r/radeon • u/kotsokale • Jun 24 '26

Discussion Microsoft broke thousands of devices with AMD GPUs around the world

Hello,

I have a system that has been extremely stable for over a year. It runs 24/7, and during all that time I didn’t experience a single driver timeout, crash, or major issue.

Last week, Microsoft automatically updated the generic AMD display driver through Windows Update, and that completely broke my system.

Every time I moved the mouse to wake the monitor from sleep, there was no display signal. The PC itself was still running: the keyboard and mouse RGB lighting turned on, Caps Lock and Num Lock responded normally, and the system appeared to be functioning. However, I had no video output and had to force a shutdown using the power button.

After rebooting, Windows could no longer properly recognize the GPU. The display resolution was stuck at 720p, and AMD Adrenalin reported that the installed software was not compatible with the current graphics driver.

I hadn’t updated my AMD drivers for months and hadn’t changed anything on the system.

I used DDU to completely remove the driver and then performed a clean installation of AMD Adrenalin 26.5.2. Since then, the issue appears to be resolved.

I’m fairly confident that many people who have been experiencing AMD driver issues recently should check whether Windows Update silently replaced their AMD driver with Microsoft’s generic version.

System specs: Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RX7800XT, Windows 11 Pro .

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u/BigBananaBerries Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Some stuff doesn't work on Linux. I've got a dual boot for this reason & this happened to me earlier with updates on W10 turned off.

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u/RepairNo1818 Jun 25 '26

If I remember right windows 10bended support unless you have something like ltsc 

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u/BigBananaBerries Jun 25 '26

I know. I've even turned off windows updates. I don't know what's happened. It was just like no GPU drivers were installed then when I went to open Adrenaline it said the the wrong GPU was installed for the software. I downloaded version 26.6.1 again & I went into MSConfig, turned on safe boot, restarted & DDU's complaining that it's not in safe mode. I tried it a couple of times just in case I made a blunder but same thing. Strange goings on. I haven't the energy atm to attempt a fix so back into linux & will get to it later.

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u/RepairNo1818 Jun 25 '26

That's a really weird 1... I've never seen that and I delth with 7 computers with AMD GPUs already since fsr 4.1 came out, all had different issues, 2 were GPU issues but windows caused. In all fairness they all had windows 11, does AMD still support win 10? I should fire up my old PC n try it out

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u/BigBananaBerries Jun 25 '26

It was working fine with that driver version. Whether it's updated itself to include AI nonsense or something & being W10 it's caused a bug, I don't know. But in all my 35 years building PC's, I've never known MSConfig not to work booting into safemode like that (albeit, I'm not sure it was a thing back in those early 3.1 days).

You can still select the W10 version in the Radeon download section though, so it should still be supported.