CMx2 Black terrain and menu in game mode

[BOT27516]

Just bought this using Steam.  Running a new AMD Ryzen laptop in Windows 11.  Game starts fine and get into the game mode and everything is blacked out except the units.  Most of the menu bat at the bottom is also blacked out.  I've heard this is a driver issue but may be wrong.

[BOT27516]

Actually, there is a brief one second view where the screen displays properly when the mission loads then immediately goes to a black screen. What is going on here?  Obviously Ive spent money on this and it doesnt work.

[Vacillator]

On 6/9/2023 at 4:28 PM, BOT27516 said:

I've heard this is a driver issue

Sounds like it, AMD GPU driver.  I'll tag in @BFCElvis but you can also put in a Helpdesk ticket.

And welcome!

[BFCElvis]

On 6/9/2023 at 11:28 AM, BOT27516 said:

Just bought this using Steam.  Running a new AMD Ryzen laptop in Windows 11.  Game starts fine and get into the game mode and everything is blacked out except the units.  Most of the menu bat at the bottom is also blacked out.  I've heard this is a driver issue but may be wrong.

IT may be the AMD driver and it may be that your anti-virus software blocked some of the installation. Check out this thread for the AMD driver. If that doesn't help, open a Help Desk ticket and include, if you can, a screenshot of the contents of the game's Data folder.

 

https://community.battlefront.com/topic/141554-amd-228-series-breaks-game-again/

 

[BOT27516]

On 6/11/2023 at 8:57 PM, BFCElvis said:

IT may be the AMD driver and it may be that your anti-virus software blocked some of the installation. Check out this thread for the AMD driver. If that doesn't help, open a Help Desk ticket and include, if you can, a screenshot of the contents of the game's Data folder

So good news is I went to the Device Manager and (automatically) reverted back to a previous version of the driver. Restarting and running the game the graphics looked like they should.  No blacked out textures.

Bad news is that the interface is now somewhat "frozen".  The mission menu screen takes about 10 seconds to select a mission.  When I get into a mission the graphics look good but I cannot select any of the units or select any of the buttons on the menu.  Previously with the blacked out graphics I was able to select the units in the planning phase.  Another down side to reverting the drivers is that none of my others games work now.  Not sure where to go from here.

[Schrullenhaft]

Since you've upgraded your video driver at some point in the past and you have now essentially 'down-graded' it with the System Restore (or whatever function Windows 11 allowed for you to go to an older driver), you may be experiencing some mild driver conflict where registry settings or DLL files don't get removed/replaced and cause some issues.

Ryzen laptop CPUs will often have built-in Radeon graphics cores. These won't be as fast as a dedicated GPU (primarily due to shared memory, etc.), but they should do a decent job in CM. To find out which Radeon graphics core you have and/or if you have a dedicated graphics GPU go to the Device Manager (right-click on Start Menu and select 'Device Manager' from the popup menu) and open up the 'Display adapters' section. In here there should be one or possibly two display adapters. What display adapter (or adapters) do you have installed ? Double-clicking on the listed display adapter should open up a tabbed dialog box. Go to the 'Driver' tab and look for the 'Driver version'. For Radeon graphics it may be hard to tell what driver version corresponds with a specific 'Adrenaline' driver (which is the version number often quoted here in the forums regarding 'driver versions').

If you have just some sort of 'Radeon' display adapter, then an update (or maybe a 'down-grade') to the driver for that display adapter may help your situation. For these drivers you'll need to know the specific Ryzen CPU model that you have (i.e - 'Ryzen 7 7730U', etc.). This information will be necessary to select an appropriate driver from AMD's site. To my knowledge AMD-provided video drivers should work with most Ryzen-powered laptops with built-in graphics, but there is the possibility that you may be limited to using just what your laptop manufacturer provides. In that case you'll need to know the exact laptop model and go to your laptop manufacturer's site to download the appropriate driver. Laptop manufacturers rarely update their drivers, so there might only be one version of the video driver on their site.

If you have TWO display adapters, then one of those is a 'dedicated GPU' (separate from a GPU built-into the CPU). This might be an Nvidia GeForce or it could be a dedicated Radeon GPU. If you do have TWO display adapters then you may want to pay attention to what is necessary to get CM to run on that dedicated GPU. Often this would be creating a profile for CM within the video adapter's control panel, though this may not always guarantee switching from the built-in CPU GPU to the dedicated GPU for a program/game. My guess is that you most likely only have the built-in Radeon graphics.

Before doing any of the following, create a Restore Point that you can go back to if something doesn't work out right.

1. Download the appropriate driver for your display adapter (most likely the AMD Radeon graphics built-in GPU) and store it somewhere easy to find (in its own directory/sub-directory preferably). I believe the 25.3.2 Adrenaline driver should good for CM (there are some possible issues, but they should hopefully be minor).

2. Download the DDU Installer. DDu removes almost all traces of a video driver to allow the fresh install of another driver.

3. Install DDU. DDU requires .NET 4.8 and there is a possibility that you might need to download a specific .NET installer (I'm not sure if Windows 11 has all of the necessary .NET files for DDU or not).

4. Run DDU. Typically it is suggested to run DDU in Windows Safe Mode, but that isn't strictly necessary. There are some instructions on the DDU download page from Guru3D. You can also reference Youtube videos on running DDU (this one shows using Windows Safe Mode). You'll be making selections of 'AMD' for your driver removal and I highly suggest using the top-most button that involves rebooting after the uninstall. You may want to disconnect from the internet before rebooting so Windows doesn't try to install the same video driver (though this may still happen without an internet connection).

5. After rebooting install the driver that you downloaded earlier. This will likely require a reboot once that is finished installing.

Hopefully the 23.5.2 driver can get you running without problems. AMD make significant changes to their OpenGL driver in the 22.7 driver. It increased the performance significantly (especially load times), but it caused problems resulting in CM players going back to 22.5.1 or 22.6.1. Recently it appears that the drivers have been fixed, but some users are experiencing errors of running out of memory with some CM scenarios.

If you need/want to try out the older drivers (in case you suffer some issues), here are the Adrenaline 22.6.1 drivers (link mentions Windows 10, but they work for Windows 11 too).