AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Performance Issues

[FaTaLMercenery]

As the title says I have a Vega 64 GPU, specifically a Gigabyte Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB OC Edition, and it just does not perform well. I haven't really been happy with this GPU since I got it back in 2019, you can see I've posted about it before. Lately though, I have been having more and more trouble with it(although I don't know if it is the sole issue, this will be discussed later).

 

Every once in a while, my computer will freeze, the screens will go black, and then the computer will crash. Unexpectedly, this does not happen while I am doing anything strenuous on my pc: playing games or making games(usually in UE4 or UE5). Most crashes happen simply while browsing the web or watching YouTube. This is not to say that my performance in those tasks is good. Also, I did some research after the last crash and found how to read the memory dump files and the error that it said caused the crash was "amdkmdag.sys" which research leads me to believe is an issue with the GPU or its drivers.

 

I don't typically play all too many games on PC, although I'm trying to get more into it, but the games that I do play a lot of are usually fine. Last week though, my friend decided to get me to play Fortnite, and let me just say that my experience was not great. Although my FPS was not terrible, the frame drops were; my frames would drop as low as single digits for a split second every once in a while. However, when I play another game, Satisfactory, which to me is fairly impressive visually, runs fine for the most part with the only issue being freezing during autosaves, but that's no fault of the GPU.

 

My biggest issue has arisen when doing game development in UE4 and even more so in UE5. Whenever I do any work in either of these game engines, my FPS jumps all over the place and the coil whine of my GPU is so loud that I just limit my fps to 30 to keep it calm. With that said, I've been trying to do more in UE5 since it's now officially released, however, it keeps constantly "freezing". I put freezing in quotes because it's not quite freezing, but dropping down to about 4 FPS and just stuttering but eventually fixes itself after a few minutes. I don't know if this is solely the fault of the GPU or if it's a combination of issues with my pc(specs at the bottom).

 

Today I decided to run some benchmarks. The results are as follows(with links):

Userbenchmark: Gaming(53%), Desktop(89%), Workstation(51%) with GPU score at 54.3%
3DMark Time Spy: Graphics(7028), CPU(6930)

3DMark Fire Strike Extreme: Graphics(10392), Physics(18699), Combined(3913)

3DMark PCI Express: Bandwidth(3.52GB/s), FPS(3.6 - 4.0)

 

I will note that in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the benchmark started off extremely choppy at under 10 FPS but eventually smoothed out. The results are slightly lower than the average for the Vega 64 on 3DMark Time Spy which is 7494. The PCI Express test is definitely what worries me. This should be running PCIE 3.0 and those are certainly not good speeds since, to my knowledge, I should be getting ~12GB/s. A second run of the benchmark gives identical results.

 

Windows is up to date. All drivers are up to date as per AMD Radeon Software. The BIOS is up to date as per MSI's Dragon Center.

 

With all that said, I have been looking at not only getting a new GPU, but building a whole new computer, but obviously the market is currently not great, so this is sort of last resort(but I wouldn't be totally against it). If there is any way to fix these issues, that would be great. I don't need 4k 120FPS performance(I wouldn't get even close with this hardware), but I'd like the crashing to stop and for games and UE5 to run smoothly at least. Any help is appreciated.

 

Specs:

OS: Windows 10 Education

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X72
MBD: MSI X570-A PRO
RAM: G.Skill TridentZ 3200 C18 4x8GB
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB OC
Storage: 250GB 970 Evo Plus, 2TB 970 Evo Plus, 2TB Seagate Barracuda
PSU: Corsair RM850x
Case: NZXT H710i

[crazyamdlover]

Might be your CPU, have you tried it on another build (if you have one)?

[crazyamdlover]

On 4/30/2022 at 8:07 PM, FaTaLMercenery said:

As the title says I have a Vega 64 GPU, specifically a Gigabyte Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB OC Edition, and it just does not perform well. I haven't really been happy with this GPU since I got it back in 2019, you can see I've posted about it before. Lately though, I have been having more and more trouble with it(although I don't know if it is the sole issue, this will be discussed later).

 

Every once in a while, my computer will freeze, the screens will go black, and then the computer will crash. Unexpectedly, this does not happen while I am doing anything strenuous on my pc: playing games or making games(usually in UE4 or UE5). Most crashes happen simply while browsing the web or watching YouTube. This is not to say that my performance in those tasks is good. Also, I did some research after the last crash and found how to read the memory dump files and the error that it said caused the crash was "amdkmdag.sys" which research leads me to believe is an issue with the GPU or its drivers.

 

I don't typically play all too many games on PC, although I'm trying to get more into it, but the games that I do play a lot of are usually fine. Last week though, my friend decided to get me to play Fortnite, and let me just say that my experience was not great. Although my FPS was not terrible, the frame drops were; my frames would drop as low as single digits for a split second every once in a while. However, when I play another game, Satisfactory, which to me is fairly impressive visually, runs fine for the most part with the only issue being freezing during autosaves, but that's no fault of the GPU.

 

My biggest issue has arisen when doing game development in UE4 and even more so in UE5. Whenever I do any work in either of these game engines, my FPS jumps all over the place and the coil whine of my GPU is so loud that I just limit my fps to 30 to keep it calm. With that said, I've been trying to do more in UE5 since it's now officially released, however, it keeps constantly "freezing". I put freezing in quotes because it's not quite freezing, but dropping down to about 4 FPS and just stuttering but eventually fixes itself after a few minutes. I don't know if this is solely the fault of the GPU or if it's a combination of issues with my pc(specs at the bottom).

 

Today I decided to run some benchmarks. The results are as follows(with links):

Userbenchmark: Gaming(53%), Desktop(89%), Workstation(51%) with GPU score at 54.3%
3DMark Time Spy: Graphics(7028), CPU(6930)

3DMark Fire Strike Extreme: Graphics(10392), Physics(18699), Combined(3913)

3DMark PCI Express: Bandwidth(3.52GB/s), FPS(3.6 - 4.0)

 

I will note that in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the benchmark started off extremely choppy at under 10 FPS but eventually smoothed out. The results are slightly lower than the average for the Vega 64 on 3DMark Time Spy which is 7494. The PCI Express test is definitely what worries me. This should be running PCIE 3.0 and those are certainly not good speeds since, to my knowledge, I should be getting ~12GB/s. A second run of the benchmark gives identical results.

 

Windows is up to date. All drivers are up to date as per AMD Radeon Software. The BIOS is up to date as per MSI's Dragon Center.

 

With all that said, I have been looking at not only getting a new GPU, but building a whole new computer, but obviously the market is currently not great, so this is sort of last resort(but I wouldn't be totally against it). If there is any way to fix these issues, that would be great. I don't need 4k 120FPS performance(I wouldn't get even close with this hardware), but I'd like the crashing to stop and for games and UE5 to run smoothly at least. Any help is appreciated.

 

Specs:

OS: Windows 10 Education

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X72
MBD: MSI X570-A PRO
RAM: G.Skill TridentZ 3200 C18 4x8GB
GPU: Gigabyte Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB OC
Storage: 250GB 970 Evo Plus, 2TB 970 Evo Plus, 2TB Seagate Barracuda
PSU: Corsair RM850x
Case: NZXT H710i

Why are you on windows 10 education edition??

[Middcore]

1 hour ago, crazyamdlover said:

Why are you on windows 10 education edition??

Probably got it free/discounted. 

[FaTaLMercenery]

5 hours ago, crazyamdlover said:

Might be your CPU, have you tried it on another build (if you have one)?

Unfortunately I don't. There are only two desktops in my house: the one I'm having issues with and my sister's which hasn't been upgraded in 10 years. I'm still pretty sure it's the GPU though because in the benchmarks it's performing lower than the average for the same GPU and the crash logs seem to point towards GPU issues or at least GPU driver issues.

4 hours ago, Middcore said:

Probably got it free/discounted. 

Ya, that's exactly it.

 

Update: I played Fortnite with my friend again yesterday and my FPS jumped all over from 144(where I have it capped) down to 10s.

[_Random_Person]

If the crash is because of an AMD file I'd guess its a bad driver?

Have you tried uninstalling the driver with DDU and reinstalling? I don't see a mention of reinstalling drivers in your post.

 

With some little research, I found people with the same broken file solving the issue by reinstalling drivers.

[FaTaLMercenery]

11 hours ago, _Random_Person said:

If the crash is because of an AMD file I'd guess its a bad driver?

Have you tried uninstalling the driver with DDU and reinstalling? I don't see a mention of reinstalling drivers in your post.

 

With some little research, I found people with the same broken file solving the issue by reinstalling drivers.

I did a "factory reset" of my drivers with AMD's Radeon Software and then went through a massive headache of Windows 10 giving me a BSoD because it had the setting for driver validation enabled. I managed to get into safe boot and disable that so I could actually get into Windows and have it finish removing the old drivers and adding the new one. I haven't had a crash since then(still lousy performance) but it's only been a few days and the crashing wasn't constant.

 

I'm not sure if that's the same thing.

 

PS. Downloading the driver straight from Gigabyte's site just opened up AMD Radeon Software in case you would have asked that next.