[Workaround] Stuck green all over the planet on AMD cards

Have you tried forcefully installing an older set of WDDM 1.3 drivers (instead of WDDM 2.0)? In the earlier releases of 10 this was possible, I don't know if it is anymore but they behave slightly different in games. You might also check under Process Explorer [view > lower pane view > DLL's] and see 'where' the GL libraries that the game is loading are. Eg, confirm that they're actually being read from the game's folder.


If the DLL's aren't all being loaded for some reason from the folder, you can always try forcedly overwriting the system32 copy .. or placing them in the AMD driver installer folder -- cleaning with DDU and reinstalling (so that your installed copy defaults to an older version of GL).

I can confirm latest AMD drivers work on GCN 1 as I have an r9 280, not encountered any issues.

All,

I also have this issue and it is incredibly annoying. Everything is in a green haze and I get some kind of macroblock thing on the edge of vision for my units.

GPU: Sapphire R9 285

????

Again a gcn 1.2 card... It's gotta be the texture compression.. @bgolus any ideas?

Yeah. Sounds like AMD's drivers are broken for our game again.

The "everything green" bug is probably a planet wide order getting stuck on for reasons I couldn't explain. The weird blocky artifact around the landing zone shouldn't be texture compression related because the shader that does those rings doesn't use any compressed textures.

Best guess is AMD put in some optimizations to their driver code that help some other game with negligible artifacts but completely break PA. Nvidia and AMD spend a lot of resources optimizing their drivers, which actually means rewrite parts of the rendering code for various games to make them faster by taking the driver calls the game makes and doing something completely different but produces a similar enough visual result that no one notices. They've been doing this for decades. There are some famous Quake 3 benchmark tests that run the game once with the default executable, and again with the executable renamed something random and getting completely different performance.

It's an odd one because this problem appears to only effect the latest generation of AMD card (so earlier revisions of GCN e.g. 1.0 like I have or 1.1 on the 260 / 290 cards don't produce this behavior).

I guess it's probably that they've been optomising for Fury to get better performance and that is what's inadvertently also upset the 285 / 380 cards as they're the same generation?

I'm using a integrated Intel GPU and I've seen stuck attack order circle popping up from time to time since I started playing PA, but I never found a way to reproduce this with any reasonable reliability.
For me, this has the unavoidable feel of a race condition. How are those circles stored for rendering? I guess this isn't a shader pass on the gBuffer with uniforms for each order.

Yes, it's a race condition issue.

Light info isn't in uniforms (most of the time), but instead a large texture that stores the position, size, and color. Range rings are a little different because the color value of the light is ignored and instead stored in a low res distance field per range type that's composited into the view later.

bgolus,

Thanks for replying to this thread. I was hoping that maybe todays hotfix would have solved this problem. What do you recommend? Revert to earlier AMD drivers? Thanks.

I'm not bgolus, yet I can comment on where to start at least if you're looking at old drivers as I've played with this quite a bit.


-If you have the ability to revert to earlier drivers it will take care of the problem .... but I would go for simply dropping the OpenGL component of AMD's drivers into the game folder (as AMD's drivers are pretty modular like that). This has the bonus of not impacting any of the other games that you run on the machine if you get it working. Aka, using the old GL drivers 'just for' PA without touching anything else.

In the worst case that you can't get it working in that way .. you may want to go for making a custom driver cocktail with an older GL version, in order to keep the latest D3D version. For instance, there's a known BSOD issue that was fixed in 1062.1004. I wouldn't suggest running an earlier D3D9 or base driver on a Fury, ESPECIALLY if you use Skype (the BSOD trigger).


... Of course I can't promise that you'll have similar results, yet I'd start with 15.6 if you do experiment. These GL drivers seem overall the most stable for PA.

Can uber raise this directly with AMD please? A few of us have reported it to them via the driver feedback but got nothing back.

This issue has been outstanding since at least August. 56 days since the creation of this thread.
Amd 15.7 drivers was on 8 July which was 98 days ago...

@mkrater I believe the other person you've been helping has the same issue as this.... This looks like a common problem on gcn 1.2 cards and will probably continue to be an issue with future amd cards.

On that basis, whilst ideally amd should fix the issue they're end, this looks likely to effect more players moving forward so perhaps worth investigating your end, even if only to find a work around (e.g. disable the green area shader for these cards, or make the option a toggle in settings?)...

123 days later since this bug has been a problem. 81 days since the creation of this thread. Nothing but non committal from uber on this issue.

I'm calling it quits chasing a response from uber. I won't be backing any future projects from this dev.

Built a new machine. AMD Fury X.
- Artifacts around the selection circles. (landing, patrol, reclaim, etc).
- seems the `fog of war` never really goes away, its extremely hard to even see any units

Bump.

I'm having the same problem as OP after upgrading from HD7850 to R9 380. Is this going anywhere, and whats the holdup?

The problem is related to the newest revision of GCN (vs 1.2) which covers the Radeon R9 285, 380, 380X, Nano, Fury and Fury X cards. All other AMD cards should work.

We have highlighted the issue to Uber but there's been no word on a possible solution from their end. It was suggested we should raise the issue with AMD, although as GCN 1 and 1.1 cards work fine even on latest drivers it strikes me that this issue isn't solely related to AMD's latest driver or all cards would be similarly effected (my R9 280 for example works fine, which is based on 1st generation GCN like your 7850). Chances are PA isn't going to work properly on any future AMD card moving forward, which strikes me as a poor situation if Uber want to continue earning money from selling the game.

The only other thing I can think of is if the community can work out a fix- from what I understand it's related to a couple of specific shaders rather than the whole game, so maybe there is a way to disable them...?

@cola_colin, @SXX, @DeathByDenim, @jables... someone really needs to look into this.

I would say better chance it's to contact somebody at AMD who actually care about GL (e.g Graham Sellers). If problem also appear within proprietary drivers on Linux it's may be worth to ask John Bridgman (AMD Linux guy) to pass issue forward.

Pinging AMD employees is so far most efficient way to get problems like that solved, otherwise it's will take years...

PS: It's would be even better if somebody can make simple GL demo that showing the problem outside of PA. Passing full-length GL trace isn't easy due to size.

Hey man, thanks for the reply, I wasn't sure you were still around but thought it might be worth a shot.

If you know a way to ping those guys at AMD it would be fantastic if they could do something. The issue is quite specific to the latest generation of their cards (older cards like mine are unaffected irrespective of driver version), although as I say it's worrying as whatever changed in GCN 1.2 that causes this is likely to be carried forward next year with Artic Islands...

I'm still watch PA/mods progress, check streams and read forums sometimes. Though it's was always hard for me to participate more than one project simultaneously so can't spend much time there when busy with something else.

For Graham Sellers you can try corporate email (graham.sellers at amd.com) or twitter. Bridgman is available via phoronix forums PM and he answer to almost everyone every time.

Sadly I can't do that myself because I only have access to old hardware and can't do appropriate traces. So you'll need apitrace of PA or better find out what calls/shaders working incorrectly and craft some simple GL demo.

You can easily check if problem hardware related or not. Just run PA on open source drivers under Linux/AMDGPU/Mesa. If it's appear then problem somehow related to hardware.

Though so far only bug that actually related to AMD hardware was with brightness (sure bgolus or varrak commented on that one in past) and it's also affected AMD with open source drivers. Considering that bug from this thread may appear/disappear depend on drivers this is not hardware bug at all.

Hello,

I'm actually having the same issue. I tried to put OpenGL 15.6 in the folder as you described it, but the game doesn't even work. (I heard a *beep* before it stars and Steam say that the game is launched).

I've a Radeon R9 380. I received my PC a week ago, the drivers aren't old.