Folding Forum

I almost auto-updated to this on my Windows 10 Pro for Workstations machine. A quick last minute scan of the release notes stopped me just in time:

Known Issues
Running Folding@Home while also running an application using hardware acceleration of video content can cause a system hang or black screen. A potential workaround is disabling hardware acceleration for the application that has it enabled.

If you're running optional (rather than WHQL) drivers, you may also wish to skip this one. I'm getting tired of AMD drivers and eyeing a 2080 Super.

There is no need to be upset about these things. This issue appeared with 20 series Adrenalin drivers last December. It did not magically appeared with latest drivers. 19.12.1 drivers do not have that bug. This bug was reported around February. AMD have been on a crunch to work out all the bugs. They have been doing very impressive job with last couple of driver patches.
That known issue appearing in the driver notes means AMD finally got through the queue of bug submissions and managed to replicate it for it to be a known issue. I suspect the fix might be deployed as soon as next driver patch, or more realistically the one after that.
Now anyone who use GPU driver auto-update feature in this day and age, are insane. Doesn't matter if you use AMD or nVidia. Everyone seems to forget nVidia driver fiasco couple of years back when it was blowing up their GPUs. Or later on when with series of driver updates they would crash the whole system, update after update.
One would think with plethora of features AMD introduced in past couple of years with their drivers, one would understand, those features do not come for free.
Also with current nVidia pricing strategy, one would be, again, insane to even look their way.

I'm 'upset' (too strong a term) because I've been trying to troubleshoot issues with AMD's driver for almost a week now, taking up many hours. Since they only posted the known issue with this update, I assumed it was a regression with this version rather than acknowledging a months-old bug. I spent thousands on a Threadripper 3960X and Vega 56 system, but can't fold or use BOINC for more than an hour at a time without kernel panics or screen freezes related to AMD's proprietary driver. So yes, that's rather annoying. I've tried Ubuntu 18.04.4 (which doesn't even have an official AMD driver yet), Arch, and others, which all show the same behaviour due to AMD's OpenCL it seems. Annoyingly Windows works fine but I'd rather use Linux. Anyway, if it's already a known issue then cool. I was just trying to save someone the hair pulling I've endured this week.

Issue was present since December, it only got to AMD's attention in recent weeks.
Unfortunately with Linux not everything is rosy on both camps Both nVidia and AMD have their issues on it. Their attention is obviously where the market is, and Linux has not gained any more popularity than few years back.
With Windows 10 privacy nonsense, I would have thought things would turn around, but Linux is still an OS for brave and reckless.

muziqaz wrote:With Windows 10 privacy nonsense, I would have thought things would turn around, but Linux is still an OS for brave and reckless.

Haha, agreed on all counts. I've been using Linux and BSD at home on the desktop for almost 20 years. I'm not sure if I'm a masochist or just stupid.

Rainmaker wrote:

muziqaz wrote:With Windows 10 privacy nonsense, I would have thought things would turn around, but Linux is still an OS for brave and reckless.

Haha, agreed on all counts. I've been using Linux and BSD at home on the desktop for almost 20 years. I'm not sure if I'm a masochist or just stupid.

You said that, not me I just don't have enough hours in a day to go back to Linux