestions?
Consider these adjustments:
1. Turn off MPO.
2. Turn off hardware acceleration (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Steam, Discord).
3. Turn off Enhanced-Sync.
Thanks for the assistance! Disabling freesync didn't resolve the issue. MPO was already disabled (just the name was missed), but your advice was appreciated. It seems like a RAM problem might be the cause. While I couldn't reproduce the issues in most tests, Prime 95 triggers hardware errors. The SmallFFT test runs smoothly, suggesting the problem is more related to RAM than CPU. I tried HCI Memtest for the first time and encountered errors there. Mematest 86 passed all tests so far...