AMD's GPU drivers on Windows have some bad behavior when the card is not active or the primary display on boot. Specifically:
- Certain EXE names are hooked in the kernel driver, and they won't even begin running for 10-15+ seconds after you open them
- ULPS (Ultra Low Power State) is buggy when Windows is running with the driver loaded, but no displays are enabled on the GPU
Regarding 1:
- Applications named
Steam.exe
,Origin.exe
, oruPlay.exe
among others get hooked by the kernel driver, presumably for some sort of game integration that I don't quite understand - I get the feeling this is potentially very outdated cruft, given that
uPlay.exe
is hooked (which no longer exists), whileUbisoftConnect.exe
is not - When your AMD card doesn't own the Windows primary display, this hooking delays launch of EXEs with these names for whatever reason
- I have not found a complete list of these EXEs in the kernel driver binary; I'm thinking they may be hashed? There's another list in the binary in