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AMD drivers have a complicated reputation, but they usually don’t crash your entire operating system. Unfortunately for some users, AMD’s latest Adrenalin 23.2.1 driver for Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 series GPUs seems to do just that.
In response to one Twitter announcement from AMD (opens in new tab) on the recently released driver update, a few users jumped into the replies to complain that the updates prevented them from booting into Windows.
My whole PC crashed, now I have to reset Windows from scratch. Thank youFebruary 15, 2023
While it’s not uncommon for a driver update to cause system problems, it’s rare for a driver to actually corrupt an operating system. We haven’t confirmed the issue with the driver itself yet, but the official Twitter account for the CapFrameX frame capture tool tweeted a possible cause for the issue, indicating that the driver may be making changes to the system BIOS.
[Update] The driver seems to change the BIOS settings. Check the boot options if your system does not boot after installing the driver. Do not just reinstall the operating system.February 15, 2023
CapFrameX also references a forum post on the German tech site ComputerBase (opens in new tab) about the problem, which other users on the site also seem to confirm. BingoTingo has reached out to AMD regarding the reports and will update this post if and when we hear back from the company.
AMD’s Achilles’ heel strikes again?
AMD makes arguably the best graphics card on the market right now for gamers (at least for those who can’t shell out nearly two grand for a GPU), but it’s not smooth sailing for Team Red in its eternal battle with arch-rival Nvidia.
As a number of users complained in response to AMD’s tweet about the new driver, the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards haven’t received major updates for a few months, and the fact that the frequency of AMD’s driver releases is even has been a selling point for Nvidia (although it’s usually not exactly the most compelling).
The driver issue comes at a time when AMD has gained a lot of ground over its rival in the consumer GPU market thanks to the power of its RDNA 3 graphics cards, and the issue is unlikely to deter gamers from buying AMD graphics cards. If more users encounter this kind of serious problem, that could soon change.
