Recently, AMD has released a fresh graphics driver Adrenaline Edition 23.3.1. The developers have fixed the bugs identified earlier, but as it turned out, the update can cause problems with system performance. In some cases, the indicator drops by more than 50%.
The user with the nickname opinali was the first to notice the unpleasant situation. He reported that the performance of his personal computer with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X processor and an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card running Windows 11 crashed in 3DMark Time Spy (DirextX 12) after installing new drivers. He confirmed his message with a screenshot with test results.
“Important detail: I did these tests after installing the AMD Adrenaline Edition 23.3.1 drivers, so they may be the problem. At the same time, I ran other tests, played games, and did not notice anything like that. In Time Spy alone, performance dropped by more than 50%,” added opinali.
3DMark developers were unable to reproduce the issue themselves, but confirmed that about 3% of 3DMark users reported performance degradation after updating AMD drivers.
“Because the benchmark hasn’t changed in a long time, we believe this is some kind of rare driver bug that causes Time Spy to run in low power mode, which negatively impacts performance,” 3DMark noted.
The good news is that the issue only occurs on the Windows 11 Release Preview Insider channel. This explains the low number of affected devices. It is now known that a driver bug affects 3DMark tests, but this does not mean that it cannot occur in some computer games.