Even the best graphics cards are prone to crashes. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Nvidia or AMD graphics card. For that same reason, AMD has launched a helpful tool called Radeon GPU Detective (RGD) to aid developers in diagnosing crashes with Radeon graphics cards.
Radeon GPU Detective salvages and analyzes the crash dumps to generate a report to help you troubleshoot the issue. The detailed report provides vital information, including the page fault details, resource details, and even execution markers that indicate the graphics card’s workload before the crash.
Version 1.0 of Radeon GPU Detective can pinpoint graphics card crashes on the Windows operating system, such as TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) errors, in Direct3D 12 applications. Apparently, previous APIs, like DirectX 11 or DirectX 9, and other APIs, such as Vulkan, aren’t on the support list. Currently, Radeon GPU Detective only supports the Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) and Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2) series. It’s uncertain if AMD will extend compatibility to older Radeon graphics cards. The only requirement to use Radeon GPU Detective is that the system must have the latest Adrenalin 23.7.2 driver installed. Funnily, the Adrenalin 23.7.2 package has its fair share of bugs.
TDR is a Windows feature that resets the graphics card when it doesn’t respond in an established time period. It’s useful because it brings your system back to a usable state without having to force a system restart. If you own a discrete graphics card, you probably have experienced it a few times. When TDR errors occur, you’ll get a warning message how the display driver had stopped working and has recovered or something along those lines. TDR errors are tricky because there’s a long list of causes, everything from a corrupted file to a faulty graphics card. Hopefully, AMD’s new Radeon GPU Detective tool can help developers debug TDR bugs faster than before.
One of the cool features of Radeon GPU Detective is that it allows developers to put the driver into what AMD calls “Crash Analysis” mode via the Radeon Developer Panel (RDP) before replicating the crash. The tool consequently produces an analysis file in text format. Alternatively, you can configure it to output in JSON format for automated processing.
The Radeon GPU Detective tool falls within the Radeon Developer Tool Suite (RDTS) and is available for public download. The code for Radeon GPU Detective is open-sourced, so that you can play with it on the Radeon GPU Detective repository on GitHub.
