[Update: AMD says that they will fix the Adrenalin bug that breaks some DirectX 9 games by issuing a hotfix]
AMD gamers have realized that the latest Adrenalin 17.12.1 drivers for AMD cards that was released just a week ago have caused problems with games using DirectX 9 API calls. Multiple gamers complained about the issue and even managed to get a response from an AMD level 2 tech engineer who explained that the reason the games don’t work is because they’re outdated.
In a thread over on the AMD community forums, someone asked why certain games like Command & Conquer no longer work with the newer drivers, and a tech support engineer named Ray hopped into the thread, stating…
“This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules.”
This caused a lot of AMD fans to become incensed, especially given that there are still plenty of games that rely on the DX9 API, and with AMD’s latest drivers for their newest cards no longer supporting those drivers, it means you won’t be able to play those games properly.
A post on Reddit from user delphiprogrammer listed some of the games that have been affected by AMD’s decision to no longer support DirectX 9.
- The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
- Guild Wars 2 (some users)
- Command & Conquer 3 (all expansions/versions)
- Command & Conquer 4 – Tiberian Twilight
- Skyrim
- StarCraft 2 (some users)
- League of Legends
- CS:GO (some users)
- Battle for Middle Earth 1 – 2
- Tales of Berseria
- Ms. Splosion Man
Now these aren’t all the games affected by this change, but as you can see, some of them are older and some of them are more recent, and some of them are extremely popular, like League of Legends and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
AMD is thoroughly shooting themselves in the foot here.
The only solution right now is for AMD users to downgrade to Crimson drivers for now, and hope that the Adrenalin drivers for Radeon cards is replaced with a more universally compatible driver-set. The Reddit post also mentions that Linux users can go old-school with a DirectX 9 to OpenGL wrapper for WINE.
Many AMD fans were so angered because the latest Adrenalin drivers ramps up support for Vulkan, and added a number of new QOL frontend features for Radeon cards, as detailed in the changelog over on the AMD website.
Some gamers pointed out that if AMD decides not to fix this issue, they’ll just have to move over to Nvidia, who not only continues to upgrade their drivers but also still support older APIs as well.
(Thanks for the news tip ThyPancakeConsumed)
(Main image courtesy of Vikster)
