SmartSDR on Windows 10 AMD graphics driver errors?

Ray G6UJB

When running SmartSDR 1.5.1 on Windows 10 Pro with the latest version 1511, using AMD graphics driver, has anybody been experiencing and graphic driver pauses or errors?

This happens very rarely, I've had about 1 or 2 instances over a listening time of about 3 to 4  hours. The symptom is that while running SmartSDR the SDR waveform and waterfall displays freeze for about a second, then the whole Windows display blinks black momentarily, the SDR displays continue running again and then Windows displays an error message - "Display driver amdkmdap stopped responding and has successfully recovered.", usually say's this twice in quick succession.

I was have tried the latest AMD crimson graphics driver and have downgraded to an older catalyst driver - but this gives the same error.

I have uninstalled and re-installed Smart SDR 1.5.1 twice with no change.

Is SmartSDR being actively tested against Windows 10 now ?

Neal_K3NC

You can try falling back to the previous driver and see if that stops the behavior but my history with these types of errors indicates you have a bad video card.

You can download the Burnin Test from passmark.com and  run the 2D stress test and see if you have an error.

73

Walt - KZ1F

I am using that driver but, rather than get it from Microsoft I got it from AMD, 1511. No problems at all.

Neal_K3NC

Agree Walt, I never use the MS drivers if there is a reliable source. BTW for the readers, never use those driver update programs. They are guaranteed to deliver the most current viruses along with your driver!

k3Tim

Had this same problem on Win 7 with nvidia card.  Googling "nvidia bsod" turned up many suggestions. Realizing you mentioned AMD but here goes:  When installing the update be sure to ccheck the remove current software option / fresh install. Power management set to high performance. 

Whilst in power management turn off PCI Express "link state power management".
It is possible your video card is going capute BTW.   uninstalling / reinstalling SSDR is irrelevant and may make matters worse. Personally I would go into the Device Manager and look for hidden devices and remove ones that do not belong such as dups.

I chased a **** Nvidia BSOD problem for a year. It seems above fixed 'er up.

Good Luck with the bit bashing.

k3Tim

Ray G6UJB

Hi all, further thanks for feedback. I had to reinstall smartSDR because of the current fragility it had/has with the recent windows 10 updates, which just complicates things when chasing silly stability issues. Its all conveniently happened about the same time the graphics card errors started. But all points noted thanks for the words of wisdom. I'll update when I've got to the bottom of the root cause. Wanted to test the water before I started blaming components by getting a sense of how others were getting on with Windows 10 etc. 73 Ray.

Walt - KZ1F

Oh, ... now you tell me.

Ray G6UJB

Just to correct the versions, it is Amd 15.30.1025, windows 10 version is 1511 the recent major release of windows 10.. 73 Ray.

Jay Nation

My display problems (and they are trivial), began right after the Radeon Crimson driver update, I hope they will be totally eliminated with Crimson2. I'll try reverting to the previous Win8.1, that didn't hang. To see if I can blame it on Crimson.

Update:
Reverting the drivers might have been the cause of blue screens upon boot I suffered all day. Removing all the AMD drivers and then installing "one" of the previous drivers might have been a better approach.
After failing to boot even into safe mode and then failing to restore from a restore point, twice, I feel lucky that whatever was going on auto-magically fixed itself somehow I had reached the point of attempting a "Clean" reinstall of win10, when I plugged in the wrong USBstick and Windows booted normally instead of loading the Win10 installer.

Another good reason to do the "Clean Win10 Install"

I'm up and running again on the Crimson driver dated 11/17/15 which came out the day before the current 11/18/15 Crimson version.
I figure my milage did vary this time.
    
73, Jay - NO5J

Walt - KZ1F

In the last few weeks, and released a new driver for their video cards, whatever release that was, works just fine on win 10.

Steve K9ZW

@Neal

My machine also experienced this - would be rather surprised if so many of us had bad AMD Crimson cards?

Pulling the latest directly from AMD seems to have helped,  No pauses again so far, but have only a couple hours on it after fixing.

73

Steve
K9ZW

Ray G6UJB

my display problems sound very similar to Jay's. I've also back dated to previous Catalyst drivers after some pain with the windows default driver leaving me with a totally corrupted and unreadable display. I had to use another machine to learn how to install the drivers blind through just key presses at the right moments! I've been running system stress tools as recommended by Neal plus some others which so far have show no repeat of the problem .... Yet and SmartSDR is stable so far. I agree with Jay, likewise I'm keeping clear of Amd Crimson drivers for at least a few updates before attempting again. Rather have stable SmartSDR than support latest greatest time wasting games. 73, Ray G6UJB

Walt - KZ1F

I just returned to the Win10 side. My AMD driver is Radeon Software Crimson Edition (15.11).

Norm - W7CK

I have an ASUS AMD HD-7870 running Crimson 15.11.  I've had the same exact problem reported here by others ever since I upgraded to Windows 10.  This ONLY has happened while SmartSDR is running.  For the past few days, I have been running SmartSDR off of my laptop and using my desktop for everything else.  I have not had the problem return.  I've even run a few very graphic intense games and still no failures.   Later today, I'll fire up SmartSDR and see if the issue returns.

Other than this particular issue, I have not had any major issues with Windows 10.  For the most part, I believe it is a huge improvement of Windows 7.  I'm not thrilled with the hoops you have to jump through to keep Microsoft out of what I consider private information on my machine, but once hardened, it seems to be ok.

Norm

Jay Nation

Update 2:

I didn't see any further issues with the 11/17/15 Crimson Driver. Then yesterday I noticed there was an 11/30/15 Crimson driver available. I updated to that one, and haven't seen any glitching yet. The 11/18/15 Crimson driver might have been the problem. New is usually better, but sometimes New == DOA. I'll keep exploring the Shiny New stuff. If I stumble onto perfection, I'll brag a lot , about being the first to discover it. When the shiny wears off, I'll share the nasty bits.

BTW the associated AMD version for the 11/30/15 driver I'm currently using is ...
15.300.1025.1001
3-4 days and that ones, still glitch free.

So far, so Meh! 
73, Jay - NO5J 

Tim - W4TME

I suspect this is part of the to be expected behavior when breaking in a new operating system.  Drivers are usually unstable as they get tweaked.  I cannot imagine what the graphics driver developers go through to support their GPU chipsets on dozens of different card manufacturers, running on millions of different machine/BIOS/software combinations.  My hats off to them.

Jon_KF2E

I've had the same problem recently. The AMD driver crashes, Windows reports it has crashed and then it reloads. Seems to work for 1-2 hours at a time. Only seems to crash when SSDR is running. I downloaded the AMD utility that tests for the latest driver and it says mine is current.

Not a huge issue but if someone has a fix, I'm interested.

Jon

Walt - KZ1F

I did suffer my first video driver issue where monitor two went solidly white. It was accompanied with two error messages, bottom right of monitor 1 that the driver failed and had restarted.

Tim - W4TME

I am not sure this will help, but it can't hurt and is easily reversed.
https://helpdesk.flexradio.com/hc/en-us/articles/202530818-Video-Card-Black-Screen-Fix

Walt - KZ1F

Thanks Tim! I didn't add but maybe should have, this phenomena has zero to do with flex or ssdr.

Norm - W7CK

I've been having the same issue as others using an AMD Radeon HD 7870 GPU card.  I'm currently running AMD version 15.300.1025.1001, windows 10 version is 1511 the recent major release of windows 10.  Every couple hours I get the error "Display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered", twice in quick succession.  I only get this error when SSDR is running.

This morning it happened again, but this time monitor two went solidly white. It was accompanied with two error messages, bottom right of monitor 1 that the driver failed and had restarted.  SmartSDR was running on 2nd monitor and the program was no responding.  I had to reboot the system to recover.

I then decided to stress test the GPU by running GpuTest (FurMark) at 1024x640 for about 8 hours.  I had absolutely no errors of any kind during this test.

After the test, I fired up SmartSDR and within an hour, "Display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered" occurred again.

I use this machine for all sorts of pretty intense projects including photo processing, video processing, editing and conversion, video security surveillance processing and capturing, gaming, etc.  All without any problems at all.  The other day my grandson was here for several hours playing some pretty GPU intense games on this computer without any issues what so ever. 

There definitely seems to be a link of some kind between the AMD driver issues and SmartSDR.  It failed again while I was typing this comment.  SmartSDR happened to be running on Monitor 1 this time.

Steve K9ZW

I thought I had this issued resolved, but now it has returned.  

Sometimes a blank and recover, but now some system killing dead driver.

My game machine savvy sons suggested the easiest sure thing is to dump the AMD Radeon the PC I bought from Neal came with and set it aside for now.

Before I do that I wanted to ask the group for any other suggestions?

Another point my sons made, knowing that I tend towards a "Two is One, One is None" ideal in tools and resources, that I really should consider having viable second SmartSDR-capable PC in the Shack.  

Thoughts on the AMD problem?

73

Steve K9ZW

Jay Nation

Steve 
Some of the recent Radeon drivers seem to be having more trouble than others.
Some of them run fine, though. As always it's probably more a problem related to how each Driver release interacts, with Windows, which is sort of a moving target.

I'm still seeing best results with the, 15.300.1025.1001 driver, that's dated 11/17/2015. Device manager list several drivers on my machine, I usually skip uninstalling previous video drivers so I can switch between them using the update driver button.

YMMV, as might mine depending on however Windows updates us next.
73, Jay - NO5J  

Ray G6UJB

All,

Sorry not a fix, just an update.

I've tried following up some fixes found on Windows and games forums that are related to similar problem that appears to be known as a TDR event https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff570087%28v=vs.85%29.aspx.

So far I've still only been experiencing the event while running SmartSDR 1.5.1. On a few occasions the event has resulted in SmartSDR crashing out, most times SmartSDR just continues running after the TDR event.

I've Tried older Catalyst drivers and the lasted version of the Crimson drivers 15.30.1025.1001 as others here have, but still the same problem, the frequency seems to be less on older drivers, but this may be due to performance tweaks that are in the Crimson drivers.

I had been running system stress testing on the video card using the Pass Mark BurnInTest v8.1 for several days now and I have seen that that the event is never being triggered by stressing the system with GPU 2D and 3D tests. I've even overclocked the GPU to force it to become less stable but this just resulted in a few graphics memory errors but never a TDR event.

I've stress tested with Smart SDR 1.5.1 running and experienced TDR events but the PassMark software has not detect the TDR event as an error and just continued running and completed with 100% pass! (Weird?)

From what I've seen, TDR discussions on forums seems to be more often related to the HD 78xx family of Radeon cards. I wonder if anybody is running anything other than an AMD Radeon HD78xx family card that is experiencing this TDR issue?

Incidentally, my son's are running Radeon R9 family cards, one has windows 10, the other windows 7, neither have complained of this TDR issue while running graphic intense games. I must see if I can sneak a copy of SmartSDR onto one of their machines...wish me luck

73, Ray

Norm - W7CK

As previously posted here and elsewhere, I'm also running an AMD Radeon HD 7800 series GPU and am having the same issues.

I recently came across a post where someone suggested that going into the AMD Radeon Settings and changing the Graphics Profile to Optimize Performance.   I made this change on my system about 14 hours ago and so far it seems to be working.  I hope I haven't spoken too soon.  Time will tell.

If anyone else has the same results or have found a better approach to the problem, please post your results.

Norm.  

Ray G6UJB

Norm, I've been running with Optimize for some days now. Over the weekend while playing in the RTTY Round-up I had about 3 TDR events across the day. But today, since I've been running for about 4 hours no events yet. I even fired up some graphics benchmark software that I ran along side SmartSDR to get things cooking but still couldn't make it happen today.

73, Ray

Steve K9ZW

As am update the latest of all available upgradeable choices has the driver error to about once in 6 hours, and usually the system recovers.




Again only seems to happen if I have SmartSDR running.


73

Steve
K9ZW

Walt - KZ1F

If we're still talking about 115, there is a newer driver; 117, I believe. I know I upgraded the AMD driver beyond 115.

Ray G6UJB

A final update from me, after many months of trying every suggestion on Internet and on here I'm Sorry to say I gave up with AMD cards, I even tried a newer R9-270 but that suffered exactly the same TDR problems, so I got rid of the AMD cards and bought an nVidia GTX960 and this works without any of the driver problems that AMD seem to have, QED.

Tim - W4TME

I NEVER install hardware drivers sourced from Microsoft Update.  I always get them from the manufacturer.