As you know (or as you may not know), AMD released their Crimson drivers with its new interface, which they claimed to be “revolutionary”. Crimson, which -for now mostly, not entirely- superseded AMD’s infamous Catalyst Control Center with its elegant design and which promises higher performance, is now a pain in the asses of thousands of people, even though it’s been released after a lengthy beta period. I seriously recommend waiting for an update from AMD if you haven’t installed it yet. Because, while the current 15.30.125 driver does keep its promise on increased performance, it’s definitely flawed enough to make it not worth installing.
Of course we have some solutions for those who have already installed it. Let’s get right to the frequent issues and their solutions, if they happen to have one, of course.
1) My fan control always goes manual and sets itself on 20% or 100% every time I restart my computer.
It seems like this is the most recurring issue with Crimson drivers. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to solve.
You’re going to have to get rid of every display driver in your system including Crimson, and then reinstall Crimson or revert to old drivers if you so desire. You can follow the steps below in order to do that. If you want, you can follow the steps I’ve explained
here, in one of my previous posts.
Let’s do this! We’re going to do this with the Display Driver Uninstaller, which is provided by Guru3D. Don’t worry; it’s going to be fast and simple.
Here are the steps you need to follow:
- (Optional) Save your desktop icon layout with Desktop Restore. You can get help from my previous entry. The reason I recommend this, is that your desktop icons will probably get messed up after the process.
- Download Crimson drivers from here, and if you want to revert to your old AMD drivers you can get them from here.
- Download the Display Driver Uninstaller from Guru3D using this link, as instructed below.
Steps for downloading the Display Driver Uninstaller.
- Reboot your computer and when you see your BIOS post screen, start smashing the “F8” key on your keyboard until you get the Advanced Boot Options screen.
The Advanced Boot Options screen that you’re going to get through pressing F8 while your computer is booting up.
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When you see the screen above, select “Safe mode” with the help of your cursor keys and press “Enter”, and wait for Windows to boot.
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Run Display Driver Uninstaller. You’re going to see a screen like the below one. First, select AMD from the red bordered top-down menu. Then, use the blue bordered “Clean and restart” option. Display Driver Uninstaller will do the rest automatically and will reboot your system.
Display Driver Uninstaller window with instructions.
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Let Windows boot up and then install your pre-downloaded graphics card drivers by following the necessary steps shown to you.
Your fans won’t go crazy when you reboot your computer from now on.
2) I’m getting an error about “cnext.exe” when I restart or shut down my computer.
cnext.exe – Application Error: The instruction at 0xebdbf5ef referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be read. Click on OK to terminate the program.
This is not a big deal, thankfully. Your computer will shut down if you just click “OK”, but it’s still annoying. To get rid of this error, you just have to right-click the “AMD Settings” icon on your taskbar and then select “Hide taskbar icon”. If you want to access your settings later on, you can just use the “Radeon Settings” on your desktop’s right-click menu.
3) My graphics card underclocks automatically while I’m gaming and it starts to stutter.
Unfortunately, only solution for this problem is to revert to your old drivers. Especially AMD r2xx and 3xx users encounter this issue with some games like Fallout 4 for example. It happens because you enter e.g. some interior places that you get high FPS and your graphics card sees this as an opportunity to cool down, and it underclocks automatically. Sadly you can’t make your clock frequencies stick with any additional software either. You have to use the Display Driver Uninstaller method, which I explained in the first problem in this page, to revert to your old drivers.
4) I’m using CrossFire and my second graphics card won’t go active when I open a game.
This is an issue that has haunted CrossFire users since forever, and it has a pretty simple solution. Your Windows version doesn’t matter. All you have to do is to disable AMD’s “Ultra Low Power State”. Open your Registry Editor by pressing “Windows+R” on your keyboard and then typing in “regedit” and clicking OK. Open the search box by pressing “Ctrl+F” and type in “EnableULPS”. Let it search for a while. When it finds the key, double-click on it and change it’s value from “1” to “0”. Click “Find Next” until it doesn’t find any more “EnableULPS” strings and keep changing them to “0”. After that, restart your computer. Now you can freely utilize your second graphics card.
5) I can’t seem to overclock/underclock my graphics card. My settings won’t save. On top of that my card starts to heat up.
This is a problem I experienced personally and I haven’t managed to find a solution for it. Let me elaborate. I own two HD7950s which I use through CrossFire.
As you can see below, there’s nothing wrong with the default settings. Both my cards are “idle” and they’re running at 300/150 MHz frequencies.
AMD OverDrive window and my graphic card frequencies.
In GPU-Z, you can see that both my graphics cards are running at the right frequency and both have ideal temperatures. The left one is warmer than the right one, because it’s sitting right on top of the other one.
There’s nothing wrong up until now. I can alter my cards’ GPU (Core) frequencies, their power management percentages and fan speeds as I desire. By the way, my cards being able to go up to +50% instead of +20% in the power slider is because they have edited BIOSes. Just so you know that it has nothing to do with the drivers. The issue surfaces when I try altering the memory (RAM) frequencies of my cards. The software won’t save any of my settings, and as soon as I alter it and click “Apply” both of my cards stop being idle and go into a state which I call “half-idle”. They still don’t go “full-blast”, but they start running at 500/1320 MHz even in Windows. Naturally after a while that causes my cards to heat up to 60-70Cish temperatures, and that causes them to speed up their fans, thus giving me a headache.
Thanks to Crimson (!) my cards are running at 500/1320 MHz, warming up nicely.
As you can see above, the problem is very clear. I couldn’t get the cards to “idle” until I rebooted my computer. Also all my frequency settings went back to default when I did restart my PC. So I stood there, between two fires, not knowing what to do.
Going back to old drivers fixed my issue. If you have the same problem and you wish to revert back to your old drivers, you can follow the steps I’ve explained
in the first problem in this page.
I hope AMD will bring a solution to all these problems and try to indulge their angry customers soon.
The Advanced Boot Options screen that you’re going to get through pressing F8 while your computer is booting up.
Display Driver Uninstaller window with instructions.
