AMD drivers: crossfire profiles gone

[SpaceGhostC2C]

I'm having a problem with AMD's GPU drivers, and so far reporting it to AMD has resulted in nothing. Hence, I thought I may ask if someone had a similar issue and managed to solve it.

 

Here's the: I'm running an R9 280 and an HD 7950 in crossfire. Everything was fine until very recently. Whenever I installed a game, I would open Crimson, go to "gaming" tab, select the game, go to crossfire mode and change it to "AMD predefined profile". A huge list of games would appear, I would scroll/search for the right one, select it and that's it, great smooth experience with twice the GPU power.

A few updates later (I believe starting from 16.9), Crimson crashed when I tried to update drivers within it. After rebooting, Crimson would even fail to see I have an AMD card. Solution: uninstall drivers, manually download new drivers, reinstall. New problem: after doing so, all the game profiles are gone. I follow the same path (gaming tab, select game, crossfire mode, etc), only to find an empty list, zero predefined crossfire profiles to choose from. Then 16.10 comes along, same story: updating within Crimson fails, clean install works but no trace of the crossfire profiles. I double-checked that every possible box is ticked in the installer (thanks AMD for dropping Raptr ), but I get no profiles still. I can always run crossfire in "default mode" for all games, but the performance is nowhere near what I was getting when using game-specific profiles. Some older games, for which this setup was absolute overkill before (as in I was playing those in my core duo laptop with an HD 3650) are now falling to ~15 FPS at times and stuttering like crazy. Of course, I could solve that particular case by just using a single GPU, but the main question remains: where have all the profiles gone, and how on Earth do I restore them?

[ivan134]

Ask @Prysin. He has a lot of crossfire experience.

[Prysin]

@SpaceGhostC2C

Clean out driver with DDU or AMD Driver Cleanup Utility -> http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx

Get 16.7.2 or something like that -> http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-Crimson-Edition-16.7.2-Release-Notes.aspx

File a report for 16.9 and 16.10 with AMD, form for driver complaints can be found here -> http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D23A3DE979

Also: Check that Crossfire bridge hasnt come loose or anything. Shit happens, might be something simple as that.

ATM i have issues with AMD drivers too. If i go beyond 16.7.2 i can no longer play certain games with CTD. So i'm just waiting for them to update their drivers and for the release notes to show that they fixed the issue.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, Prysin said:

@SpaceGhostC2C

Clean out driver with DDU or AMD Driver Cleanup Utility -> http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx

Get 16.7.2 or something like that -> http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-Crimson-Edition-16.7.2-Release-Notes.aspx

File a report for 16.9 and 16.10 with AMD, form for driver complaints can be found here -> http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D23A3DE979

Also: Check that Crossfire bridge hasnt come loose or anything. Shit happens, might be something simple as that.

ATM i have issues with AMD drivers too. If i go beyond 16.7.2 i can no longer play certain games with CTD. So i'm just waiting for them to update their drivers and for the release notes to show that they fixed the issue.

Thanks a lot for your help! I have solved it in the meantime, but I'll report back on your suggestions as well, in case someone with a similar problem lands here:

 

- DDU: I used it after Crimson's driver upgrade failed. Hence, when manually installing new drivers, it was a clean install.

- Using older version: didn't try that as I solved the problem at least temporarily; worth trying otherwise. Maybe I'll do it anyways if the Wattman error messages continue to appear for my non-Wattman GPUs  

- Repport to AMD: did it last weekend  

- Crossfire bridge: checked. Notice that crossfire is working, though. It's enabled in Crimson and both cards are used by games, it's just that all games were using the default profile, which was worse than game-specific ones.

 

So how did I got the profiles back? After asking here, I tried checking for updates in case they had released a patch. It turns out there is a beta 16.10.2, but the release notes say nothing about my issue. I tried upgrading anyway, which this time worked without issues. The "application profiles" box was ticked. After installing and rebooting, still no profiles. However, I went to the folder where the installer unpacked everything (C:\AMD\<driver version>), and there was a subfolder for application profiles. Inside, there was a .msi setup file. I ran it, still nothing, but it asked for a reboot. After rebooting, all the profiles were back! I chose the appropriate profile for each game and everything is back to normal. Only one weird thing: the application profiles installer I used was in the 16.10.2 beta folder. However, after rebooting, Crimson reports I'm back in 16.10.1 and that there is an optional update available (the beta .2). I'll leave it like that for now 

 

So bottom line: it seems that the profile part is unpacking but not installing when I update for some reason. I wonder if the same may be happening with other components  Manually installing the specific component (kind of) fixes it.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

OK, 16.11.3 is out and the problem is back - except this time my previous fix doesn't work, when I manually install the AppProfiles.msi, nothing changes and the profiles don't come back after restarting.

 

And all this only after having Crimson crash on me during the upgrade, hard reset needed, new attempt at running setup.exe, new hard reset needed, DDU, then finally manage to install 16.11.3. Am I supposed to do all this with every new version? I guess I'll stay outdated for a looong time.

 

FFS, at this point Crimson already is one of the worst pieces of malware I ever had on my computer. Btw, still no answer to the report I filed before opening this topic.