The Microsoft Windows update team, before leaving for a long holiday on Thanksgiving, released an update for the Graphics driver for AMD graphics cards. Since some people use old AMD GPU devices, such as ATI Radeon HD 3000, like me, in one of my systems, this update has broken the Screen resolution and is causing other display problems.
The main issue is resolution. The customer who has a display that supports 1366*768 resolution isn’t being offered that, 1920*1080 isn’t being offered, and so on. This has rendered a large number of computers useless from a display aspect. In this article, I would like to discuss potential resolutions for this issue.
Actually, what happened is that AMD dropped support for Radeon Series Graphics cards before Windows 10 got released. They only provided drivers till Windows 8, not for later. Any updates, if, would be coming through Windows update only. So, Microsoft released an update for AMD-based systems, which is causing these problems. Thankfully, as Windows 10 and 8 share a similar driver model, Windows 8 drivers would also work. Here is what can be done to correct this:
Rollback to the previous version of the Driver
Rolling back, if available, is the best option to correct this. For this, have a look at the following steps:
- Go to Device Manager by typing in Devmgmt.msc in Run dialog box.
- Navigate to Display devices and right click ATI Radeon HD or Similar device you have. Choose Properties.
- On the Driver tab, hit rollback Driver to go back to the previous version.
The next step would be to block Driver updates from Windows updates. For this, the best option is to use the show hide tool:
How to temporarily prevent a driver update from reinstalling in Windows 10
You can also turn off the Windows update service, but make sure not to do that permanently.
Download the legacy driver from AMD’s website
- Uninstall everything of AMD using this tool:
AMD Clean Install Utility - Reboot.
- Make sure your device manager shows the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter as a display device.
- Download the legacy driver from here for Windows 8 system (Driver model is same for 8 and 10) according to your architecture(You might have to do a bit of exercise to locate the driver:
www.support.amd.com/en-us/download - Run the Setup and you should be good to go.
- Again, temporarily disable the Driver update or Windows update.
Check if Windows has a previous version of the driver
A user Ken, has posted this solution which can be handy. Here is what it says:
- Download DriverStore Explorer from
https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer/releases/tag/v0.8.4.2. - Unzip and run DriverStore Explorer (Rapr.exe). The application displays a list of drivers stored in the WindowsSystem32DriveStoreFileRepository folder.
- On PC, under Display Adapters, are listed 3 AMD display adapter drivers-You would have similar ones too:
- c0317758.inf version=22.19.128.0 date=7/25/2017
- c0317757.inf version=22.19.128.0 date=7/25/2017
- c7179335.inf version=8.970.100.9001 date=1/13/2015
- In DriverStore Explorer, click Restart As Admin, select checkbox beside c0317758.inf and c0317757.inf, then click Delete Package.
- Start Device Manager and uninstall existing ATI Radeon HD3200 display driver.
- In Device Manager, select Scan for hardware changes; the old AMD display driver from 1/13/2015 should be reinstalled, allowing you to properly set the resolution of your display again.
I hope these solutions help you. Please let us know if you have any other solutions
