Around two weeks ago I got a new Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card, replacing my old Nvidia 3080 RTX. Whilst many things went smoothly, I have noticed a couple of issues:
Trying to enable Raytracing with some games causes freezes and either a game crash or a shell crash. Looking up any issues on dmesg, it shows that a protection fault occured (GCVM_L2_PROTECTION_FAULT_...) followed by a GPU reset (with messages like GPU wedged but recovered). Looking up any issues on problem reporter, I get that a SIGABRT signal occured with the function amdgpu_ctx_query_reset_status. I tested RT with:
Control (on Heroic, using Proton-GE latest) - Crashed; occasionally crashes shell too.
Spiderman Remastered (on Heroic, using Proton-GE latest) - Never loads past first logos, have to force quit
DOOM Eternal (on Steam, using Proton Experimental) - Never loads past loading screen, occasionally crashes (either alone or with the shell)
Ghostwire Tokyo (on Heroic, using Proton-GE latest) - Hangs after warning page, sometimes crashes, might take shell along with it.
Hogwarts legacy (on Steam, using Proton Experimental) - Actually works with zero issues
Note: This issue has also happened with the Talos Principle II (on Steam, using Proton Experimental), where after a couple of hours of gameplay, the game will crash, with the same errors appearing. This game has no raytracing however.
Some games, like LEGO Worlds and Civilization 6 have issues where 3D meshes twitch or flicker; that’s the 3D stuff specifically, not anything 2D (no relevant errors appear anywhere).
Videos in firefox will have white or black pixels pop up on various places in the frame. That behaviour occurs specifically with videos on firefox, not with any other video player (likewise, no relevant errors appear anywhere)..
It should be noted that these issues stopped appearing for a while until reappearing recently. If memory serves correctly, I think I had around two kernel updates and one Mesa driver update during those two weeks I had the card.
I do not experience any form of system instability or unexpected crashes other than the crashes described above.
It should also be noted that I have never faced these issues with the old card.
Does anyone else face such issues? Is this a drivers issue or is it hardware? I would appreciate any insight!
Draws 105 watts TDP, while Radeon RX 9070 XT can draw over 300 watts. Older PSU’s often degrade power quality when heavily loaded, so power quality problems should be considered.
True, but the 9070 XT has a lower TDP than the RTX 3080 that OP was previously using. So if it’s the PSU then it’s odd that it would affect the AMD card and not the Nvidia.
It also does not seem to explain all of the problems, like the white pixels on firefox videos. That shouldn’t be a taxing task for the GPU, the way I see it.
Doesn’t also explain why the issues disappeared for a while.
To give more context on this issue, here is a closeup of a frame of a video where I had that issue wth the white pixels. Such pixels appear randomly on frames (although for each frame they appear in, they stay on the same place they appeared the first time, suggesting to me it has to be an error during decoding), sometimes in high frequency
An older PSU run at near the original power capacity may provide “dirty” power leading to random glitches. There are dedicated PSU testers Passmark Inline PSI Tester that cost more than a new high-quality PSU.
Status update: Issues have now vanished again. A kernel update had happened in the meantime, but it was not what stopped the issues.
I have noticed both times that if one issue of the above has stopped, then all of them have. This leads me to believe that they have the same underlying cause
EDIT: Only the graphical glitches have stopped. RT crashing the game and/or the shell still happens.
At this point, I am half convinced that it may indeed be a PSU issue, mainly a PSU age issue. Sadly, I don’t have a backup PSU to test and I don’t have the budget right now to get a new PSU. So, I will just avoid RT stuff for the time being.
There are many older computers stashed in closets. If there is a computer user group in your area, they may help may help you borrow a power supply to test in your system.
