Display driver crashes when playing 1080i high bitrate videos on crossfire setup

L

lemonhead

Member
With 14.2 beta drivers, playing HD videos (1080i for instance) in Windows Media Center (mpeg2, 12-15mbps) can crash the driver especially if you seek the video frames forward and backwards quickly in large steps.

Interestingly, the problem doesn't happen when crossfire is disabled. Going back to 13.11 or 13.12, fixes the issue and whether the cards are overclocked or not doesn't matter. The problem is more likely to happen in windowed mode. Lower bit rate videos (mp4 2-4 mbps) play fine.

I am running 2x7950 Boost on Windows 8.1 with the display driver using default configuration.

I sent the report to AMD through the driver feedback page.
 
Same thing happened to me yesterday when playing a 1080p MKV only in MPC-HC. When I skipped ahead a few chapters I got the video driver has stopped responding pop-up.

I was also using the 14.2 v1.3 beta drivers. Went back to the 13.12's and no problem. I never thought of disabling crossfire though.
 
Display driver crash on HD videos playback is there in 14.3 v1.0 beta as well, with crossfire enabled.

I can say for certain that once crossfire is disabled the problem is gone, as I never once hit the problem on the previous 14.2 beta drivers in several weeks, with crossfire disabled.

I'll send another feedback, and may put 13.12 WHQLs back.
 
Problem exists in 14.4 RC as well, which unfortunately means that it'll be there in 14.4 WHQL.

I'll send another driver feedback report on this matter. Anyone else running into this problem, do send AMD the bug information. Running HD mpeg2 videos on crossfire setup doesn't seem like a common use-case, so any feedback about this bug is quite critical. Here's the link http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D25AD12B51

Back to 13.12 WHQL.
 
Installed 14.6 beta with great hopes, but the display driver still crashes when playing mpeg2 videos on crossfire setup.

Turned off crossfire, and the video players are stable.

I'll fire off another driver feedback, and go back to 13.12 WHQL. It's frustrating. I have seen this problem on multiple PCs and it's straightforward to reproduce. I can only hope that AMD released this beta driver quickly to counter bad Watchdogs performance, and that there's another development branch, where this bug has been fixed properly.

I hope at the very least someone at AMD knows about the existence of this bug.
 
Did few more experiments yesterday on a clean install of 14.6 beta and found out that, the crossfire display driver crashes only happen when media application was in windowed mode. For some reason WMC caused more crashes than Media Player but that's probably just coincidence. I couldn't however reproduce the crash in full-screen mode. This is different than 14.2 or 14.3, where browsing video files in full screen would easily crash the system.

I also set up a profile in CCC for WMC, with crossfire disabled.

By the way the crashes aren't limited to mpeg2, I saw a crash on h.264 mp4 files with 2-3 mbps bit rates.

I'll stick with 14.6 beta for now.
 
14.6 RC2 also crashes in WMC in windowed mode, with crossfire enabled.

I ran 14.6 beta for a while and in full screen video playback, the crashes were rare, which makes this annoying bug somewhat tolerable.

I am not sure now if this problem will ever get fixed, but will report it in any case.
 
Try WMC in windowed mode and display driver will crash. It happens less frequently in full screen mode, but still happens enough, that I have started keeping crossfire disabled and turning it on only before starting a game.

14.7 RC showed no difference on my setup. Hopefully the next major release will have a fix.
 
Okay, yeah I have switched my GFX card, from two 290 to a single 295 (much more silent) - but should be no difference to the driver becaue crossfire is still enabled.
 
I went back to 13.12 WHQL finally. Managing 14.x drivers to not crash by keeping crossfire enabled only at times turned out to be more of a hassle than I initially thought.

Before that, however, I tried one final experiment. I did a system wipe, and re-installed Win 8.1. Went to Catalyst 14.7 RC2 directly, and had the exact same issues as before. Going back to 13.12 WHQL stabilized every thing. WMC works in windowed mode or full-screen and display driver doesn't crash at all and I can have 7950s crossfired all the time. It means, I again can't have Mantle but that's fine.

If I have to guess, I think AMD broke the idle clock management under some corner cases sometime in the 14.x driver series, particularly when it comes to moving from idle to the video clock-rates. In this WMC scenarios, where the second GPU doesn't fire up, some calculation to either detect the idle state, or to set the clocks, hits a software exception.
 
Display driver still repeatedly crashes and recovers in WMC with 14.7 RC3, when crossfire is on.

14.7 RC3 however fixes the 99% busy crossfired GPU issue, so I'll stick with this set and stay mostly in full-screen in WMC (which is where the driver crashes far less often)

Bye bye 13.12 WHQL, hopefully for good this time!
 
I think AMD has a huge issue with crossfire and DX9 games in these drivers. Oh well, I guess that is the price to pay for going AMD, if you want top play using DX9 then use a single card or go buy Nvidia. Shame really because DX11 games have no issue, but DX9.....Man AMD you suck.
 
I haven't seen issues with games, DX9 or otherwise. The crossfired cards, work perfectly fine in games. For that matter, I don't see BSODs with flash or other GPU accelerated videos either.

It's this otherwise stable system, which makes the WMC display driver crashes (not BSODs) quite ironic and annoying. I am almost certain that if someone at AMD can reproduce this issue, and have the backtrace of the driver exception, the fix will be immediately obvious. The clean and predictable way in which display driver dies and recovers makes it lot more likely to be a software issue.
 
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