AMD releases grey screen fix for Radeon 5000 series

Robert Hallock 5 Feb, 2010 at 11:58am ET Article published in Tech

AMD has announced today an official hotfix designed to remedy the intermittent “grey screen of death” and vertical line corruptions reported around the web.

The firm has not provided any additional insight as to the nature of the problem or the mechanism behind the fix at this time.

Comments

5 Feb 2010 ~ 12:31pm pigflipper I have a 5000 series card and I have yet to have a problem with it, other than the annoying 60Hz hard limit on this old CRT (but the older one currently runs @ 75Hz?). That problem will be fixed when I get that 25.5" Samsung HDLCD.
5 Feb 2010 ~ 12:34pm mirage Can you run a simple 3D benchmark with and without the fix? Just curios because I remember the Furmark burning problem of HD48xx cards with earlier Catalyst drivers. ATI released a Catalyst fix that reduced the heat and benchmark scores to eliminate the issue. The "fix" was only detecting Furmark and throttling it down.
5 Feb 2010 ~ 12:45pm Thrax According to rumors, the GSoD and artifacting issues are due to a bug in GDDR state switching found on the Radeon 5000 series. The card can run its GDDR5 with GDDR3 signaling and power consumption for power savings if the demand being placed on the card isn't great. The theory goes that there was some bug in the state switching that was causing graphical anomalies.

Whether or not this is true is open to speculation, so it was not published in the original story.
5 Feb 2010 ~ 2:26pm Cliff_Forster Running a Radeon 5870 myself, have not had a problem.
5 Feb 2010 ~ 5:05pm GooD One of my friends is having the grey screen problem, will post back to say if this fix solved it :P
6 Feb 2010 ~ 11:32am Sledgehammer70 The issues was mainly seen in the 5700 & 5900 series of cards.
6 Feb 2010 ~ 12:40pm QuadWhore I'm glad they have given a (possible) solution for this. The GSOD has been a major turn off for a lot of people I know when buying any of the 5700, 5800, and 5900's. I remember I saw a review for an XFX 5850 and one man said he returned it because of the GSOD's.
6 Feb 2010 ~ 1:44pm Sledgehammer70 I would avoid the GSOD by running a game or major 3d app int he background.
6 Feb 2010 ~ 2:22pm Thrax According to reports, the number of affected cards was 10x less than what is considered your standard return rate (1%). Hmm.
6 Feb 2010 ~ 2:34pm GooD For my friend its a 5850 that have the GSOD problem, so far so good, no GSOD until now, but he doenst use his computer often on weekend, next week will be the real test :P

Honestly, the GSOD is the only reason i didnt buy a 5850 when i got the money for it. Im not very lucky when i buy something so if there's 1% of chance that something happen, it will happen to me hah :P Now even if the GSOD is solved, i'll wait until march to see what NVDIA will offer, and how it will affect ATI pricing
4 Apr 2011 ~ 11:44am Spence Can i get the fix still?

I RMA'd my card, they tested it (with their generic tests) and it came back fine...... and charged me a tenner!!

Apparently some people were gonna get together in a class action lawsuit as it seems to be affecting a lot of cards but the RMA never turns anything up.
4 Apr 2011 ~ 12:38pm Thrax The fix is any new driver.