Radeon RX6800xt Issues

[Pat-Roner]

So finally got a hold of a 6800xt and got super stoked. Uninstalled my Nvidia driver with DDU, removed it, installed the AMD card and the latest drivers. Immidiately i notice that the core clocks are all over the place (compared to what I'm used to with nvidia), but I think nothing of it. 

Played some wow and today i wanted to play some Warzone. Clock speeds again all over the place, almost no utilization, CPU pinned and I'm hitting 10-20 fps in the menus, and all of a sudden the game freezes and the screens turn of. 
I try to reset my via the reset button, but nothing happens. I hold the power button until the systems turns off completely and turn it back on, and the screens are back. 

My system is a z370 board with a 8600k, and 16gb of ram. 850w seassonic prime px psu (with two cables).

I play at 1440@165hz
Temps were never over 70c.

 

Swapped back to a 3060ti that I also have, and everything is back to normal with solid speeds etc. 

 

I also had Fortnite installed since my nephew was here recently and i thought to try that since that's known to be fairly optimized (at least what I can recall), and 9fps while dropping and 20 roaming around the woods.

 

Tried Bfv as well, 10-20 fps.

 

Have also tried to format my system drive and install AMD drivers completely clean (zero trace of nvidia) but no luck at all. 

Is my GPU dead?

[GamerDude]

I think it's a driver bug, my RX 6900 XT has this issue too. On games like Serious Sam 4, the clocks go all over the place, but can still maintain >100fps at 3840x1080 (at max setting). But, when I played Metro Exodus Sam's Story, the framerate drop was quite noticeable, with my RX 6800 previously, I was still able to hit 40+ and higher fps, and gameplay was surprisingly smooth. With my 6900XT, the clock dipped to 800Mhz which resulted in framerate dipping to 30fps (I should be getting higher fps easily with this card), I've reported this to AMD.  Will reset my card and see if the issue would be resolved.

 

Playing an older game, like UT3, I find the clockspeed to vary as well, where previously, I can hit >100fps, I now see fps in the 100's. No, I'm NOT saying it unplayable, far from it, but it does show a trend of clockspeed fluctuation (noticed that it was between 1.5GHz to 2.2GHz, much like Serious Sam 4, but NOT so for Metro Exodus which always seem to be problematic with the new RX 6000 series cards)

[my name is guru iam tech]

try reinstalling the gpu and reinstalling the drivers if the problem persist wait for the next driver update it could be a driver issue.

 

[GamerDude]

@Pat-RonerI'd suggest you use the Report Bug tab in Adrenalin to report this to AMD, they need to be aware that this issue exists.

[Falkentyne]

AMD setting clock speeds based on GPU Usage load has been an eyesore for AMD cards for years.  Although this usually never causes problems in new games, where the card goes to max core load or as much as it needs (if FPS is locked/vsync), this has been known to cause performance issues in older games where the card simply 'doesn't' detect a 3d load at all and ends up running at 2D clocks.  However while I can see this happening in Unreal Tournament 3, this should not happen in any semi recent game.

 

Nvidia cards sometimes have had the same issues with not detecting a proper 3D load, but with MSI Afterburner, or even with the NVCP, you can at least force 3D base clocks, or lock in a boost clock.  With AMD, there hasn't been a way to do this in the drivers (locking P7 or the highest clock state), unless something was added in the last few months, I never saw a way to lock P7 state on Vega.  There was an OpenCL app named Clockblocker which would send the card openCL commands which would trick it into running at full clocks (while not putting an actual load on the card) but I don't know if the app is still updated, as I last ran it on a HD 290X.

[Action_Johnson]

My 5700XT's clock speeds go up and down all the time if I use "Chill", or I hit the FPS limiter in a game engine. 

 

But usually if it's in any game made since at least 2015, it hits about 2050MHz and pretty much stays there give-or-take 100MHz

[GamerDude]

I tried setting Metro Exodus Sam's Story framerate to 144Hz, ensure I was on Ultra and started the game. Framerate's much better, only one slowdown, and it was at the fire station level up on the tower , but other than that, it's good. Now, I get anything between 40+fps to 100+fps, doesn't dip below 1100MHz, it seems to be smooth now. So weird, having the boost clock go all over the place previously, strengthens my belief that it's a driver issue. I guess AMD need to polish their drivers a little more for the newer cards.

[Pat-Roner]

Thanks for all the advice. Will do some testing. Any idea what games software I can use to test that reliable results? Heaven benchmark crashes for some reason for me. 

[GamerDude]

15 minutes ago, Pat-Roner said:

Thanks for all the advice. Will do some testing. Any idea what games software I can use to test that reliable results? Heaven benchmark crashes for some reason for me. 

Try Superposition, and Timespy....and Firestrike Extreme. I usually have MSI Afterburner running to check temps and gpu clocks while I was running these benchmarks. For pure benchmarking, I'd disable MSI AB because it may chew up precious CPU cycles, thus lowering the final score.....I believe so anyway.

[Pat-Roner]

Put the 6800xt back in and did some testing.

Did a couple of Heaven runs and Time spu runs, and it seems to run those fine - nice and stable clocks.

In Timespy I got a graphics score of 17 897, which to me seems good, comparing to guru3d’s benchmark.

 

Also BfV runs better now, but not as well as I’d hope - 130fps ish which seems low compared to TPU’s 190fps albeit with a better cpu, but should cpu have that much to say on performance?

 

CoD is running like sh*t, but I notice that it bogs down my whole cpu, but only when I have a AMD gpu installed, so I’m thinking that has to be a driver issue 

[Pat-Roner]

Just to mark this as solved, but I installed an older driver (20.11.2 WHQL) driver, and now all the issues are gone and everything runs smoothly. 

 

I ran in to issues again, and seems like MSI Dragon Center and MSI SDK was the root. As soon as I removed those programs all my issues disappeared. Now also with the latest driver

 

Edited January 10, 2021 by Pat-Roner