Here's Your Fix For AMD's Radeon Driver Bug That's Punishing SSDs

If you're a hardware enthusiast, you probably read earlier this week about an issue affecting AMD's graphics cards that caused the firm's drivers to perform excess writes to the disk near-constantly. Well, AMD is happy to report that the AMD Adrenalin 26.11.1 driver package resolves this issue entirely, as well as the year-old problem where moving windows around also caused disk writes for some reason.

AMD marks this driver as "Optional", and the reason is because most people aren't affected by the bug. Investigators on Reddit pieced together that it was being caused by the drivers logging the absence of certain driver files that were removed after the 26.3.1 driver. If your Radeon machine has been up and running since March, you would still have those files in place and thus would not be affected. It apparently also didn't affect graphics cards from the Radeon RX 6000 series and older, either.

In any case, the problem is solved now, so kudos to AMD for fixing up this issue. Of course, as with any software package as complicated as a graphics driver, there are ongoing issues; AMD's list of known issues includes various crashes and driver timeouts in numerous recent games, including Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, Call of Duty Modern Warfare Remastered, Gears of War Reloaded, Phantom Blade Zero, and even slightly older games like Cyberpunk 2077 and War Thunder.


Interestingly, AMD's graphics drivers still support Windows 10, so if you're a die-hard holdout on the 11-year-old now-unsupported OS, AMD's got your back. However, the firm notes that SmartAccess Memory may get turned off after the installation of this driver, so make sure to go flick that back on if you want the best performance from your GPU; while it's hit or miss on NVIDIA, it's pretty much a net win in nearly all games for Radeon cards. If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a decent explainer here.

AMD cautions that folks who are downgrading (though there's no newer driver to downgrade from, yet) should use the AMD Cleanup Utility, which is a good thing to be aware of anyway. It's like DDU but less destructive. You can check out the full release notes and grab the new driver from AMD's download page, as usual.