15.200.1062.1004 WHQL, Catalyst 15.7.1 is the current, uninstalled with DDU and re-installed. I haven't tried any others, actually, as consensus seems to be that drivers should be up to date. The idea of breaking something that isn't yet broken by reverting back to an older version isn't too appealing either.
An up to date driver doesn't always have to mean it fixes the problem.
It does appear frequently that installing an older version of the drivers solves the problem.
Heh, no, it obviously doesn't fix this particular problem. I'm aware that reverting can solve issues. For now though, as long as it appears to be working with settings that (afaik) shouldn't cause any other problems, I'd rather not fiddle further. Of course that's bound to come back to bite me sooner or later.
Although I'm guessing that without trying a different driver, there's no way of telling whether the current one is responsible, is there.
No, I thought not.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still kinda curious what the actual issue is/was and I appreciate all the troubleshooting help which at least seems to have shown that my system is mostly healthy. As long as it works with this setup, though, and nothing else goes wrong, I'm hesitant to change anything more.
There's a reason I never marked this topic as solved ... because I'm a pessimist, and it's not.
Since my last post I've had "only" three BSoDs, as opposed to multiple per day, so I feel like limiting the cores and downclocking the GPU has done something, at least - just not enough. What occurs more often now (but not constantly) is my screen going black due to "amdkmap" being restored for some ludicrous reason, which in turn causes the game to be unresponsive so that I have to restart it.
Once again, both these errors are seemingly random; sometimes a certain effect may cause a crash or outright BSoD, other times it may not. The only thing that has caused it for sure was a certain cutscene which included a distortion effect. It would probably help narrowing down the problem if I knew what actually happens with my hardware when that occurred.
In the meantime, I have tried downclocking the GPU some more since those first attempts seem to have helped a bit. Honestly though, I don't know if going down too far can actually cause more harm than good.
Besides that, I've uninstalled the Catalyst Control Center (leaving only the display driver) as that seems to cause problems for some people even when it's not running but that also hasn't helped.
So, I'm dreading this, but considering that there appears to be some correlation between the display driver and the crashes/BSoDs, is this the point where I do have to start reverting back to older drivers to see if that helps? From what I gather, however, this game in particular seems to rely on CPU more than GPU but that's just a side note.
Or maybe try that Crimson Edition thing AMD has put up now, though I don't quite understand whether that's an actual driver update or just an update/change for CCC.
If/when I do that ... where do I stop? How far back would I go before a driver issue could be ruled out?
On another note, I've also found reports of my MoBo and CPU not always agreeing with each other, but I'm guessing that wouldn't explain the display driver crashes. (Otoh, stranger things have happened. I certainly understand now why some people prefer consoles for gaming.) Besides that, temperature readings on AMD/FX CPUs aren't correct sometimes - however, if it were a heat issue, I presume I wouldn't be able to run Prime95 without any trouble.
A sane person might just shelve the game and move on at this point. But a sane person might also not ramble as much.
What is the activity you have done the most in the past few weeks that were around the time of the crashes?
It only happens when I play Dark Souls. Granted, I haven't been doing much else lately, other than using the Internet. I've played some Witcher 2 (which definitely stresses my GPU a lot more than DS, at least) and Dishonored but not for long - no issues there though. Other than that, full screen 1080p videos don't cause any trouble either.
Nothing else, only this troll of a game. Which is why I'm confused; surely, if I were dealing with a hardware issue, more things would go wrong?
After all the trouble-shooting I've done according to your instructions, axe, and some things I've tried from random Google searches, you'd think my system was fine, yet Dark Souls manages to wreck it. Hence my suggestion that I should give up but this just bothers me way too much.
Edit: Spoke too soon. Happens in Dark Souls II as well, only just bought that and couldn't even get to the tutorial. brb bashing head into wall.
Last edited by Solus; 26 Nov 2015 at 23:45. Reason: new bsod
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