Yandex alleges AMD's Windows drivers unfairly favor Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge

Gandalf_The_Grey

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Apr 24, 2016
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Russian software company Yandex, which also makes browsers, has alleged that AMD graphics drivers are unfairly favoring other Chromium-based browsers which mainly include Google Chrome, and perhaps Microsoft Edge too. In a blog post describing its new findings, the firm has alleged that AMD drivers would crash over five times less and would eat up on average, 8% less memory when these drivers would detect the "chrome.exe" file.

The chart below shows the crash pattern of the AMD drivers. The line in red represents the number of driver crashes when using the chrome EXE file workaround.

1679131825249.png
Yandex developers apparently stumbled upon this finding when investigating a webpage scrolling issue that wasn't present on Chrome and Edge. This issue seemed to resolve when the "browser.exe" file was renamed to "chrome.exe".

Yandex says that it has reached out to AMD regarding these findings and has also already included the optimization, ie, the executable file renamed to chrome.exe, in its browsers starting with version 22.9.0.
 

SeriousHoax

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But AMD drivers has an issue on all Chromium browsers at least on YouTube. If the video resolution and your monitor resolution doesn't match, then videos appear blurry unless you go full screen. For example, if you watch a 1080p video on a 1080p monitor, everything is fine but if the resolution of the video is different then it will appear a bit blurry. Even if you watch a 8K video it will be quite a bit blurry.
Only Chromium browsers are affected, not Firefox. Chrome devs told me that everything is fine on their end and it's an issue of the AMD driver. There's workaround for it which they suggested which is what I have to use. It is effective but according to them might use more CPU than usual while watching videos. Thankfully nothing notably high for me. In case anyone guessing...No, the workaround is not about disabling hardware acceleration though that works too but that's the worst possible workaround.
 

show-Zi

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I think it may not be an intentional problem. If AMD's drivers take precedence, it's definitely for gamers.
In environments such as video editing, it lags far behind Nvidia.
 

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