AMD will fix DX9 Game Related Adrenalin Driver Issues With a Hotfix
Two days ago it was widely reported on the web that AMD graphics card have had issues with certain (older) DirectX 9 games. The issues started with the release of the new AMD Adrenalin drivers which offer some really nice new features and updates.
The 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. 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 Uprising, C&C4 Tiberian Twilight, Battle for Middle Earth 1-2 and Witcher Enhanced Edition.
A technical support engineer from AMD responded on its official support forums that it is "unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue.", shortly hereafter the web exploded.
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Bingo..! The Internet is all about making mountains out of molehills. GPU driver bugs are a fact of life--for everybody--Intel AMD and nVidia. It is a constant and unrelenting situation. The AMD site is not a site in which people talk directly to the engineers and the other people who actually write the drivers. These kinds of sites are mainly for users to try and help other users; they are not conduits into the companies themselves. The best thing that Ray_M has ever said on the site, at least that I've seen? "Thanks for the info--I'll be sure and see that the right people hear it." That's it. That's the best Ray_M can do. I've never expected him to do more than that--hell, half the posts out there come from people who don't know the difference between a ram chip and a mouse..! You cannot, in 100 words or less, bring such people "up to speed"... Not remotely possible...!
So some people think Ray_M should be fired because they overreacted to his cursory, terse one-line statement? Because they didn't themselves think about it for one second? Because they did not know that Ray_M is a PR guy not a driver developer? So, if Ray_M should be fired for putting his foot into his mouth--should we also ban all forum users who write queries with zero thought involved at all--who ask really stupid questions?
Ray took ten seconds (It is the Holiday season--and most AMD people are *off* atm) to Bing/Google "The Witcher EE", saw that it originally shipped ten years ago, and then made a judgment call and put his foot squarely into his mouth. Why he said that, I really couldn't say, but as you can see the guys at AMD *who do write the driver software* don't agree and were horrified to see that and have since corrected the statement. There was never a doubt in my mind that Ray_M spoke out of turn--it happens. Perfection does not exist and those who look for it will be sorely disappointed by its absence--everywhere in the human sphere of involvement. Space shuttles blow up, submarines implode--$hit happens. That's life. This was a tiny little nothing event of absolutely no consequence to anyone. Another driver bug--yaw-w-w-w-w-wnnnn. I've seen software bugs for 30 years plus and if I am lucky will see them for another 30 years from now...
What I think Ray_M intended to say that didn't come out right: "The game is ten years old and I don't see AMD having to do a whole lot to fix it." That's what I think he meant to say--and don't you know how much he wished he had said exactly that?...

As I say, I have an installed--installed now--not just shelved--library of >350 games, many of them dating back 30 years or more and every single one of them run perfectly on my RX-480--no problems with all drivers up until the Adrenalins. So when I see something like this I know it's a bug, and nothing but a bug, and that it will be fixed provided someone points out the bug to the pertinent people inside AMD--which has been done. And now the bugs are being fixed. It's what AMD *always* does, btw. Trust me, if the company didn't do that I surely would not have been satisfied enough to stay with their GPUs since 2002--my old, fondly remembered R300. ( The ArtX architecture that forever changed the direction of 3d GPU design and implementation.) So how can I be even slightly surprised when Terry comes out and says, "You bet we're going to fix it! AMD is all about game compatibility."
Listen, the Internet today is chock full of impatient people demanding this and demanding that at the drop of a hat, like spoiled brats. Doesn't mean they will be heard for their much-speaking. Intel, AMD and nVidia all work hard to address driver bugs when they happen. Impatient sensationalism has never helped much of anything worthwhile to happen, imo. How people became so displaced by a one-liner from a PR-guy on a self-help AMD website is utterly beyond me. But, $hit happens...indeed it does...

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I'm actually surprised to see a company investing their time and money into making a game work that is more than 10 years old. Good customer service I will say.
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There are 2 problems that arose from this situation:
1. Clearly, there are communication issues within AMD. This is a little scary, considering this kind of head-butting of upper management is how Bulldozer came to be.
2. Neither AMD nor consumers should be using Twitter as a basis for official decision making.
That being said, I'm not faulting Guru3D on reporting this, because if AMD were to be so deliberately negligent/lazy, that is worth being aware of.
Regardless, as many people had predicted, it seems this is nothing more than just an annoying temporary setback.