Both AMD and Nvidia's latest drivers can do very bad things to your gaming PC
Nobody comes out looking good in the latest round of graphics card updates, because both AMD and Nvidia have shipped out drivers that can do bad things to your PC. First, Nvidia has a relatively simple CPU overuse issue(opens in new tab) that occurs after exiting a game, and the basic workaround is just to go back to the previous driver. Second, AMD's driver can, in rare instances, totally corrupt your Windows installation.
Eep. That's a rather bigger deal, but actually isn't really AMD's fault, even though it has been live in both this latest Adrenalin driver and the previous one. Blame Windows' penchant for updating the OS at all costs.
The Adrenalin 23.2.1 driver from February, as well as the current 23.2.2 version, can totally brick your machine, as happened to a bunch of Radeon owners, as well as Brad Chacos from PC World(opens in new tab). They have documented their pain and the «exotic» steps they took to get their test rig back up and running after the driver update killed it.
The issue, it seems, is that on rare occasions where Windows decides that no matter what you're doing it simply must update something while you're installing your new AMD drivers, it will corrupt the system. Chacos found their installation went fine until the point where it came to restarting the machine, at which point it went through a continuous boot>BSOD cycle.
The workaround, which arose from a painstaking back and forth with AMD engineers, is to hit the power switch on your PC in the split second in between the BIOS keypress options screen and the spinning Windows logo appearing. That should encourage an automatic recovery event, which in turn allows you to select from some advanced options to sort out your system.
That's easier said
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