AMD Graphical Bug in Legacy Horizons

Paranoid_Andr01d · Mar 16, 2025

Clean install of latest AMD drivers with a RX 9070:

Installing DXVK fixed the graphical bug, but messed up planetary generation (when landing on the surface). While researching the issue I learned about DXNAVI, which appear to be custom dx11 drivers released by AMD that can have issues with older dx11 titles. As AMD doesn't offer the option to toggle this, I attempted to roll back to legacy dx11 drivers with a tool called AnWave but it doesn't appear to offer the ability to do so with the latest driver/my GPU.

Since Legacy Horizons isn't getting any official support to my knowledge, I felt it wasn't worth submitting anything to fdev, so hoping I can reach out to the community to see if there are any 9070/9070 XT owners out there who play Legacy and have found a workaround.

EDIT: Added a couple more screenshots and submitted a bug report with AMD for what it's worth

jumpingclear · Mar 22, 2025

I don't play legacy but while I was waiting for a module transfer I thought I would give it a try. Sapphire Pulse 9070 with 25.3.1 drivers, I get the same wacky colours that you do.

In Odyssey the colours are fine but the aliasing is awful. Much worse than it was with my old radeon 5700.

forbiddenlake · Mar 22, 2025

25.3.2 is out, did it help?

jumpingclear · Mar 22, 2025

Adreneline isn't picking that up for me. It says it checked today and that I am still up to date with 25.3.1. I will give it a couple of days to see if it updates automatically.

I see 25.3.2 is not whql but I don't see any setting in adreneline where to specify whether to allow optional updates or not.

Paranoid_Andr01d · Mar 24, 2025

@jumpingclear thanks for the reply and for taking the time to replicate the issue - glad to hear it's not just me! Aliasing is definitely an issue in Odyssey, would love for them to implement FSR4 in the future. I play Legacy specifically for it's VR performance.

@forbiddenlake I manually installed the 25.3.2 drivers and the issue remains, unfortunately.

I submitted a new bug report to AMD for this latest driver version as well. Here's hoping a solution becomes available at some point.

Paranoid_Andr01d · Jul 24, 2025

Reporting back that this is still an issue in Adrenalin driver version 2.6.3. I just realized Frontier still allowed submitting issues for Legacy so I went ahead and submitted one today. I'm not sure if these issues are still seen but I felt it was worth a try.

To @jumpingclear and anyone else who may see this, if you've been able to reproduce this issue on your end, I'd greatly appreciate if you submitted a contribution to the issue tracker: https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/77266

Thanks!

Arcaru · Monday at 4:07 PM

I also experience the same color/illumination bug with RX 9070 XT using driver version 25.10.16 of Adrenalin. To my knowledge, this bug only shows up in the Horizons Legacy version, I haven't experienced it in Odyssey nor Horizons Live.
So far I have experienced the following areas where the color/illumination bug shows up:
1) Light sources (Lamps, wakes in Supercruise)
2) Adverts in stations and hangar
3) Anything in the Hud with the color blue is also slightly disfigured
4) Paint job

These are the steps, I have performed so far to without luck fix the issue.
1) Updating drivers
2) Resetting Graphics Override file
3) Clearing DirectX shader cache
4) Forcing DX11 mode
5) Tuning FX effects in EDFX

In addition, I checked the sensor readings of my GPU, while running Odyssey and again while running Horizons legacy. No notable differences were observed
Lastly, a user on the subreddit posted about the same issue (also using 9070 XT) in VR, which he "fixed" by installing DXVK. However, DXVK is primarily meant for wine and linux, so I am unsure if this is a viable long-term solution

@Paranoid_Andr01d, I have included the main points of the above text as a contribution to the linked issue report. It's "good" to hear that this is not an isolated case.

Paranoid_Andr01d · Monday at 10:31 PM

Thanks for confirming the issue on your end as well as contributing to the Issue Tracker, @Arcaru ! I think it's fair to assume that we have discovered a bug with Elite Legacy and AMD RDNA 4 GPUs / drivers.

To your comment on DXVK, I was able to eliminate the lighting issue as well by using it, however it breaks planetary generation (fly below 1km altitude and the surface warps and makes landing impossible.) and doesn't work in VR without implementing a workaround using vrperfkit (that even the developer warns against using due to poor performance), and in my experience introduced inconsistent (and nausea-inducing) frame time skips, most notably when using in-game menus.

I also tried reverting from DXNAVI to stardard DX11 using the atidxx64.dll and atidxx32.dll files from an older driver (22.xx.xx), and that didn't work either in my experience.

I wonder if this is more of an AMD issue than FDev, however I feel that either party has a better shot at reaching out to the other and coordinating a fix than any of us players do, so all we can do is document our experience. I'll keep reporting via the AMD Bug Report Tool as well (although it's not possible to track those requests once submitted) and encouraging Legacy players here to try and give the Issue some traction if they are encountering the bug as well.