Abstract:
Recently, some AMD users have discovered that the background process of the graphics card driver continues to write data to the system disk even when the computer is idle. Some users have observed the AMD graphics driver background process writing data at a rate of 5MB per second, while others have observed hundreds of KB to over 1MB of data being written per second.
Doing this in the long run may consume SSD life:
AMD RX 9070 XT users report observing write rates of around 5MB per second, which is sustained; AMD RX 7900 XTX users report write rates of 0.7MB per second. However, this may have nothing to do with the graphics card model, but is mainly caused by the graphics card driver.
The amount of data written continuously depends on the write rate and computer runtime, and at a write rate of 5MB per second: a 24-hour write request is approximately 432GB, and a 30-day run is approximately 13TB. Of course, the PC cannot be turned on 24 hours a day and be idle all the time, so 13TB of data will not be written under normal circumstances.
In addition, a user installed a solid-state drive data monitoring tool. It was not until the monitoring tool issued an alarm that the health level continued to decline that the user noticed the continuous writing of the background process. It's unclear when this issue began, but the AMD team is investigating.
AMD will release a fix:
Based on current feedback, the problem points to the AMD External Events Utility service, which comes with the atieclxx.exe background process. On some affected computers, this process will continue to generate write activities in the background when there are no obvious disk tasks.
After users posted feedback on the AMD forum, they have received answers from staff. AMD staff said that the investigation direction involves the interaction between AMD External Events Utility and Microsoft PCIe filter driver. The relevant fixes are already being tested, and AMD will merge the fixes into the driver in the future.
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