Lightroom: Crashing with GPU acceleration on (AMD Radeon driver 17.4.4)

I've often criticized Adobe on the forums, when the criticism is objectively warranted.

Dude, I get it. You're one of their champions; you've sold yourself to believing in a company and can't see part their faults. You are their Evangelical. Congrats and keep up the faceless fight. And yes, circumstancial. Seeing how the workaround was a mere setting, any QA person would have been able to find that. Testing wise, first thing you do it's go through the program or driver and turn on and off one setting at a time. It's basic troubleshooting. Especially if they were truly working with AMD they would have found this pretty quick instead of waiting on users to do their job for them. Furthermore, I have yet to see aknowledgement on AMDs side of a bug in their release notes and they've had at least one driver update since then and are usually pretty good about documenting bugs for users.

Will you get off your high horse now? What's it to you if I switch away anyhow. Been using both Affinity and Capture one trials for a month now and they are faster and do more than Adobe PS and LR. And their service reps actually respond to their users. This plus the sluggish to no performance in LR has sealed the deal.

"Actually work with AMD to fix it rather than sitting on their hands."

Jeffrey Tranberry, Sr. Product Manager, said four weeks ago, "We're working with AMD to try and correct this problem."  The help article published at the same time says, "Our engineering team is working with AMD to correct this problem."    

Is there evidence that Adobe is "sitting on their hands" instead of working cooperatively with AMD to fix the issue? 

Actually work with AMD to fix it rather than sitting on their hands. I work for a software and hardware development company. I've worked for a few. It's rarely just one or the other causing the issue. But you do have companies that rather than trying or rather than releasing updates would prefer to point fingers. Furthermore, it's easy to point a finger without adding specifics of what the error is. It very well can be Adobe code and if AMD were to update their driver to fix Adobes bug might break a slew of other things. It's all heresay but to sit on your hands going I'm not going to fix it, not working with anytime to fix it it's on AMD is just lazy and poor customer service.

What would you have Adobe do about a bug in the AMD driver?

Screw it, I'm done. Officially moving away from Adobe products by the end of next month.

The crash happens inside the AMD driver. It is not something Adobe can fix. If a wheel fell off a new car, do you blame the driver or the car manufacturor :-).

When are you going to fix the actual problem? Why does the user base have to solve these problems for Adobe?

Thank you Lance. I can confirm that this trick seems to work based on my testings with AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.4.4. As you suggested, launch the "AMD Settings” utility software installed as part of the driver software updates, click on Gaming, then Global Settings, then click on "Wait for Vertical Refresh" and set it to "Always on". Lr seems to work fine without crashing the AMD GPU driver.

If you later toggle the "Wait for Vertical Refresh" settings back and set it to "Always off", Lr also does NOT crash.  The actual value of "Wait for Vertical Refresh” does not seems to matter, but the act of toggling the "Wait for Vertical Refresh” seems to change some driver factory default settings that would workaround the Lightroom crash.

If I reset the AMD settings to the factory default by clicking on the "Reset" button (top-right), then relaunch Lightroom. Lightroom would start to crash consistently again. Please give this workaround  a try if you are still experiencing the Lightroom crash with GPU on.

Lightroom has been crashing anytime I switch from library to develop and anytime I try to sort images in the develop module according to a rating. It has crashed at least 5 times in a matter of 10 minutes to the point I can't get any work done. Please someone tell me how to fix this...
Here is my system info 

Lightroom version: 6.10.1 [ 1117303 ]
License: Perpetual
Operating system: Windows 10
Version: 10.0
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Logical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 3.3 GHz
Built-in memory: 11188.8 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 11188.8 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1081.8 MB (9.6%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 1358.7 MB
GDI objects count: 581
USER objects count: 2468
Process handles count: 5316
Memory cache size: 630.8MB / 2541.2MB (24.8%)
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 4
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX
Camera Raw virtual memory: 448MB / 5594MB (8%)
System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Displays: 1) 1920x1200
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: Yes, External touch: No, External pen: Yes, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info: 
AMD Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics

Check OpenGL support: Passed
Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Version: 3.3.13474 Core Profile Context 22.19.162.4
Renderer: AMD Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics
LanguageVersion: 4.50


Application folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom
Library Path: C:\Users\Ashley\Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
Settings Folder: C:\Users\Ashley\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

Installed Plugins: 
1) Canon Tether Plugin
2) Facebook
3) Flickr
4) HDR Efex Pro 2
5) Leica Tether Plugin
6) Nikon Tether Plugin

Config.lua flags: None

Adapter #1: Vendor : 1002
Device : 1313
Subsystem : 2b17103c
Revision : 0
Video Memory : 992
Adapter #2: Vendor : 1414
Device : 8c
Subsystem : 0
Revision : 0
Video Memory : 0
AudioDeviceIOBlockSize: 1024
AudioDeviceName: Speakers / Headphones (IDT High Definition Audio CODEC)
AudioDeviceNumberOfChannels: 2
AudioDeviceSampleRate: 48000
Build: Uninitialized
Direct2DEnabled: false
GL_ACCUM_ALPHA_BITS: 0
GL_ACCUM_BLUE_BITS: 0
GL_ACCUM_GREEN_BITS: 0
GL_ACCUM_RED_BITS: 0
GL_ALPHA_BITS: 8
GL_BLUE_BITS: 8
GL_DEPTH_BITS: 24
GL_GREEN_BITS: 8
GL_MAX_3D_TEXTURE_SIZE: 2048
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE: 16384
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS: 8
GL_MAX_VIEWPORT_DIMS: 16384,16384
GL_RED_BITS: 8
GL_RENDERER: AMD Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics
GL_SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION: 4.50
GL_STENCIL_BITS: 8
GL_VENDOR: ATI Technologies Inc.
GL_VERSION: 4.5.13474 Compatibility Profile Context 22.19.162.4
GPUDeviceEnabled: false
OGLEnabled: true
GL_EXTENSIONS: GL_AMDX_debug_output GL_AMD_blend_minmax_factor 

I removed the extensions to shorten the post.