Weird problem with incredibly old AMD HD 6950

[Max Veteran]

I have an issue with my HD 6950. Yes, it is ancient. I run Windows 11/11400/16GB RAM and the AMD driver dates back to February 2016. 
Yes, I know I should really get another card. But I won't because it works fine for what I need aside from a silly problem and I'm stubborn.

I play CS:Source and GTA V. Everything works fine with these, can play for hours, no issues whatsoever.

Go onto YouTube, iPlayer, certain videos playing in VLC (not sure if all of them), the system will just shut off entirely after a minute or two, then restart. No blue screen, nothing in the error log. The crashing happens mostly under YouTube. I have tried turning off GPU acceleration in Chrome. I have tried different browsers.

If I disable my graphics driver, the system is fine and does not crash with any of the above.

This has only happened since I upgraded to Windows 11. All I can think of is there is some sort of driver incompatibility with Windows 11 and video decoding. I'm not expecting a magic answer here, but is there a way to verify or disable things relating to this so that I can isolate the issue further?

I am very happy to have my graphics driver disabled browsing YouTube etc. It is a mild inconvenience to enable the graphics driver every time I play a game. Is there a way to automatically enable the graphics driver upon opening a game? Even better if it disables itself after the game has closed.

As I say, I'm not expecting a magical answer but someone might know something that I don't!

[hellowalkman Reporter]

Maybe related to hardware acceleration

[Matmanamane]

Maybe this can help: https://www.digitalflem.com

[olavinto]

Just for the record, that is nowhere near "ancient". In fact it is still a very usable card for most tasks (except for heavy AAA gaming and speedy video editing, etc.). It even uses modern PCIe. Some 3dfx Voodoo card or even an ATI branded GPU (something that precedes the AMD merger) would qualify as "ancient". Just saying...

[spaceelf]

On 28/10/2023 at 03:15, olavinto said:

Just for the record, that is nowhere near "ancient". In fact it is still a very usable card for most tasks (except for heavy AAA gaming and speedy video editing, etc.). It even uses modern PCIe. Some 3dfx Voodoo card or even an ATI branded GPU (something that precedes the AMD merger) would qualify as "ancient". Just saying...

A 13 year old card isn't ancient?  Heh, if you say so.

On 26/10/2023 at 21:29, Max said:

Is there a way to automatically enable the graphics driver upon opening a game? Even better if it disables itself after the game has closed.

You probably won't find anything like that.  You could possibly write a powershell script to make the process easier.

[Max Veteran]

Apologies for digging up this old thread, but after nearly a year of this seriously annoying problem and much prodding and poking with a couple of graphics cards that were doing the same thing, I finally discovered the solution: Disable C states/C1E in the BIOS.

I do not understand why this would correspond with watching YouTube though. Any thoughts welcome!