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AMD Driver Update Breaks Apex Legends on Radeon RX 9070 XT

Investigators say malformed GPU commands in the new Adrenalin driver are producing fatal engine crashes that will likely need a driver or game patch to fix.

Overview

  • Respawn confirmed on Wednesday that players using the Radeon RX 9070 XT are experiencing crashes and said it is investigating the problem while advising a temporary rollback to AMD Adrenalin 26.7.1.
  • Players and reporters began linking the failures to AMD's Adrenalin Edition 26.8.1 after the update produced a fatal engine error that reads, "The application's device failed due to badly formed commands sent by the application."
  • A community-discovered workaround that disables bindless rendering through Steam launch options (+staticprop_color_use_bindless 0 +staticprop_depth_use_bindless 0 +r_drawworld_depth_bindless 0) has allowed some users to boot and play, though it may reduce performance.
  • User reports show 26.7.1 does not fix every case and that many affected players find the older 26.6.1 driver to be the most stable, which points to a driver regression rather than a hardware or game-only fault.
  • AMD's 26.8.1 release notes do not list Apex Legends as a known issue even though they document a separate Starfield crash on RX 9000-series GPUs, so players should weigh stability against features when choosing to rollback and watch for an official patch.