The Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT.
There have been a multitude of reports of black screens, performance issues, and random system hangs, reboots, and crashes with AMD’s Adrenaline Edition drivers for a number of months now. Reports seemed to reach a fevered pitch coincident with the releases of the company’s Radeon RX 5600 XT GPU and Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver suite, however, which were introduced over the course of December and January. The Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver suite brought with them a myriad of new features, like a more complex overlay system and Radeon Boost (among many other things), which can increase performance in supported games by dynamically lowering the resolution during fast-moving action due to quick mouse movements.
AMD had been touting the quality of its drivers for the past few major revisions, an even published a study in 2018 to that effect. The perceived lack of acknowledgement of these recent driver issues, however, had many users up in arms; some even claimed they were forced to switch to rival NVIDIA and wouldn’t be coming back to team red anytime soon.
Radeon Adrenalin Edition Game Overlay.
AMD recently commented on the issues in the release notes for its v20.0.3 Radeon drivers though, and today the company may have finally resolved the issues – or some of them at least.
The release notes for the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition v20.2.2 drivers that just hit the web mention “black screen” no less than eight times. Five of those mentions are associated with fixes related to things like task switching when hardware acceleration is enabled in some applications, HDR, or using the Instant Replay feature available in the drivers. There is still a known issues related to Enhanced Sync listed in the release notes, however, and AMD cautions that there are likely still issues that need addressing.
“Although Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.2.2 resolves many black screen issues, AMD is aware that some users may still experience black screen or system hang issues during extended periods of gameplay. AMD will continue to monitor and investigate reports of these issues closely.”
Should users continue to experience problems after installing the newest drivers, AMD is asking for feedback on this page.
