Some AMD Radeon users may experience lower 3DMark Time Spy scores, AMD/UL confirm

Published: Mar 11th 2023, 10:46 GMT   Comments

AMD is aware of a rare 3DMark performance bug

Some Radeon users may experience performance issues with 3DMark software when using the latest Radeon drivers. 

The issue has been reported Osvaldo Doederlein (Software Engineer at Google), who noticed a drop in performance when using the latest Radeon drivers for his RX 7900 XTX GPU. The issue reportedly affects TimeSpy benchmarking software by rendering much lower results.

The UL/3DMark developer confirms that around 3% of the users may be impacted. Probably because only such a small number of affected systems is reported, the company was unable to reproduce this issue internally. However, the AMD driver team had more success in doing so, although the issue has not yet been added to the ‘known issues’ list for the latest driver.

We have not been able to reproduce this in our test lab at this time. We’re still trying, but nothing so far. So we know at this time that this is not a general issue that affects everyone with 7900XT/XTX. If this were such an issue, it would have also come up during driver approval testing but that process saw nothing odd with the latest drivers when they were tested.

But we also looked at our database to compare results on the previous driver vs. new driver on any result using 7900XT or XTX and can confirm that this appears to be a real, if very rare issue. Among all results with the new driver, approximately 3% of the results show abnormal (very low) scores on Time Spy. No similar group of very low scores appear on the results with the previous driver version.

[…]

In other news, AMD has apparently reproduced this internally and it is starting to look more and more like a driver issue, so at this time I can only offer “rollback to previous or ignore and wait for future driver fixes”.

— UL Jarnis

3DMark Time Spy with Radeon RX 7900 XTX (old and new driver), Source: 3DMark/Osvaldo Doederlein

Neither AMD nor NVIDIA were fortunate with recent driver releases. Both companies were forced to release updates that resolved some critical issues.

AMD had to remove an option to reset drivers settings (factory reset) upon a fresh install because it could have triggered operating system issues when Windows updates were running in the background. Meanwhile, NVIDIA released a hotfix driver that solved a CPU usage bug from its ‘Container’ service.

The 3DMark bug does not appear to be a widespread issue though, so it does not require a major or quick driver fix, but definitely something that Radeon users should be aware of.

Source: Steam




Comment Policy
  1. Comments must be written in English and should not exceed 1000 characters.
  2. Comments deemed to be spam or solely promotional in nature will be deleted. Including a link to relevant content is permitted, but comments should be relevant to the post topic. Discussions about politics are not allowed on this website.
  3. Comments and usernames containing language or concepts that could be deemed offensive will be deleted.
  4. Comments complaining about the post subject or its source will be removed.
  5. A failure to comply with these rules will result in a warning and, in extreme cases, a ban. In addition, please note that comments that attack or harass an individual directly will result in a ban without warning.
  6. VideoCardz has never been sponsored by AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA. Users claiming otherwise will be banned.
  7. VideoCardz Moderating Team reserves the right to edit or delete any comments submitted to the site without notice.
  8. If you have any questions about the commenting policy, please let us know through the Contact Page.
Hide Comment Policy
Comments