Update, 1/4/18, 7:21pm PT: AMD has just released an alpha driver hotfix to resolve the issue.
Update, 1/2/18, 6:17pm PT:As we predicted, AMD didn’t stay silent on the issue for long. The directory of software strategy at AMD, Terry Makedon, has tweeted that AMD is aware of the issue and is working on a fix.
AMD’s latest Adrenalin driver seems to have broken a number of DX9 games. In responding to a comment about the problem in its community forums, AMD said that it likely won’t fix the issue.
Talk of this problem began on Reddit when some AMD GPU users reported a crash on some older games, including The Witcher, the Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 series, the Battle for Middle Earth series, and other DX9 titles. The games crash with an error stating “Fatal error: Exception in exception handler.” It was discovered that the issue is only present with driver releases after and including 17.12.1--AMD’s last major driver release, which is called Adrenalin.
The issue made its way onto the AMD community forums when a user apparently traced the crash to a module called atiumdag.dll. A community technical support engineer replied the post with the following:
This title is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules.
Reddit users have since created a thread with a list of games that have reported issues. In addition to the above titles, the list also includes The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Crysis (in DX9 mode), among others. Issues have been reported on both Windows 10 and 7. According to the thread, reverting from 17.12.2 to 17.12.1 might help, but only reverting to 17.11.4 will fix the issue.
AMD hasn’t issued any further comments on the issue yet, but, given the popularity of some of the affected titles, we doubt they’ll be sticking to their original comment. We’re sure a great number of you still fire up a Command and Conquer game occasionally. It’s only the first day back at work for most of us, so let’s give them a while.
