This is going to be a long thread because there is a lot to explain here.
So in summer of 2022 I purchased a PowerColor 6950 XT. Initially the drivers were not in a good state and pretty much everyone was complaining about black screen crashes/ hangs and stuttering. I was initially frustrated but decided to give team red a chance to get their drivers better and slowly but surely they did. 22.6.1 delivered many optimizations for DX11 titles and stuttering and crashing decreased.
However there was one problem that I had throughout my entire usage of the GPU - I would get these grey screen + blue vertical lines crashes that would result in a reboot. I was getting that issue in all sorts of different situations - sometimes while I was using VSCode or watching YouTube videos, but the issue was always reproducable in one game - Predecessor. It’s not a particularly famous game, it’s a remake of Paragon that got closed down a few years back.
So naturally I started searching for what this issue might be and found quite a lot reddit and other threads (that I am going to link at the end of this post) having a similar issue. People were actually blaming Samsung monitors because the common culprit between all affected users seemed to be that they had a Samsung G7/G8/G9 monitor and since Samsung are infamous for having firmware/other QC issues with their monitors that was largely the consensus.
The thing is, I was using an Alienware 240hz monitor when the crashes started and then I switched to the ASUS PG27AQDM which is a 240HZ 10bit OLED monitor that’s using a display from LG and not Samsung.
This got me thinking, what do all affected users have in common?
They’re all using high refresh rate (above 144hz) and/or 10 bit panels and usually in combination with different monitors with different refresh rates as their secondary.
I followed all the normal instructions that come with diagnosing and “fixing” GPU issues like disabling MPO, reinstalling windows, repasting my card, hell I even tried installing different vBIOS (but that was useless because it seems like all the BIOSes for the 6950XT have the same clock speeds and the only difference is fan curve).
Since I have a 4 monitor setup I tried unplugging my monitors one by one and the game stopped crashing when I ONLY used my 100hz ultrawide which was my lowest refresh-rate display. Then I tried usign my ASUS main monitor at lower refresh rate and it did not crash up until I went above 144hz.
Now for the kicker - this is not an RDNA2 specific issue. From all the threads I’ve found on the subject there are people with RDNA1 and RDNA3 that are having the same issue.
Now as to why I have included “black screen” in the title. Well it seems like the grey screen blue lines crashes turn in to regular black screen crashes whenever you’re using a 240hz 8 bit panel, the crash just looks different on 10 bit panels for some reason.
I’m writing in this forum because I know Wendell made a video about display signal issues with AMD GPUs all the way back in 2021, but since I have tried multiple cables and multiple displays I highly doubt this is a cable issue, there’s just something wrong with the way signal is being sent to high bandwidth displays and something errors out and crashes these GPUs.
As to the solution - After dealing with that crap for a year and a half I decided I’ve had enough, went out and purchased a 4080 SUPER. And since there was a lot of speculation that these crashes are caused by AMD Chipset drivers or bad CPU/RAM overclocks I decided I would test that as well by not changing ANY of my bios settings when I got the 4080, just DDUing the AMD drivers and installing the Nvidia drivers straight away with everything else - OS and BIOS settings remaining the same.
And I did just that. The result - no more crashes. So this is IMO the proof that this is definitely a GPU issue now all that’s left to find out is if it’s actualy silicon defects that manifests in the exact same way in 3 generations of GPUs or if it’s a driver bug.
Update: Unfortunately, since I’m a new user I can’t share links, if you google “amd grey screen blue lines” you will find threads ranging from 2022 to 2024 with RDNA1,2 and 3 users affected both in the amd community forums and on reddit.
I didn’t take into account the many black screen crash threads I found because there’s no way to proove that all black screen crashes are the same as the grey screen crash, but I’m pretty sure all grey screen crashes are a variation of the black screen crash.
My 6950XT is just sitting in its box because I don’t want to potentially sell a defective GPU but I have a feeling this is not a defect with my Unit but a much larger global scale bug and since most people are not using 240hz + and/or 10bit monitors it has flown under the radar for a long time.
edit: Forgot to say why I mentioned the game “predecessor”. What’s specific to that game is the insanely large fluctuations in GPU usage and FPS because the game is heavy when there are a lot of spell being cast on screen and not that heavy otherwise, so it causes GPU usage to spike from 50-60% to 100% in milliseconds, but most importantly I think it has something to do with the framerate being so variable. Also forgot to mention I thought it might be a FreeSync Issue so I also tried disabling FreeSync an ALL displays and it still didn’t fix it.