COD Modern Warfare 2 Season 3 Update Is Breaking The Game For Some AMD Gamers
A reader (who asked to remain unnamed) wrote in to alert us about this problem that seems to primarily affect users with AMD Vega-based graphics hardware, meaning not only the original Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards but also the Radeon VII and integrated GPUs based on the same architecture. That list includes the integrated GPUs for almost all Ryzen processors, such as the Ryzen 5 5600G and 5000-series mobile processors, even if paired with a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GPU.
That sounds like a Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) event to us. TDR is a Windows mechanism that detects when the graphics driver has crashed and attempts to restart it. While this works well to prevent the whole machine from being locked-up and can save users from losing work in office programs, it generally crashes any games or other GPU-accelerated programs as the original driver context is lost.
Indeed, that's the error code shown in the screenshots posted all over the web. DirectX error 0x887A0005 means that the device context was lost and the application can no longer send commands to the GPU. Given that this started happening to owners of Vega GPUs after the Season 3 update for CoD:MW2, it seems obvious that the game itself is at fault here, but it could also be down to a previously-undiscovered issue in AMD's graphics drivers.
Notably, there are sparse reports of people with other graphics cards having this same error, but it's worth noting that this error message is just a generic message explaining that your GPU driver crashed. That could happen to anyone for lots of reasons, including a corrupted graphics driver, weak power supply, or myriad other issues. Meanwhile, it seems like nobody with a Vega GPU can actually get in-game.
Some posters have advised users to take the standard troubleshooting steps: clean out your cache files, update your graphics drivers, and verify the game's integrity through Steam or the Battle.net launcher. While those are certainly good steps to take, it doesn't seem like they resolve this particular issue. One user posted a reply from the game's support staff acknowledging the issue but offering no more useful information. The bug hasn't appeared on the game's Trello bug tracker yet.
Sadly, we don't have any useful information either—like, say, a fix, at least aside from replacing your graphics card. While Vega is getting quite long in the tooth at this point, the discrete cards are still quite competent for current games in lower resolutions and with modest settings; it would be a shame for people to replace working graphics cards just because of one game bug. Hopefully Infinity Ward can get this issue patched up soon. We have reached out to AMD for comment as well and will update if and when we receive a response.
