Something that NVIDIA users like to brag about is having better (i.e., less buggy) drivers than their AMD brethren. They might actually have a point: there have been a lot of complaints lately on reddit and other social media regarding a “black screen” bug present in the current Adrenalin driver.
The glitch is extremely annoying because it can reportedly happen for no rhyme or reason. Users say that their monitors have gone black regardless of whether they were playing games, watching videos on YouTube, or running some other kind of GPU-heavy process.
Back in January, AMD did publish a blog post (“Continuing Our Focus on Delivering the Best Driver Possible for 2020”) that acknowledged numerous black screen issues. They are as follows:
- An intermittent black screen or loss of display may occur when performing parallel actions such as web browsing, gaming or watching video.
- An intermittent black screen or loss of display may occur when the system is left idle at desktop.
- Some Radeon RX 5700 series graphics users may intermittently experience a black screen while gaming or on desktop. A potential temporary workaround is disabling hardware acceleration in applications running in the background such as web browsers or Discord.
The first two have been reportedly been fixed, but AMD is still “currently working to address” the last one. We have no idea when the black-screen bug will be squashed once and for all, but the Radeon team has set up a survey to get more information from users who have encountered video output issues.