MP 7,1 Mac Pro 7.1 Radeon Pro Vega II Win10 Half Life Alyx: Random black screen crashes

[MacFlaX]

I’m fully aware that a Mac Pro 7.1 with Radeon Pro Vega II MPX isn’t a gaming machine. On the other hand it should work for that purpose as well, at least during breaks from more serious things ;-)
Here my experience with Half Life Alyx under Win 10 Pro, AMD Radeon Bootcamp driver 19.40 (and 19.20), Oculus Quest via Oculus Link and Half Live Alyx (Update 1.2) via SteamVR (beta and normal). Everything works generally very well. Half Live Alyx runs smooth in Ultra settings, until... random crashes occur. The VR scene freezes in a kind of square, the sound continues and the Windoes desktop turns black. Windows desktop recovers after about 30sec with a Steam VR crash error message. After restart of Oculus software and Steam software game could be restarted without Win restart. It works until next random crash will occur after a couple of minutes or half an hour or later. In windows activity manager GPU runs at about 85..95% during gamig, and at or above 100% in such crash events.
Interestingly the issue doesn’t happen with Radeon Pro 580 MPX. Unfortunately HL Alyx runs only with Low graphics settings and still a bit laggy. Playable, but clearly inferior to the Vega II.
Does the Radeon Pro Vega II MPX have similar „random black screen“ gaming issues like the Radeon VII? There I found multiple threads about similar issues In other forums.
PS: No teaching needed that Mac Pro isn’t intended for gaming or VR gaming ;-) I‘m fully aware. But at least it should work generally, e.g. to avoid a separate gaming PC beside the great Mac Pro.

 

[jinnyman]

AMD Graphic drivers are notorious for instability especially the current generation of 5000s family. AMD has attempted to fix it, and as far as I know, it's almost stable enough, but not perfect. With that in mind, and assuming your hardware is problem free, I'm not sure how much AMD's fixes are applicable for VegaII.

People run nvidia for gaming not only because of performance, but it's way more stable than AMD.

I think your best bet is contact their support team, or else, get PC for Alyx.

 

[TrevorR90]

I'd recommend using the unofficial drivers from third party sources that are tweaked for gaming. There's a reason why Nvidia/AMD releases a new driver every time a major game is released.

Not sure if I'm allowed to post link.

 

[marvguitar]

Have you ever figured it out - Same is happening for me I installed adrenalin 2020 April Red edition and it still crashed.

 

[MacFlaX]

Unfortunately not. I switched to the W5700X MPX meanwhile. Sufficient performance for my use cases so far and more stabile under Win10 in Half Life Alyx as well. Not yet perfect, because occasionally the GPU acceleration drops. Under macOS addressed in 10.15.5. Beta, in Win10 still there occasionally. But at least no black out freezes. If it occurs you can still continue with low FPS, save and reboot.
(...Sorry, this answer doesn’t help you with your Vega II)

 

[vinegarshots]

Unfortunately not. I switched to the W5700X MPX meanwhile. Sufficient performance for my use cases so far and more stabile under Win10 in Half Life Alyx as well. Not yet perfect, because occasionally the GPU acceleration drops. Under macOS addressed in 10.15.5. Beta, in Win10 still there occasionally. But at least no black out freezes. If it occurs you can still continue with low FPS, save and reboot.
(...Sorry, this answer doesn’t help you with your Vega II)

You need to try Trevor90's advice. AMD/Apple don't push updated Bootcamp drivers fast enough. Takes way too long to get a new version with bug fixes, so your only REAL option is to use third party Boot Camp Drivers. There's a website dedicated to releasing updated drivers about 10x faster than you'll get from AMD/Apple. Look it up...I had the same issue on my iMac Pro trying to use my Oculus Rift in Bootcamp.

 

[MVMNT]

The "isn’t a gaming machine" line is such a poor cop out for what should be a Mac to blow everything out the water.

 

[Norbert Mikołajczyk]

It is well known amd driver problem under Windows with many amd gpus. It got nothing to do with Bootcamp. Search reddit.
AMD is trying to fix it but with mixed results.
It happened many times for me with my Radeon vii also on my MP 5.1.
It drives me mad, sometimes it does not happen for days and then suddenly a couple of black screens in a day - playing Doom Eternal, benchmarking Heaven, playing RDR2...
I changed cables, slots, reverted vbios (now testing this).
The black screens are random things to happen sadly.
People are reverting vbioses and drivers with mixed results and some of them are switching to the green.