Odyssey unplayable on latest AMD systems... A note of criticism to FDev.

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

After 10,000 hours of exciting gameplay over three accounts, I feel that now I am being forced to quit Odyssey...

Having upgraded my system with a powerful Ryzen 7 7700X CPU and RX6950XT GPU, I find Elite has become unplayable in my VR Vive headset. The rendering of planets is broken when using the latest AMD graphics drivers. I am unable to land on planetary surfaces or conduct exobiology unless I revert back to the now year-old 22.5.1 AMD driver - which is the last one that worked.

FDev, it would be helpful if you could let the AMD VR portion of your playerbase know if there is any news from AMD concerning this issue?

To date, players affected by this issue have only received silence.

Ned Flandalorian · Jul 10, 2023

So what I'm hearing is that AMD still haven't managed to fix things they broke after 22.5.1.

Ultra Fluffy · Jul 10, 2023

Is this an issue with ED Odyssey or with the AMD graphics card drivers? Or the way that ED uses the graphics drivers? Seems to be the drivers and FDev did not write them. Now they could come to your help and work with AMD to solve the problem with the drivers, but ultimately you are complaining to the wrong people.

And a strong warning on all their points of sale that people should not use their product if they are also using a buggy graphics driver. That will get them sued.

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

Whether the fault is with AMD, or FDev, or both, after one whole year the issue still remains not fixed. It is essentially a game-breaker for those who play in VR. This is something that is only ever going to be solved through a collaboration of dialogue and effort between the two companies. Until that happens, the game must be recognised as not fit for purpose when using VR.

GraphiteGB · Jul 10, 2023

@Ultra Fluffy no body does research any more...

Video stuttering or performance drops may be observed during gameplay and video playback with some extended display configurations on Radeon™ RX 7000 series GPUs.
Some virtual reality games or applications may experience lower-than-expected performance on Radeon™ RX 7000 series GPUs.
Application crash may be intermittently observed while playing RuneScape™ on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the Radeon™ RX 5700 XT.

Its been known to be that card specific since thats cards release... take the hint if theres issues on one there can be issues on others
Classic no research... get burned buying "new" products for VR unit usage...

Ultra Fluffy · Jul 10, 2023

CaptnPicard2305 said:
Whether the fault is with AMD, or FDev, or both, after one whole year the issue still remains not fixed. It is essentially a game-breaker for those who play in VR. This is something that is only ever going to be solved through a collaboration of dialogue and effort between the two companies. Until that happens, the game must be recognised as not fit for purpose when using VR.

Totally agree that cooperation is needed between FDev and AMD. Getting it to happen needs pressure on both sides though. Still think it is worth you complaining to AMD because they are essentially the people who can fix it. FDev cannot fix the issue but they can put pressure on AMD. How do we know that they are not? It comes down to the usual bad comms issue at FDev.

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

All I want to do is to be able to play the game. FDev have known about this driver issue in VR for over a year now but for some reason they have chosen to remain completely silent on the matter and to keep their AMD VR players of Odyssey in a state of loss and uncertainty... Nothing worse than FDev's total silence and lack of update... It's painful, it really is.

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

Al that AMD VR players want is for FDev to state, and show, that they are actively doing something about it. Whoever is at fault, AMD, or FDev, or both, there is nothing worse than total silence.

Helmut Grokenberger · Jul 10, 2023

What are they supposed to do? Tell AMD off? That'll surely help. Tell their customers to not use AMD products? That'll backfire quickly. I have no boat in this race as I use a team green GPU, but a quick google search suggests that AMD's drivers are still... beta at best. No strong words from a niche developer for a niche product in a niche use case will change that.

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

If FDev are indeed as frustrated by the issue as much as all their affected players, then why don't they say and then keep VR players informed of developments. Have FDev even raised the issue with AMD? Are they working with AMD to help solve the issue? And if not, why not? All this silence from FDev is causing a section of their customer base such distress.

Helmut Grokenberger · Jul 10, 2023

you have been around for a while, you should know Frontier aren't the talkative kind. And I am presuming that Frontier is too small a fish in the pond to warrant any "collaboration" with AMD on issues their drivers have had for ages. Pure speculation of course, but I believe that the ball is firmly in AMD's court, and that there is as much information trickling down from team red towards Frontier as is from Frontier towards the players with AMD cards.

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

Helmut Grokenberger said:
you have been around for a while, you should know Frontier aren't the talkative kind. And I am presuming that Frontier is too small a fish in the pond to warrant any "collaboration" with AMD on issues their drivers have had for ages. Pure speculation of course, but I believe that the ball is firmly in AMD's court, and that there is as much information trickling down from team red towards Frontier as is from Frontier towards the players with AMD cards.

You may be right... But wherever and with whoever the fault is judged to be assigned, the customer should always be kept in the loop. Surely that is not too much to ask.

Helmut Grokenberger · Jul 10, 2023

I get what you mean. And it sucks we have so little options on the GPU market. But neither AMD nor NVIDIA seem to really care about their GPU customers. Iffy drivers are one reason why I always avoided AMD cards in the past twenty years (and if it wasn't the drivers, there were models that were just cooking your computer). The GPUs can be as good and maybe even offer better price/performance ratios in theory, but when they fail on a driver level... team green on the other hand has just gone mental with pricing, lackluster features and power consumption. As a consumer, we're really between a rock and a hard place.

Helmut Grokenberger · Jul 10, 2023

By the way, is a driver downgrade not an option? What about the solutions in the stickied thread?

Arioch · Jul 10, 2023

Frontier have acknowledged the problem and it is currently the 41st highest voted issue:

Issue Tracker

issues.frontierstore.net

CaptnPicard2305 · Jul 10, 2023

Helmut Grokenberger said:
By the way, is a driver downgrade not an option? What about the solutions in the stickied thread?

I've used the driver downgrade option for the past year (rolled back to 22.5.1 with no issues) but Windows and AMD Armoury Crate often upgrade my graphics driver automatically and I've no idea how to prevent that. Looking at the comments in the AMD Community, it seems a lot of VR users are frustrated with the AMD driver developers. Indeed, many are thinking of turning back to Team Green.

My wife has just come up with a solution. As she is not into VR, she wants to swap my AMD RX6950XT for her Nvidia RTX3060.

Helmut Grokenberger · Jul 10, 2023

I am not using Geforce experience, and I installed my drivers by hand, and I had never had my drivers upgraded automatically. Using Geforce experience apparently does this, though. Maybe? I don't know. I tend to stick with drivers for a long time once they are proven to work well.

Northpin · Jul 10, 2023

CaptnPicard2305 said:
Whether the fault is with AMD, or FDev, or both, after one whole year the issue still remains not fixed. It is essentially a game-breaker for those who play in VR.

You should have done your research before investing in an AMD GFX card to play ED in VR

AMD did some weird stuff with their drivers post 22.5.1 and not only ED but other games were affected too.
Now, Odyssey VR not being officially supported, it means FDev has a close to zero priority to solve any issues with VR related

Honestly, if you are really dead set to play Odyssey in VR, return the RX6950XT and replace it with something comparable from NVidia because there are slim chances for AMD to fix their drivers and it's quite unrealistic to expect FDev to fix an unsupported feature when there are many other bugs that are solely on FDev and still not fixed.

Kira Goto · Jul 10, 2023

Helmut Grokenberger said:
I am not using Geforce experience, and I installed my drivers by hand, and I had never had my drivers upgraded automatically. Using Geforce experience apparently does this, though. Maybe? I don't know. I tend to stick with drivers for a long time once they are proven to work well.

Unless I ticked a setting to disable auto driver updates somewhere, I don’t think Geforce does it automatically. Certainly don’t recall it doing so for me, though it will show if a new driver set is available(I haven’t had any issues with any recent ones there… Odyssey’s jank issues seem to remain the same regardless of what I use).

(I was thinking about an AMD build for my next PC in whenever it requires replacing… seeing issues like this, maybe not.)

Ozric · Jul 10, 2023

Let's play nicely please! Throwing around accusations, threats and witch hunting really aren't welcome.