AMD Help and support

Hi all,

I've read that there is no recommondation for AMD gfx cards for WOFF.
Since I am an avid user of ATI/AMD I wanna share my experience with WOFF so far, which is pretty smooth sailing.
But there might be some Guys which havent had a nice experience and can put up their workarounds and fixes.
It would be a shame to lock out potential customers from this wonderful Sim just because they dont use Nvidia. I dont wanna start a AMD/Nvidia war, so keep it objective and civilized.

Regards

LtCasey -- I agree with you. It seems a shame to discourage a group of potential customers. If it helps, there's a recent thread from over in the Technical issues forum that talks about issues with the AMD graphics card.

https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4547403/weird-city-ground-textures#Post4547403

I think there's also a question/section in the FAQ on the topic. As a nvidia user, I haven't followed the issue in much detail.

Hi mandrews,
Thanks for the Heads Up!

Nothing really to add here except to check over the good link that Mandrews has provided. Also keep in mind, as KK has indicated in those posts - it all depends, to some extent, on the age of the AMD vid. card, vid. drivers installed, etc. I suppose also worth considering is whether or not your rig is AMD vid. and processor, or AMD vid. but Intel processor, as in my case. For the record, WOFF runs fine on my rig. (the PE ed. even better than the UE ed.,, ver. 4.18 of the UE ed. ran best in terms of those various editions - ver. 5.03 of PE is smoothest on my rig., etc.).

I am running the ver. 17.x.x Bootcamp vid. drivers for AMD, and have locked Win10 down to ver. 1809 (latest updates for 1809 installed, Win10 Professional). Use "WUB" by the way, Windows Update Blocker, to block/manually toggle updates - works on home eds. of Win10 too. So, in short, a few factors to consider - and another good (obscure) tip, as I indicated in that thread - is to run a video overlay program simultaneously with WOFF if you still have minor flickering with an AMD vid. card - has done the trick in my case with flickering/chequerboard terrains in IL2-BoM, and to minimize cloud flickering in RoF (I have found no need to run the video overlay program with WOFF/FE2/WOTR/SF2/IL2-1946 vpmodpack).

Happy flying and tinkering,
Von S

Thanks for sharing vonS,
This is exactly what I wished for. The little tweaks which make the Sim enjoyable for everyone.
So everyone should be encouraged to post his solutions in one comprehensive place.

AMD user. Win 10 upto date. All cool my end.

Good to hear Wodin!👍

What model amd gpu?

As I mentioned previously, your hardware is old enough (RX480 GPU) that it still uses drivers which pre-date the issues several have reported the sim has with newer AMD cards. ( >LINK< )

VonS has also avoided the issues because his card(s) are also older, as discussed in the thread linked above.

To (try to) avoid further confusion: AMD CPUs are fine; I just built one with a fellow forum member here and he's having no issues (but he uses an Nvidia GPU).

The issue is with newer AMD GPUs (anything 5000-series and newer). The older cards (RXVega 56/64 and before) appear to be OK, since they will all work with older drivers (which don't appear to have the issues). Newer cards won't run older drivers (as is to be expected), so only newer cards have the problem in WOFF.

Pol has been in contact with AMD over on their Developer's forum (>LINK<) ; they've indicated it's been reported to the appropriate group internally.

Every time *any* GPU manufacturer creates new drivers, there's a chance of problems happening; Nvidia is no different. The word 'bug' (as related to software problems) exists for a reason.

TBH (my opinion, FWIW) I wouldn't hold my breath - but I'd love to be wrong about that, for the exact reasons mentioned above.

Thanks, I thought that was the case.

Hmmmm...I also distinctly remember playing when one of my old cards was relatively new, and even back then people were saying that the game doesn't work with AMD GPU cards -- yet here I was merrily playing the sim with zero issues (at the time the card was an RX 470 - now long since moved on). So issues then seemed to be the batch of cards (or drivers) actually prior to what I had - so at that point in time the "new" stuff was actually fine. So despite all this, there seem to be a bracket in the product line (or driver line as may indeed be the case (or combo of both)) that was just fine - and indeed that could change in the future too. Point being, in general, careful of blanket statements -- but as kksnowbear and others have eluded to, it is indeed buyer beware regarding the AMD GPU.

A good and beneficial thread gents' - also, I'm not 100% sure of this (perhaps KK can pitch in with the relevant info.) - but I think that the ver. of Win10 you are running may also limit the age of graphics DLLs that you may install - for example, ver. 2004 may not allow one to roll back as far as the ver. 17.x.x DLLs that I have loaded in ver. 1809 for the AMD vid. cards. Perhaps it's tied somewhat to the ver. of Win10 being run in the same way that it is tied to the age of the graphics card(s).

Cheers all,
Von S

I think what you're remembering was different from what's happening now. There have been two periods over the past few years where there were reported issues with AMD cards:

- One (if memory serves) was about newer drivers (newer at that time) with *older* RadeonHD cards - this is relatively easy to work around by simply not using newer drivers if you have an older card. Even then, however, there was a further distinction (and I think this is what you're referring to, as you were involved in the discussion at the time). RX cards (like your 470) worked OK with newer drivers (again, newer at that time) - but older HD cards (eg HD7870) had problems with drivers which were "new" at that time. This was all discussed (c. November 2018, now itself more than 3 years ago >LINK< ) before the thread disintegrated into the usual level of personal attacks when folks can't actually debate a point and instead attack a person, ad hominem. Regretfully, the result is that important, factual and helpful information is obfuscated due to unnecessary distraction...unfortunate, because that information is now relevant and helpful here again, some three years on.

- The other, much more recent issue involves newer *cards*, which won't work with older drivers by design, thus requiring newer drivers, and therefore have the issues being reported of late (some textures not displaying properly, broadly and generally).

So, in summary, I believe the following is correct:

- Old cards, old drivers are OK; I think something along the line of the 17 series drivers (possibly 19?) are OK, but again, these drivers predate newer cards and thus the newer cards aren't supported in these older drivers.

- Old card, new drivers; technically supported by the drivers (to a point) but drivers beyond a certain point would likely have the issues mentioned some three years ago, per the thread linked above from ~Nov 2018 - again, depending upon specific hardware.

- New card, new driver; has some texture issues as reported more recently by several users with AMD GPUs 5000 series and newer.

Also, with respect to VonS' comments above concerning Windows versions and drivers: I'd honestly have to defer to others' knowledge and experience in this area, not having specifically studied it myself. That said, his point certainly sounds plausible to me - as a matter of course, developers often have 'prerequisite' environments for a given driver. One such example I've run into many times recently is an inability to load recent Nvidia drivers unless/until Windows itself is updated. So that would seem to corroborate VonS' point, to me.

Please note I am not considering or representing anything 'official'. It would be strongly preferred, of course, to have 'official' comment and guidance in this area, but failing that, I am only relaying what I've observed in various threads on the matter in the OP (lest I am attacked yet again for being "off topic" just because I don't agree with someone).

Nice summary @kksnowbear.

You can test if it is a driver issue by installing WOFF into a windows 10 virtual machine. If you don’t get texture artifacts then it’s definitely the AMD driver.

I remember a long time ago, there were custom AMD drivers made by folks to replace the “official” ones. Maybe if these custom drivers exist for newer cards that could be a possible solution. I’ve never owned AMD, so I could be wrong.

Edit: they were called omega drivers.

Good points Orbyx,

Speaking of custom AMD drivers - they are also available for Bootcamped Windows installs on Intel Macs - so I am including a few helpful links below for Mac users/fliers, since relevant to this thread:

Official, latest AMD drivers for Bootcamp:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/apple-boot-camp

Official, older AMD drivers for Bootcamp:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/apple-boot-camp-previous

(For some reason the ver. 17.x.x. drivers are missing from the link above - recommended is an internet search for that ver. of drivers, or a look at other repositories that perhaps host older AMD-vid. drivers.)

Unofficial, "turbo-charged" AMD drivers for Bootcamp:
https://www.bootcampdrivers.com/

(Recommended is to read directions carefully on the "unofficial" website - I have never used the unofficial drivers since I have no use for them - performance is just fine with the official ver. 17.x.x drivers on my rig, across various flight simulators, including WOFF/WOTR.)

Cheers all and happy tinkering,
Von S

Hi,

Had my First campaign flight over the flanders frontline and wittnessed a seriös drop in framerates down to below 20fps.
I would like to know your settings you guys with AMD cards and CPU Run in WOFF.

Thanks in advance!

LtCasey;

It has been noted in past threads that FPS drops are common when Arty is doing shelling at the front. It might impact some users, Personally I don't worry too much about FPS drops unless the drops are so bad as to reflect significant pauses or stutters in the game.

Best Regards

@Robert_Wiggins

Thx, I expected frame drops, but that went below 20fps.
I will reduce resolution to FHD and turn Terrain detail to 4. Clouds also.

@LtCasey, included below are both my AMD GPU panel settings as well as WOFF PE in-sim settings. I also have my WOFF GPU Tuner patch installed, as well as the "lite tweak" of Xjouve's ver. 1.1 water mod. (the water mod. drops ave. FPS by about 20 or so, into the 80s FPS or so - on bad, rainy days, the FPS drop to as low as the 60s FPS). With no water patch installed, I get about 100 to 120 FPS or so on ave. Processor is not AMD but Intel Xeon 6-core by the way. The two AMD FireProD700 cards have been lightly overclocked, from stock 850/1370 MHz to 1030/1380 MHz. No instability noted. Some graphical oddities emerge if the core clocks are bumped into the 1040s MHz and higher, also the 1050s MHz. 1060 MHz and above is a no-go.

EDIT: Regional air activity is at "light" since my campaigns are early war currently; might bump it up to medium or heavy if I ever get to 1918, and will turn forced encounters off then. I do have a campaign in the Alsace, 1917, but that works well historically at light air activity so haven't bothered to try out medium for that yet.

Happy tweaking,
Von S

Thank you vonS,

I will Check that Out!👍

Hi All,

Been tweaking my FrankenWOFF 4.18 install further and, largely thanks to Pol's good advice in one of the WOTR threads - regarding what exe to point your vid. panel settings to - have now done a few experiments. For those pointing their AMD vid. panel settings to the WOFF.exe, see my post a couple of posts above this one for good settings that work well with my Tuner Patch for PE/BHAH.II. If on the other hand you are pointing AMD to the CFS3.exe, as recommended since that is the run-time environment for WOFF - best is to look at the settings included in the pic. below, for highest and fairly stable FPS. Definitely disable cross-firing if you have AMDs and also turn off frame pacing - CFS3.exe does not work well with multiple AMD vid. cards. Also, use regular AA x4 (not EQ), and do not use "edge detect" - since this lowers FPS as well - for the other settings, set as per the pic. to avoid terrain artefacts and to have minimal or no micro-stuttering. The good thing about pointing AMD to CFS3 instead of WOFF exe is that tree shadow flickering may be avoided that way - I now have good shadows, at a setting of 2, even in WOFF UE 4.18 with PE backported aircraft and textures - whereas previously I was only able to have tree shadows with no flickering in the PE Addon. Hopefully we will hear back from those on AMD vid. cards and running BHAH.II, in this sub-thread, eventually - regarding shadows, textures, etc.

NOTE: Other two pics. taken with settings set as suggested in the AMD vid. control panel. Also running my "FrankenMiniTuner" in this particular install that increases texture quality a bit more than the WOFF GPU Tuner - shaves off about 10 fps on ave. but terrain quality at distances preserves further crispness.

Cheers,
Von S

An interesting link that may be of help for those of us on AMD vid. cards:

https://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/gey1on/finally_got_reshade_working_on_win10_with_amd/

Now I understand more clearly why I was never able to get ReShade working with WOFF UE/PE (on Win10) - on my rig. with AMD vid. cards. This is one of the reasons why I also set up a separate FrankenWOFF 4.18 install for myself recently, so that I could take advantage again of SweetFX (that was sorely missed and that does work well on AMD vid.).

Will look into this further, eventually - perhaps there is a way of running ReShade for us AMD-ers and in WOFF - but I will tread carefully with ReShade until/if I can get it to work properly.

Cheers all and happy tinkering with our AMD vid. cards (no choice but to tinker ),
Von S

ReShade now working on my AMD-vid.-card rig. Please see the link included below the pic. for the relevant package, also for more detailed info.

Cheers all,
Von S



https://combatace.com/forums/topic/92320-fm-tweaks-for-woffuepe/?tab=comments#comment-782377

No wonder you are getting reasonable FPS with air activity set at 'light'.

I started with PE version set at 'ultra heavy' for ages, getting terrible FPS. I couldn't work out why I was getting a slide show even with all the graphic box's set down to '2', and some at '0'.
Just dropping to 'very heavy' gained about 8 FPS. 'Heavy was OK, getting about 55 FPS with graphic box's at '4s' & '5s'

But with H & H2 I have had to drop right down to 'medium', and all graphic box's set at '4' or lower. And it still only runs at about 48 FPS in a dog fight ]if I'm lucky].
I am not even going to look at 'light air activity', I like to shot the Hun out of the sky in large numbers.
When I want to go sightseeing I will get 'Microsoft flight sim'.

After months of messing with settings, I don't think my 'Ryzen 5 3600x' and 'rx5600xt red dragon' are up to the task.

So AMD users with similar spec to mine should probably stick to PE version for now..

You don't need 120fps to enjoy a game. Even if you get 55 fps you can fly happily. I used to fly Red Baron around 5 fps on an Amiga!

There are many options you can adjust not just the activity.

There are a TON of variables that can affect fps. BH&H II has massive changes, we now focus your missions much more in the region you are based so date time place affects you much more - as there could be more aircraft closer to you.
Although for many people, BH&H II runs smoother, with a little fps less - which is how it should be for a title that comes out 4 years later with many new visual and other additions (head anims, vibrations etc).

BTW ultra heavy was never intended to be used on the current hardware at that time, more like a future setting once the sim was out some time and only for very high end CPUs you are asking for trouble with FPS

@jnhoward, I've never been fully certain about the regional air activity settings but as far as I remember from previous threads here, a higher activity setting increases the area/diameter where flights are happening, but doesn't increase the congestion of flights in any one spot. So, it may be the case that if you fly close enough to a mission flight path, you will not see more aircraft at heavy, as opposed to light, settings - but there will be more activity beyond where you are flying, if you stray very far from your flight path (it is of course that extra activity, beyond visual range, that drops FPS - and more so than toggling of graphics quality settings does in the in-sim menu).

So tweak to taste of course - if you fly close enough to mission flight paths, I doubt there is any need to fly higher than at medium activity settings, even as late as 1918, in any version of WOFF. I toggle instead the "forced encounters" setting in PE, leaving it at medium, for more variety than at "off" - works well even if flying at light or very light activity settings.

For those flying only UE 4.2x or FrankenWOFF 4.18 install variants (with PE textures in UE and SweetFX, as I sometimes do) - there is no frequency of encounter setting but there is one called "encounters" - with the option to choose either "realistic" or "high" encounters. Works similarly to the "forced encounters" setting in PE (realistic is probably closer to off or medium, in forced encounters, in PE).

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I now run both WOFF and WOTR with the "force v-sync" setting at "on" - uncapped and fully modded I am at around 80 FPS, or so - with the v-sync cap set to on, I get a constant 60 FPS, knowing that I have an extra buffer of about 20 FPS uncapped helping to offset any possible drops in FPS - seems to be working well enough and is lighter on GPU-vid. usage with v-sync set to on, the fan being a bit quieter that way on the Mac Pro (2013). MacFansControl is set to GPU Diode 2, by the way, for any Mac/Bootcamp users reading this - with a temp. range set to between 60 and 85° C.

Cheers all and happy tweaking,
Von S

Cheers VonS, I will give the 'force v-sync on' a try.
And forced encounters I've always kept at High, maybe I will play with that too..

I'm running off a 60htz, 39'' TV. So anything over 60fps go's unnoticed. It would just be nice to be running higher than 34 in dogfight.
I used play 'Knights of the Sky' and ';F15 Strike Eagle' on the Amiga. not sure I'm happy going back 30 years to that standard.

Brief update to this thread - BH&H 2 now successfully loaded in (classic) WineSkin on the Mac but requires some strange tricks to work - see the bottom section of the WOFF-on-Mac post here on SimHQ for relevant info. (or the relevant post on CombatAce). Requires that you have an older ver. of WOFF already loaded in a WineSkin wrapper, for initial run-up of BH&H 2, etc. (more details under the relevant thread).

In turn - and as relevant to this AMD vid. thread - transplantation/extraction of the BH&H 2 install to Windows 10 (in Bootcamp) on the Mac works fine - no texture flickering or terrain corruption on my AMD-vid. cards (although do take note that I am running stock AMD drivers ver. 17.x.x). This variant of WOFF works better than WOFF PE 5.04 where I had to downgrade to 5.03 to eliminate minor horizon flickering at edges of the landscape. Best installs for Macs with Intel integrated or AMD vid. cards are therefore: WOFF 4.07, 4.12, 4.15, also 4.18 (or FrankenWOFF 4.18 variants that backport PE aircraft/textures into 4.18) - also good is WOFF PE 5.03, and BH&H 2 is better, as good as 4.18 if BH&H 2 is (very) carefully installed.

Cheers all,
Von S

Another little update to this AMD-related thread. If running BH&H2 on AMD-vid. cards, feel free to point your vid.-panel settings to WOFF.exe, as per this post (https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4562311/re-amd-help-and-support#Post4562311). No need to point to CFS3.exe - better FPS this way, no micro-stuttering whatsoever that I noticed, and also, if you have multiple vid.cards, you can enable cross-firing mode and frame-pacing that way (by pointing to WOFF.exe). Representative pic. below - with all other settings as per the AMD vid.-panel pic. in the post linked above. (Take note again that I am using stock AMD drivers 17.x.x - mileage may vary depending on age of drivers, etc.).

Happy tweaking,
Von S

Try some different settings GPU, WOFF plenty of tweaks you can do depending on hardware.


Nights of the Sky at 60fps




WOFF at 60fps with 100s of detailed aircraft with realistic AI in the air... mmmm yeah quite right KOTS all day

Hello fellow WOFFers on AMD-vid. cards,

The information that follows might be helpful to those running WOFF on AMD-vid. cards (with slightly older AMD DLLs), and if interested in recording video/audio in the WOFF runtime.

Newer versions of AMD-vid. software come with an optional "Radeon ReLive" package that apparently has good vid-recording capability - something perhaps to try out for those on newer AMD-vid. drivers. For those of us who swear by the stability of the ver. 17.x.x drivers, there is no ReLive option. Windows GameBar works just fine for recording FE2/SF2/RoF/BoX by the way, and VLC Player may be used to compress videos before upload to various sites, etc., so that at least is a simpler solution.

I've tried a few free video capture methods for WOFF today, and while I can capture the menu settings and main screen, the runtime environment of WOFF, while CFS3 is running, gives only a blank screen. A possible way to bypass this problem does exist, but is complicated if you are on the ver. 17.x.x AMD drivers:

INSTRUCTIONS

Install VoiceMeeter (for ability to record audio within the WOFF runtime)

Install MSI Afterburner (for video capture; you may already have it installed if you overclock your components)

Double-check that RivaTuner Statistics Server has also been installed (necessary for the video capture option in MSI Afterburner to work, and should be automatically installed via the Afterburner installer, as far as I have been able to test)

Once all of this is downloaded/installed:

a) in Afterburner, go to "settings: video capture," and select the following options:

- capture mode mixed (also good is "desktop" mode for greater, all-round reliability than "mixed," and works both for desktop videos and in-sim videos; no need to choose the "3D applications" option)
- video format mjpg compression
- container format matroska mkv
- frame size (choose the resolution and screen width ratio of your monitor - I've chosen 16:9 1080p, for example)
- framerate (set something reasonable; I've gone with 24 fps)
- framerate limit (set something higher, but not too high, so that you can see via the frame counter in WOFF when video recording is active; I've gone with a 48 fps limit)
- multithreaded optimization (leave at automatic or choose half of your total cores; I've gone with 3 compression threads on my 6-core Intel Xeon)
- for audio source no. 1 choose "WASAPI capture device" (for the option immediately underneath, choose "VoiceMeeter Output" if you want to capture WOFF audio)
- don't forget at the top of the "settings: video capture" window to choose a key for "Video capture" (so that you can toggle video capture on/off while in WOFF)
- once you are done with all of the selections, click on "Apply," and then on "OK," at the bottom of the settings window in Afterburner
- also don't forget that, in order to be able to toggle video recording on/off in WOFF, you will first have to open and leave running the MSI Afterburner app (RivaTuner does not have to be run; it is called up by Afterburner)

b) in order to complete the "loop" necessary for full audio recording while within the WOFF (CFS3) runtime, do the following:

- open the Sound control panel in Windows
- under the "Playback" setting, select VoiceMeeter Input as the "default device," and click "Apply"
- under the "Recording" setting, select VoiceMeeter Output as the "default device," and click Apply" and then "OK"

This will complete the audio throughput necessary for Afterburner successfully to pull in the WOFF audio (you will not be able to hear audio in WOFF while running the audio throughput this way - still haven't figured out how to do that - because if I switch over to my speakers as the "default device," under "Playback," and then record from WOFF - I can hear the sounds while flying but they will not be recorded via Afterburner - if I stumble on a smoother trick to toggle these things, I will post later - currently it would require an alt+tab while in the WOFF runtime, then a switcheroo of the default Playback device to VoiceMeeter, and then a return to the sim in progress before recording is toggled on - nasty, but it works).

EDIT: sound toggle problem solved - merely leave VoiceMeeter running while recording audio in WOFF - that way you can hear audio via the sound card on your computer simultaneously with recording. For those who do not like listening to onboard computer sound while recording, it may be possible to bypass this by plugging in headphones into the headphone output jack of your computers. Speakers plugged into a separate speaker jack on the other hand, at least from tests done on my Mac Pro, do not output sound while VoiceMeeter is being used to record sound in WOFF - but at least the onboard sound solution works with the VoiceMeeter window left open in the background.

c) if you feel that these instructions so far have not been complicated enough , and if you enjoy high-quality sound, why not also download the "ASIO4ALL" program (it's free) and in its "offline settings" panel set the following options as so:

latency compensation
- in, 0 samples
- out, 48 samples
options
- checkmark for allow pull mode (waveRT)
- buffer offset, 2 ms
- asio buffer size, 104 samples

One more step: now open VoiceMeeter and, under the heading that reads "Hardware Out," under the "A1" tab, select "ASIO: ASIO4ALL." This will, ideally, help to improve sound and latency while Afterburner pulls the sound in from the WOFF (CFS3) runtime, while you are flying and recording.

Keep in mind that the clips recorded in Afterburner may become quite large, several GBs in size for recordings that last about 5-10 mins., so be aware of that and perhaps also compress videos in another program, further, once they are recorded via Afterburner.

Happy flying and recording,
Von S

Bumping this (hopefully) helpful thread up and linking to an AMD-vid-related post over here, and that is also relevant to this thread.

Carry on gents',
Von S

Brief update to this thread - instead of opening a separate post, I thought that it would be best to bump this particular thread up with fresh(er) technical info. regarding WoFFing on AMD-vid cards. Those who are sometimes troubled by flashing and/or dark terrain tiles in WoFF on AMD video might wish to have a gander at this article located at the bottom of the WoFF FM and other mods. support thread on CombatAce, wherein I outline an X79 server build and a few tips/tricks that might help to resolve any oddities if WoFFing on AMD GPUs.

Cheers all & good WoFFing to you,

Fascinating work there VonS...but I believe it's true to say that the crux of the matter with AMD GPUs applies to those *before* the 5000-series (which work OK) as opposed to those 5000-series or higher (with which WOFF has always displayed the graphics anomalies you mention).

Essentially, you "got away" with using the drivers you did (and thus avoid terrain issues) because this X79 build is using older hardware with older drivers.

Pretty sure it's the same as always: Since the newer hardware didn't exist when older drivers were written, newer AMD GPUS aren't going to work with older drivers. Using older hardware avoids the problem in WOFF, because it inherently means you can also use older drivers. However, you can't use the older drivers with newer hardware - and thus, newer hardware requires newer drivers...which WOFF doesn't work with well.

TBH I think this essentially means nothing's changed. You basically used a newer version of hardware than your FirePro D700, but still older than the 5000-series (at which point somewhere around where the driver issue came about).

Once it's established where the issue occurred, it's fairly easy to see what will and will not have the issue. I'm putting it somewhere around the 5000 series cards because I'm too lazy to go back and look over it all again But I think that's close; the 'gray area' being the RX Vega and Radeon VII cards, which I don't think were ever actually used/reported on by anyone in the early threads here....so not exactly sure where the 'cutoff' is (and don't have hardware to test...can't afford to buy more hardware every time this comes up lol).

Now, granted, I'm doing this from memory, and I admittedly didn't read in detail the entire post at CA, simply because most of it isn't relevant to the GPU/driver issue you mention here.

FWIW, as an aside: Unfortunately I suspect that (after some years now since c. 2019? when this first came up) if AMD were able to fix it with their drivers, they'd have done so by now.

With all that said...

I absolutely **love** your approach of using dual GPUs, having built many a 'giant killer' myself - on old X79 platforms, nonetheless, and still running today with SLI Nvidia cards. I haven't specifically studied it, but it may be that the 580s you chose are as far as one can go without running into the "wall" that WOFF has with newer AMD hardware/drivers.

I love X79 boards, and although I may well be fooling myself, I remain convinced that we haven't yet seen the end of these multi-GPU "monsters". I currently have a build with two 2070 Supers (which competes with a 3090 BTW), as well as others with two 2070's, two 1080Tis, two 1070Tis, 1070s...etc etc etc lol

I'm even getting storage at speeds competing with PCIe Gen 4 x4 on these same platforms ...it just requires using the right hardware, and I get read transfers over 6800 MB/s (Crystal DiskMark) which is *double* anything a PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive can do

Nice to hear from you KK and pleased that you like my dual GPU build. I figured that since it's a dual CPU build, it deserves two GPUs too.

It's entirely possible that I got lucky with the build regarding WoFF since I was picking through "new" components but ones that are a few generations old. The goal was to build a more powerful/beehive version of the 2013 Mac Pro and I think that, in that context, the project was successful. And most of the components were not too pricey so I figured why not build something around the two E5 Xeons that I found. I managed not to exceed 800 USD or so for the whole build, so I'm happy with it. And I also like the X79 boards - basically the same server generation mobo as the 2013 Mac Pro - so I mostly knew what I was getting myself into.

You may indeed be correct that the AMD RX 580 is the last "safe" video card if WoFFing on AMD vid - who knows, but it makes sense. Although I hope that those running newer AMD GPUs will at least have some success if they tinker with various versions of DLLs. I went with the 580s since they were also Dilwe brand like the X79 mobo I picked up, and the mobo supports AMD Crossfire mode. As far as I know, most of these Chinese mobos do not support SLI on nVidia cards that have SLI capability. So it was either two 580s or a solitary GTX 1060 6GB for me - I decided on the 580s.

For those running newer AMD GPUs and experiencing terrain oddities in WoFF, try tinkering with the generation of DLLs I mention under that X79 post (ver. 19.x.x). Other generations of DLLs possibly worth experimenting with are linked to below. Take note that I only stick with the Pro version of the DLLs (have found that in most cases the Adrenalin/consumer DLLs create texture corruption in my WoFF installs, but your mileage may vary).

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Link to the AMD Cleanup Utility (I use the official AMD utility to remove DLLs before installing different ones; the uninstaller always boots into safe mode before uninstalling, and then reboots into regular Windows, where you then go ahead and install drivers normally):

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/gpu-601

Next up are a series of links to different versions of Radeon "Pro" software that are worth experimenting with:

Radeon Pro 20.Q3 (available only for Windows 10, not for Windows 11)

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-pro-win-20-q3

Radeon Pro 20.Q4 (available only for Windows 10, not for Windows 11)

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-pro-win-20-q4

Radeon Pro 21.Q1.2 (available only for Windows 10, not for Windows 11)

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-pro-win-21-q1-2

Radeon Pro 21.Q4 (available both for Windows 10 and 11)

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-pro-win-21-q4

(Link to the slightly older 19.Q3 DLLs is in my X79 build post, by the way.)
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Cheers all & good luck with your AMD WoFFing experiments,