AMD Adrenalin Driver Has Issues With Older DX9 Games
Last month AMD moved their driver suite upwards towards the new Adrenalin drivers which offer some really nice new features and updates. However the new drivers triggered issues with older DX9 games, it seems.
The new Adrenalin drivers seem to cause issues with a handful of 10-year old games running on the older DirectX 9 API and a growing number of people are complaining about the fact that AMD hasn't done and isn't doing anything to address the issues.
Example of a users reporting an issue:
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition does not start with 17.12.1!
The problem started after the release of the new driver.
The Steam version does not work for me. Another person does not start a GOG version, and he claims that all the previous drivers (17.11.4) are doing fine!
Some of the games affected are, crashing at startup:
- C&C3 Tiberium Wars
- C&C3 Kane's Wrath
- C&C Red Alert 3
- C&C Red Alert 3 Upising
- C&C4 Tiberian Twilight
- Battle for Middle Earth 1-2
- Witcher Enhanced Edition
Some AMD Radeon users who experienced their issues took it all to Reddit, Somebody from AMD responded on its official support forums that it is "unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue."
Thanks SH SOTN for the news submit.
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Posts: 3929
Joined: 2014-12-09
The AMD customer support in his official forums (via his own reps) is impressive.
The exact first post from AMD rep on that thread is:
https://community.amd.com/message/2839053#comment-2839053
100% BS proved simply by November 2017 AMD GPU drivers use (or any older than december 2017 drivers)...and Nvidia GPU gamers. LOL
His second and closing thread reply was:
there is nothing more to add to this thread so it’s locked.
CASE CLOSED!
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Joined: 2004-11-16
That explains why I couldn't start some older DX9 JRPG's within my Steam list. 17.11.4 works fine running Reccetear and TW1:EE, 17.12.2 not even starting. So I must be happy also having a green card in my system in order to run DX9 titles.

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Paying Premium for Nvidia pays off =]
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Posts: 2513
Joined: 2012-04-16
This is one of the reasons why I'm going green when Volta arrives.
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Posts: 3929
Joined: 2014-12-09
Example of a users reporting an issue:
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition does not start with 17.12.1!
The problem started after the release of the new driver.
The Steam version does not work for me. Another person does not start a GOG version, and he claims that all the previous drivers (17.11.4) are doing fine!
Some of the games affected are, crashing at startup:
C&C3 Tiberium Wars
C&C3 Kane's Wrath
C&C Red Alert 3
C&C Red Alert 3 Upising
C&C4 Tiberian Twilight
Battle for Middle Earth 1-2
Witcher Enhanced Edition
Some AMD Radeon users who experienced their issues took it all to Reddit, Somebody from AMD responded on its official support forums that it is "unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue."
17.12.2 too.
So we are supposed to believe AMD GPUs performance is better as they get older due to driver improvement and then AMD drop support for older games in these same improved drivers?
"Good" job AMD, your driver team makes Nvidia PR easier:
"Buy 2018 AMD GPUs to play 2020 games "better" than using 2018 Nvidia GPUs but forget about...2018 and previous games!"
BTW I tried to launch TW1 enhanced edition in Windows 10 updated (OS and drivers) with AMD driver 17.12.2:
And the result is...: