ASUS TUF A16 (2023) Black screen on login with AMD SmartAccess Graphics

[Alastor_8472]

Hi, I own the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 Advantage Edition with an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS and Radeon RX 7600S (using the latest AMD drivers).

Problem

When cold booting I see the bios, Windows starting up. And more often than not, the login screen will turn black while the rest of the machine is working fine (I can even login blindly). The same can happen when putting the machine to sleep by closing the lid. Opening the lid will show the login screen for 2 seconds before it turns black. Closing, opening will show the same thing until it randomly decides to not turn black and operate normally.

While playing games, and switching between the iGPU to dGPU, or back when exiting, everything works fine.

Workarounds

A working solution is to disable AMD SmartAccess Graphics and fully rely on the dGPU entirely (Armoury Crate: Ultimate).

When switching AMD SmartAccess Graphics off, and defaulting to Microsoft Hybrid Graphics mode (Armoury Crate: Standard GPU mode) it seemed to happen less (or not at all), but I haven’t tested this for long though.

Driver or bios issue?

I’ve filed a bug report with AMD’s bug reporting tool, and hope since it seems to be a general driver issue (and not brand related, as Alienware (M17 R5 AMD Advantage 6850M XT Screen goes black. : r/Alienware (reddit.com)) and Lenovo (Legion 7 Gen 7 AMD Advantage Black Screen Issues : r/LenovoLegion (reddit.com)) show similar issues) that a fix will be forthcoming sooner than later.

I hope AMD and ASUS acknowledge the existence of this issue, it seems AMD Advantage laptops with AMD SmartAccess Graphics are still quite uncommon.

[ShadowEyes]

No need to leave it to a service center. They wont be able to do anything about it.

[gaurmanan]

I was going through multiple retailers selling the system. They system is rated 4+ stars.

Is their any possibility that we have got some faulty hardware and other systems are good?

Because there must more complaints, I believe.

The problem is persisting since long time. There had been 5 driver releases since the device is launched.

[SSGKano]

It would seem to be an AMD software issue. I turned off one of the advanced settings under the graphics tab in the AMD software. This goes for both GPUs listed under the graphics tab.

To my surprise there weren’t many settings to go through under each GPU as mine were mostly disabled by default.

The issue stopped. I left the smart access on. 

Next step is to let AMD know what setting is causing the issue.

[averagehikki]

The ‘surface format optimization’ one? That’s the only advanced setting enabled for both GPUs. Also, seeing as this was posted was a week ago, has the issue reoccured?

[SSGKano]

I haven't had the issue reoccur since disabling those settings. 

[Alastor_8472]

I haven't tried disabling any (advanced) settings yet, but for the past two weeks or so I've enabled AMD Smart Graphics (using the HYPR-RX profile) when 23.11.1 was released by AMD. In addition made sure running the latest MyASUS (and drivers) as well as the latest Armoury Crate (and components), and Windows 11 in general.

So far the results seem to show a more stable behavior, but I have to test more (only played a bit of Half-Life and Halo: MCC atm).