Introduction

I have been running Windows 11 on my laptop for over a month now and most issues I have had are negligible. My laptop is an ASUS TUF gaming laptop running an AMD Ryzen 5 3550H with Radeon Vega graphics. It also has an NVidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card in it as well that I use for some light gaming when I am with friends. Civilization 6 is a chill game to play while visiting with friends.

Last week I realized that I hadn't installed the AMD drivers for my Ryzen processor with the Vega integrated video. By default, that is the card that Windows uses for some reason. I went to AMD's website and downloaded the newest drivers for my Vega card and the AMD chipset. I installed the driver and everything looked good. After the installation, I had to reboot my laptop. The annoyances started when I logged back into Windows. The AMD Software popped up a window saying my driver was not compatible with the installed AMD Software.

Resolving the Issue

After digging around, I found that the drivers that were installed were version 27.20.1032.2 from August 11, 2020. I reinstalled the AMD drivers to find it installed version 30.0.15021.1001 from March 31, 2022. This time before rebooting, I ran the Windows Update manually. I sat there in dismay as I watched it install the old driver again.

The really irritating part about this is I have the setting in Windows 11 to not update my drivers due to I was having issues with Windows 11 doing this with another driver previously.

After looking through many forum posts from around the web, I ran across a post where someone on a Windows 7 machine years ago was having a similar issue with a driver. A Microsoft employee had recommended using "Roll Back Driver" in "Device Manager". I thought it was worth a shot, so I tried it.

In case you are not sure how to find this, you can either hit your Windows key (wait a second for it to catch up) and then type "Device Manager".

The other way is to right-click on your Start Menu icon and click on "Device Manager".

Once I was in Device Manager, I found my AMD video card. From here, I right clicked on the device and selected "Properties" from the menu. Next, I went to the "Driver" tab. I then clicked on "Roll Back Driver", After a couple of seconds, Device Manager was showing my installed driver as 30.0.15021.1001. I ran Windows Update again and rebooted my machine just to make sure Windows wasn't going to roll back the driver to their old default version of the driver. Once my machine had restarted, I opened up the Device Manager and verified the driver was still the new version I has installed.

One of the biggest concerns I had, as well as a few other people I talked to about this (I ranted to), is what would happen when I go to install a newer driver for my AMD card. Luckily, AMD released a new optional driver in the last couple days so. This opened up the opportunity for me to test.

After installing the update, my laptop's driver is now on version 30.0.15021.7000 from April 20, 2022. I manually ran Windows update again just to make sure it didn't do anything unexpected. After a reboot, I was happy to see the drivers were still on the newest version I installed.

Conclusion

Hopefully this will help someone else running into this same issue. I have not had this issue with NVidia cards, but I have encountered it a few times now on Windows 11 with AMD cards. I previously had this issue on my desktop PC before switching it back to Windows 10.

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