Alienware 18 Latest AMD Radeon Driver Problems

Hi,

Install the latest driver in our website here. 

Let me know how it goes!

Hi and Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunately those are the drivers I'm using that are giving me the graphical glitches.

I have been through all the settings and adjusted them manually and tested and it's made it marginally better but I'm still getting parts of the screen flickering etc but at least it's playable, it only seems to be affecting World of Warcraft.

Curious.

Did this machine ship with Windows 8?

Does it have "AMD Switchable Graphics" ... a hybrid graphics system that switches between on-board Intel integrated GPU and discrete video cards?

Did you recently upgrade this machine to Windows-10?

Our driver won't appear as HD8970M on device manager, so the system must be updating the driver automatically.

You will need to do a clean install of the driver.

• First open the start menu, go to search and look for Change device installation settings, open it and click NO (this will prevent Windows from install the update automatically), the restart.
• Delete the AMD driver completely and do a clean install from our website.

Let me know how it goes!

Yes the machine did ship with Windows 8, I upgraded to Windows 10 a year ago when it was released and have had not major issues with it up until now.

I'm not aware of it having switchable graphics, the only graphics cards showing in device manager are the R9 M290X

Hi,

I'll explain where I am now with this because I think our wires are getting a little crossed.

After trying the latest drives from AMD getting the extremely slow boot up to Windows, device manager telling me that my cards are HD8970M and it crashing on shutdown I downloaded the drivers for my system from the Alienware website using my service tag to make sure I got the correct ones.

I then uninstalled the bad drivers so that device manager was saying it was using the basic Windows drivers, I then installed the downloaded Alienware drivers and now the system boots properly, device manager is showing the correct R9 M290X graphics cards and Windows shuts down without crashing.

But with these Alienware drivers I'm getting all these graphical glitches while playing World of Warcraft, none of my other games have any problems that I have noticed. So for the time being I'm putting up with the graphical glitches because at least everything else it working as expected.

I just wanted to make sure it wasn't AMD-Switchable Graphics because last time I checked, neither AMD nor Microsoft ever re-wrote them for Win-10. Looks like that is not the case here.
Appears to be two R9-m290x in CFx.

The WoW graphics engine does not need an expensive card or even two.

You might have to service the machine. I would try it with only one R9-m290x, and test both that way. Maybe just turn off CrossFire-X for testing or disable one in DM.

The slow boot is likely related to the video card / driver mis-match.

Hi Tesla, long time since we chatted.

What do you mean by "switchable" graphics? Do you mean like optimus for nvidia?

These 18's have intel HD graphics but the laptop needs to reboot (FnF5) to switch to intel HD.

It works on one or the other, not both together.

To Nikmillard - Your GPU's are HD8970's, the graphics driver from the dell website has had one line changed to ID your GPU as a R9 M290X. You can do it yourself with any new driver.

The GPU's are identical, it's just one has a fancy name.....................

If you would like to verify this then install the dell drivers so the hardware shows as R9 M290X, then download and run a program called 3DMark Vantage and compare your test results with others online, the test will show you having HD8970's even though your device manager shows R9 M290X.

Next problem - I suspect if you are using the newest driver from the AMD website that it is AMD Crimson?

I've had a lot of trouble with this driver and it has negatively affect 3 different AMD GPU's I have in various laptops, these laptops were OK with CCC, but shortly after Crimson installation they had issues and eventually stopped showing up in device manager.

I suggest you rollback to the "latest" release of Catalyst Control Center and see if that fix's your problems. Going from previous experience with these laptops I am highly suspect on the new "Crimson" drivers, I think perhaps they have not spent as much time on the "older" tech like your have and are more focused on the new "switchable" onboard GPU's, I've already seen this happen with NVidia.

Make sure you run driversweeper between installation of GPU drivers as they always leave fragments in the windows reg

Thanks for the info AndrewSi, I had read that the R9 M290X were just re-badged HD8970 so I was not too concerned when the device manager started to show them as this after installing the latest AMD Crimson drivers, my major concern was the slow boot of Windows and the crashing when shutting down.

I did as Tesla1856 suggested and switched crossfire off and that has indeed fixed the graphical glitches in WoW which is good news...sort off. It's going to be a bit of a niggle switching crossfire off and on depending on which game I want to play.

Hey nikmillard.

I have been having nearly the same problem as you with alienware 18 but with overwatch. I have had a mix of ultra slow start ups. Freezing on restart/shut down, and crossfire crashing randomly when idle and in game. If i install the new amd drivers crossfire works beautifully until it crashes. If i go for the stable driver which is 15.xx crossfire for overwatch dosent work.

I was wondering if you've had a better fix since your post. Maybe you've had more success with the relive drivers?

Either way thanks for reading and all the best.