Solved! AMD barely supports their Raven Ridge Mobile APUs and we consumers have to pay for it...

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Nov 5, 2018
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This is both a rant and a cry for help as I recently bought an HP EliteBook 755 G5 with the Ryzen 7 PRO 2700U and have been dealing with endless issues that couldn't be fixed (yet) even after contacting AMD and HP. HP claims that they will be able to fix the issue by replacing some hardware components but I've been convinced that these are driver-related issues after a ridiculous amount of time wasted on driver installing and testing...

I don't really know how one could do this, but it's clear that letting OEMs distribute the drivers for Ryzen Mobile was a terrible idea as my testing has shown that AMD's drivers are significantly better (even though unstable) compared to those from HP, which are several months old and have terrible performance.

I also want to thank /u/brokemyacct for all his help over the past posts I've made and ultimately inspiring me to make this post which I will crosspost, post on different platforms and show AMD to hopefully grab their attention and get this issue sorted out one way or another. If you guys have issues as well (even if you're using a system from a different manufacturer) feel free to use this post and contact whoever you can so AMD can finally come back to their senses and give us the drivers directly instead of forcing the OEMs (who frankly have no idea) to "optimize" and distribute the drivers.

As I've only had this laptop for about 5 weeks and counting, I was only able to test 3 driver versions and here were my results:

17.7 (from HP):


  • VLC crashes
    occassionally Windows Movies/Photos crashes
    Adobe programes don't properly detect HW
    GTA's resolution can't be changed to 1600x900 on both a 4K monitor and the laptop's monitor
    lackluster performance compared to 18.10.2
    reported clock speed is 201MHz
    GPU is reported as Radeon(TM) RX Vega 10 in both the Task Manager and AMD Radeon Settings

18.5.1 (from AMD):


  • non-stop screen flickering
    couldn't test performance or check/change settings because the flickering was that bad
    GTA's resolution can't be changed to 1600x900 on both a 4K monitor and the laptop's monitor

18.10.2 (from AMD):


  • occassional screen flickering
    random system freezing requiring a reboot and resulting in possible data loss
    GTA's resolution can't be changed to 1600x900 on both a 4K monitor and the laptop's monitor
    GPU is reported as RadeonT RX Vega 10
    reported clock speed is 1300MHz
    exceptional performance in games and regular workloads
    GPU is recognized correctly by all tested programs

If I think of anything more, I'll be sure to add it. Currently I'm using the 17.7 drivers because those seem to be most stable, but I really hate not being able to use VLC and lackluster performance I'm getting from a system with so much potential. I really would've loved to stick to the 18.10.2 drivers which except for the crashing are amazing... I hope this post, or someone else's post gets recognized by one of the companies and brings them to their senses, hopefully resulting in AMD distributing the drivers for Vega Mobile directly on their website instead of us getting outdated drivers from the OEMs.

This post will definetly land on AMD's support forums, LTT forums and anywhere else I can think of. Feel free to link this anywhere, it's not about the credits but us consumers actually getting decently stable systems and not this crap.

Link to original post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9ug1f5/hpamd_driver_support_for_ryzen_mobile_is_terrible/
 
Solution
Resetting and doing a clean install are in no way even REMOTELY similar to the same thing. These systems come with adware, bloatware and often, spyware, already installed on them directly at the factory, often in ways that you can't see when they are new. The restoration partitions that come preinstalled on there have the exact same crap on them. Do a CLEAN install of the latest Windows release. There are very good reasons for it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3567655/clean-installation-windows.html


Followed by a CLEAN install of the graphics drivers:

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2767677/perform-clean-install-video-card-drivers.html

Are your versions of these Adobe softwares paid versions or torrented versions?
VLC is having problems even on my very solid Skylake i7 desktop system. I've ditched it and started using KMplayer. VLC couldn't tell me why and since their program does not work with third party versions of the codecs, I am done with trying to make it work.

I like KMplayer better now anyhow.

Many of your issues are probably not even related to the CPU, OR the GPU drivers, but are inherently Windows related issues due to the always occurring problems after every new spring and fall update.

I'm sure SOME of your issues might fall directly in AMDs lap, but much of it probably doesn't. I'd do a clean install of Windows.

What Adobe programs are you using? What versions? Where did you get them?
 
Nov 5, 2018
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I understand what you're trying to say, but let me explain why it can't be a Windows/HW related issue:

I have this laptop for about 6 weeks now. For the first 3 weeks, everything worked, without any issues at all. VLC would work smooth as hell, Adobe programs ran amazing and GTA would let me change the resolution to 1600x900. Then all of a sudden, without updating anything, especially not the drivers, I started having these issues, so I resetted Windows. Resetting Windows didn't help at all, I formatted my SSD for this and now I don't even have the recovery drive, and the issue still persists. As you can see, changing from driver to driver means I have different issues to deal with, as for example 17.7 has issues with VLC and 18.10.2 has issues with freezing. In the end it's definetly a driver problem and I'm sure AMD knows this. The thing is that not enough people "complain" about this for AMD to care, and until we don't let them know that these issues are bad, they won't do anything about it and stick to their ridiculous business practices of distributing the drivers to OEMs who seemingly nerf the GPU to pleasure Intel (can't confirm this part, but 17.7 performs so much worse than the 18.10.2 drivers straight from AMD)...

Also, I mainly use PhotoShop and Premiere Pro, but sometimes I mess around with Illustrator and After Effects. All of them have issues with recognizing the GPU which wasn't the case before.
 
Resetting and doing a clean install are in no way even REMOTELY similar to the same thing. These systems come with adware, bloatware and often, spyware, already installed on them directly at the factory, often in ways that you can't see when they are new. The restoration partitions that come preinstalled on there have the exact same crap on them. Do a CLEAN install of the latest Windows release. There are very good reasons for it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-3567655/clean-installation-windows.html


Followed by a CLEAN install of the graphics drivers:

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2767677/perform-clean-install-video-card-drivers.html

Are your versions of these Adobe softwares paid versions or torrented versions?
 
Solution

Corwin65

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Nov 2, 2015
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"AMD barely supports their Raven Ridge Mobile APUs and we consumers have to pay for it..."

No, as a consumer if you really feel that way, you return it and let your dollars going elsewhere do the talking.
 
Nov 5, 2018
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My Adobe programs are cracked and I did wipe my SSD before installing Windows 10 Pro on my system with a bootable USB stick I made. In addition I didn't have these problems for three weeks, so what the hell happened?!
 
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