Experiencing Black Screens With Radeon? AMD Wants Your Feedback

Over the past couple of months, we’ve noticed an increase in the number of complaints revolving around AMD’s Radeon graphics drivers. In particular, a notorious black screen bug has been plaguing some users for a while, though it’s not the only one. Even after multiple driver releases, users continue to see bugs linger, with no clear end of the problem in sight.

Fortunately, AMD is well-aware of these issues, and seems committed on ridding the biggest issues sooner than later. We’d wager that this black screen bug is a particularly challenging one to eradicate, simply because of how long it’s stuck around. While it also mostly affects Navi, rarer Vega and Polaris reports have popped up, as well. Now, to get it fixed sooner than later, the company is seeking your feedback if you’ve bumped against the issue.

The one-question survey was posted to the popular /r/AMD subreddit by an official employee, and can be accessed here if you want it to participate. With a bug this complicated to squash, don’t underestimate the value of your simple input.

Coincidentally, we decided to play some Destiny 2 on our RX 5700 XT earlier this week, to give the card a proper real-world test. Sadly, we actually encountered the black screen bug within three hours of playtime, requiring a hard reboot to recover. We also crashed to the desktop in the middle of a competitive match, which for obvious reasons isn’t ideal. D2 isn’t what we’d call the most stable game to begin with, but these particular issues were unique to our use of the 5700 XT.

It wasn’t long ago when “Fine Wine” was a thing, where people could anticipate improved Radeon GPU performance over time. With the issues many gamers are dealing with, though, that meme is starting to become blemished. We’re of the mind that the situation will improve at AMD, especially as its resources grow due to the increased success of its CPU division. GPUs are hugely important to the company, so at this point, it’s clear that improving stability should be treated with paramount importance right now, rather than introduce even more features. If there’s one thing we’re confident in: people don’t like their computers crashing on them.