I reported earlier this week on a bug within AMD's GPU driver suite, wherein a misfiring utility was accused of making huge amounts of erroneous storage writes. Some AMD graphics card owners reported their SSD health dropping by up to 1% per month, but a fix has finally arrived.
AMD Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 is an optional update, which means you'll need to download the installer yourself. However, according to the topline notes, the update fixes "excessive writes to the system drive" at idle for Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards and above.
AMD's wording suggests that older GPUs might not be affected by the bug, but some of the user reports mention RX 6000-series cards, so it's unclear if a fix for earlier models is still in the works.
I also think it's a slightly odd move to make this an "optional" update, given the severity of some of the reports, though this is often how AMD deals with getting fixes out in between official driver releases—by the looks of the known issues, this interim driver might still need some work before it's patched into the next full release.
AMD lists a litany of potential issues with various games, including crashes and driver timeouts in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, War Thunder, and Cyberpunk 2077 with FSR enabled. These issues, however, match and are fewer than in the previous driver release, with the exception of the Phantom Blade Zero bug.
The company notes that "visual corruption may appear on character hair while playing Phantom Blade Zero on Radeon RX 9000 series graphics products." I'm currently working my way through PBZ myself, and the idea of turning down the quality settings on Soul's magnificent hairdo? Sacrilege, as far as I'm concerned.
Still, I'd definitely consider downloading the update if my SSD health was rapidly being eaten by a misfiring utility. Buying a replacement these days isn't cheap, so anything that prevents unnecessary wear and tear on existing hardware is a-okay with me.
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
3. Best mid-range: Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB
4. Best high-end: AMD RX 9070 XT
