AMD's Adrenalin 26.11.1 optional driver is now available with the promised fix for the Radeon bug that kept system drives writing in the background. According to the release notes, the update addresses excessive writes to the system drive while the PC is idle on Radeon RX 7000 series cards and newer. It also fixes a related case where excessive writes could show up while moving or resizing application windows.

AMD confirmed the problem earlier this week, tracing it to the External Events Client Module (atieclxx.exe) in the 26.10.1 and 26.10.2 drivers. User reports put the write rate anywhere from 0.3 MB/s to 5 MB/s, which works out to roughly 26 GB to 432 GB a day on a machine that's doing nothing. Until now, affected users had to disable the External Events Utility, turn off Resizable BAR, or use a community-made open-source tool that blocks the writes. The release notes only mention RX 7000 and newer for the idle fix, so it isn't clear whether older Radeon cards were affected at all.The driver does come with a fairly long list of known issues, including crashes or driver timeouts in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, War Thunder, and Cyberpunk 2077, plus visual corruption in Phantom Blade Zero and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered on RX 9000 cards. AMD also notes that Smart Access Memory may get disabled after installation on Windows 10, so anyone who switched off Resizable BAR as a workaround should make sure it's back on after updating.