Graphics Driver Issues

This page quickly summarizes graphics driver quirks and issues present in GPU drivers by different manufacturers.

» Intel (Proprietary)
» AMD (Proprietary)
» NVIDIA (Proprietary)
» AMD (Mesa)
» Intel (Mesa)
» Hall of Fame (List of fixed issues)

Intel (Proprietary)

OpenGL

GLSL compiler is very broken
» Workaround implemented: No
» Reported: No
» Note: Intel proprietary OpenGL drivers are unsupported by RPCS3 due to their poor state.
There are likely other issues as well...

Vulkan

No known problems at this time

AMD (Proprietary)

OpenGL

glMultiDrawArrays is broken
» Workaround implemented: Yes
» Reported: Yes, on 2018-04-25. No replies.
» Note: This seems to be undefined behavior in the spec. The gl_VertexID propagation behavior across MultiDrawArrays is not defined, i.e whether it should continue incrementing of reset to 0 on a new instance. However, due to the comparison with a loop of [first, count] and implied functional equivalence, this may be interpreted as a bug. Either way, RPCS3 provides a workaround using index lookups.

Vulkan

Primitive restart is 'broken', this seems to be a GCN hardware bug as it affects both proprietary and open-source drivers
» Workaround implemented: Yes (automatic)
» Note: Confirmed, see eae8f49f@mesa3d/mesa
MSAA with sample shading disabled does not work on NAVI when using Vulkan
» Workaround implemented: Yes (automatic)
» Note: Forcefully enabling sampleRateShading for all pipelines and calculating the minimum ratio works around this problem

NVIDIA (Proprietary)

OpenGL

Floating point precision issues with Nan/Inf values
» Workaround implemented: Yes (automatic)
» Note: This is not a driver bug as it can be considered implementation-defined behavior.

Vulkan

Floating point precision issues with Nan/Inf values
» Workaround implemented: Yes (automatic)
» Note: This is not a driver bug as it can be considered implementation-defined behavior.

Unexpectedly slower performance (-25%) when replacing VK_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM with VK_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM
» Workaround used: None
» Reported: Yes, on 2020-10-30. No replies.

AMD (Mesa)

OpenGL

No known problems at this time

Vulkan

Primitive restart is 'broken', this seems to be a GCN hardware bug as it affects both proprietary and open-source drivers
» Workaround implemented: Yes (automatic)
» Note: Confirmed, see eae8f49f@mesa3d/mesa
~~LLVM 8 generates broken code on Mesa~~
» Workaround implemented: No, use newer versions of Mesa that are based on LLVM 9 or above
» Reported: Yes, on 2019-06-22. Quick reply.
» Note: This is caused by a dependency (LLVM), and not a bug on the driver's implementation.

Intel (Mesa)

OpenGL

i965 Driver: Not supported. Games won't render properly with it, it's very broken [1], [2], [3].
iris Driver: No known problems at this time.

Vulkan

Missing shaderStorageImageMultisample Vulkan feature support on Intel iGPUs
» Workaround implemented: Yes, Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) will be disabled automatically by RPCS3
» Reported: Yes, on 2020-08-03. Feature unsupported by hardware.
Missing descriptorBindingUniformBufferUpdateAfterBind support
» Workaround implemented: Yes, an alternative (slower) code path will be used instead
» Reported: Yes, on 2020-09-28.

Hall of Fame

List of reported graphics driver bugs that are now fixed. We'd like to thank the developers who fixed these!

CRITICAL: OpenGL no longer renders any game on any AMD GPU! (Windows)
» Affected drivers: Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.12.1, 19.12.2, 19.12.3, 20.1.1, 20.1.2, 20.1.3
» Workaround used: None, not possible
» Fixed on: Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.1.4
High: AMD RADV driver crash when using ACO due to unusual control flow (Mesa)
» Affected drivers: Mesa 20.0.2 and earlier
» Workaround used: None, using RADV with LLVM instead of ACO
» Fixed on: Mesa 20.0.3
High: Incorrectly rendered Vulkan shaders due to broken SPIR-V optimization on NVIDIA
» Affected drivers: NVIDIA Windows 452.06 and earlier, NVIDIA Linux 450.56.06 and earlier
» Workaround used: None
» Fixed on: NVIDIA Windows 452.28, NVIDIA Linux 450.56.11
High: Driver instability leading to crashes on NVIDIA Windows
» Affected drivers: NVIDIA Windows 526.XX
» Workaround used: None
» Fixed on: NVIDIA Windows 527.37
High: Performance regression on AMD Windows with very high submit and flip latency per frame
» Affected drivers: Radeon Software Adrenalin 23.3.2, 23.4.1, 23.4.2
» Workaround used: None
» Fixed on: Radeon Software Adrenalin 23.4.3
High: Graphical corruption on AMD Windows with RDNA3 GPUs when upscaling games
» Affected drivers: Radeon Software Adrenalin 24.1.1 and older
» Workaround used: None
» Fixed on: Radeon Software Adrenalin 24.2.1
Normal: OpenGL's glGetTexImage/glGetTextureImage/glGetTextureImageEXT do not work with immutable textures if pack/unpack byteswap is requested on any AMD GPU (Windows)
» Affected drivers: Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.4.2 and earlier
» Workaround used: Manually byteswap texel data (now removed)
» Fixed on: Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.4.3
Normal: Unnecessary implicit subpass dependencies caused performance regression on AMD RADV (Mesa)
» Affected drivers: Mesa 20.0.0, 20.0.1
» Workaround used: Explicitely injecting null subpass dependencies (now removed)
» Fixed on: Mesa 20.0.2
Normal: vkGetQueryPoolResults returns incorrect values when VK_QUERY_RESULT_PARTIAL_BIT is set on NVIDIA (Windows)
» Affected drivers: NVIDIA GeForce 442.59 and earlier
» Workaround used: Keeping NVIDIA driver from using partial results (now removed)
» Fixed on: ~NVIDIA GeForce 442.74
Normal: Missing shaderStorageImageMultisample Vulkan feature support on GCN1 GPUs (RPCS3 crashes if MSAA is enabled)
» Affected drivers: Mesa 20.0.8 and older
» Workaround used: None (disable MSAA on affected drivers)
» Fixed on: Mesa 20.1.0
Normal: Vertex explosion when using ACO shader compiler on AMD RADV (Mesa)
» Affected drivers: Mesa 20.2.1 and older
» Workaround used: None, not possible. Using the older shader compiler instead of ACO, which was the default prior to Mesa 20.2
» Fixed on: Mesa 20.2.2