Bad AMD Adrenalin drivers potentially crippling Ryzen 7 6800U APU in some AYANEO handheld consoles

AYANEO released the AYANEO 2 and the AYANEO Geek handheld Windows gaming consoles in September 2022. Both consoles pack the Ryzen 7 6800U APU, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage in the base models. The Ryzen 7 6800U APU combines an 8-core Zen 3+ CPU that can boost up to 4.7 GHz and an RDNA 2 Radeon 680M iGPU with 12 Compute Units (CU). It now appears that the latest AMD Adrenaline 23.2.1 GPU driver is hampering the Radeon 680M inside the Ryzen 7 6800U in the AYANEO 2 and AYANEO Geek consoles.

Per AYANEO, the Aderenalin 23.2.1 can limit the VRAM in the Radeon 680M iGPU to just 512 MB. Normally, the Radeon 680M has access to 3 GB or 6 GB of memory that is shared with the system. So, limiting the memory to only 512 MB can make modern games perform bad or possibly unplayable.

According to AYANEO, users will need to perform a BIOS flashback on the affected machines. To avoid installing bad drivers, AYANEO recommends unchecking the Factory Reset (Recommended) option inside the AMD Adrenalin software during driver installation.

Furthermore, if you don’t know whether the driver bug has plagued your console, the company has a detailed guide on identifying the problem and fixing it if it has already occurred.

Finally, the issue only seems to affect the AYANEO 2 and AYANEO Geek handhelds and not the AYANEO 2021, AIR, and NEXT consoles.

AMD has a bad reputation regarding the stability of its GPU drivers. So, although the latest Adrenalin 23.2.1 drivers are found to increase performance of the Radeon RX 6000 series desktop boards, it is advisable to read up on any potential issues and bugs before driver installation.

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