Hi,

I'm looking for help as to why NI VSTs (Massive, FM8, Absynth, Kontakt but not Massive X) are crashing in all DAWs as soon as you try to load the instrument?

The VSTs were previously working perfectly with my very old Nvidia graphics card, but do not work with my newly installed AMD Radeon card (latest Adrenalin driver, Windows 10 21H2). At first I had no idea as to why the VSTs were crashing, but I discovered they were working perfectly in Unify (where no graphics scaling was applied). Notably, standalone does work with graphics scaling enabled. Old or new versions of the VSTs makes no difference.

I need to scale the GUIs as otherwise they are tiny on my high-DPI screen.

 

Further testing reveals that in Ableton Live if the VST added without graphics scaling, then removing the VST and opening it again with graphics scaling applied it does work. But this workaround is risky (and doesn't work in Bitwig) - a lapse in concentration, adding the scaled version and it'll just crash.

 

I use scaling in Win10 with a Radeon 5700XT and get crashes with NI sometimes in Reaper, but certainly not constantly or on loading.

One nice feature of Reaper is the ability to run buggy plugins as separate/dedicated processes, so if they crash they don't affect the DAW or other plugins, and you can just reload them with 2 clicks and continue. I haven't kept up with other DAWs, but it's worth checking if they have something similar.

 

Bitwig has that too, but it just crashes the plugin container 100% of the time (when scaling is on)

 

Seems the problem is only with the DAWs. That's odd.
Perhaps a bug in the latest AMD Radeon drivers? What GPU exactly do you have?

Edited: random search:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1146zbv/amd_software_adrenalin_edition_2321_causing/

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2023

6700xt. This is the only problem I've experienced so far. I've only tried a few games (BG3), but no stuttering rather than the experience stated in the link.

It might be a bug, I'll try the 'pro' edition driver to see if anything is different.

 

I note a comment on the Renoise forum that might be a hint:

I'm not sure how that applies to windows, but it is probably similarly crude.

 

I tried the latest "Pro" driver version (which is quite a bit older, dating to Q4 22), lo and behold, no crashes!

 

So problem solved? Nice, enjoy