AMD Video Card Crash on Shader Compile

I’m stuck on this one.

We’re using UE 4.7.6 and are building it from source code. I just brought an audio engineer onto my team and when we try to run the game on his workstation, it crashes. The game and engine runs just fine on my development machine, my artists machine, and on my laptop. We all use NVidea cards.

I told my audio guy to update his video card drivers and reboot his machine. I watched him do it, and verified that he’s running the very latest graphics drivers from AMD. He’s using an AMD Radeon R9 200 Series video card, running on Win7, and using Visual Studio 2013 CE.

We’re able to compile and open the latest version of the game. However, when we open the game up in the editor, it begins to compile 1,800 shaders. It gets through about 20 of them and then the screen goes completely black. It then returns, and the video card driver reports that it crashed and that we may need to update drivers (which we did). My guess is that some of the backend shader instructions are unsupported by the video card drivers? I have no idea. Is there a way to get him up and running without going out and purchasing an NVidea video card?

Attachment: Crash Log

If the driver itself is crashing, it’s not just a matter of a faulty card is it? why not throw some stress tests at it just to be sure?

Hi Slayemin,

I am using a AMD Radeon R9 200 Series card with the 15.200.1062.0 driver and I haven’t had any issues. Any reports I have seen are generally old drivers or hardware issues. I’m wondering if it maybe something with the card itself. Let us know the results if you decide to try the stress test.

Weird. That’s good to know. I wonder if its project specific? Or maybe engine version specific? I’ll try to open an empty project and see if I can replicate the video card crash.

Where would I find a good video card stress test?

Alright, we ran UE 4.8.3 with an empty project, and it crashed. We ran UE 4.7.6 and it crashed on an empty project.

What’s weird is that we just ran an empty project in UE 4.8.3 less than a week ago with no issues, but now it’s crashing the video card. The only thing that changed was a driver update.

Okay, we were able to run a stress test on the card and that also crashed the video card. Now, we’re thinking it is either a new defect in the card which occurred within the last week, a fan cooling issue, or a power supply issue.

I’d say its likely power supply… I ended up having to put in a 850W PSU to get my Nvidia GTX650 card up and running… it also used to have intermittent issues, been flawless for the subsequent years.

I usually test with Furmark and just leave it for a few hours.

It’s often the 12V output of the PSU cant handle the requirements of the card and everything else, even if it meets the 500w Minimum PSU requirement of the R9 200 series.