(Image credit: AMD)
Windows 11 has been causing a ruckus for graphics card owners over the past several weeks — particularly for Nvidia GPU owners, to the point where Nvidia was forced to release a hotfix GPU driver to fix gaming performance problems caused by the October update. Now that the December security update for Windows 11 is out, we have new evidence reported by OC3D that AMD GPUs were possibly also having issues cau…
(Image credit: AMD)
Windows 11 has been causing a ruckus for graphics card owners over the past several weeks — particularly for Nvidia GPU owners, to the point where Nvidia was forced to release a hotfix GPU driver to fix gaming performance problems caused by the October update. Now that the December security update for Windows 11 is out, we have new evidence reported by OC3D that AMD GPUs were possibly also having issues caused by Windows 11 cumulative updates. A number of user reports claim that the December security update for Windows 11 has fixed several AMD-related GPU crashes and other bugs.
Several AMD GPU owners claim the December KB5070311 update for Windows 11 fixed a few major issues affecting AMD GPU owners over the past year. This includes GPU driver crashing issues in games such as Battlefield 6, Arc Raiders, and BO7, as well as general AMD GPU hanging in Windows. There is no official documentation from Microsoft or AMD regarding these fixes, but there are enough user reports suggesting their issues were fixed following the installation of the December update that it seems legitimate.
The only piece of evidence that relates to what these AMD GPU owners are reporting is a patch note from KB5070311 stating that Windows 11 will no longer display an "unsupported graphics card detected" message when a supported GPU is being used. Interestingly, AMD’s patch notes for the latest version of Adrenalin (25.12.1) list several application and driver crashing issues on a number of games and GPUs, but only a couple of these crashing instances were fixed, and AMD did not claim Windows was the source of these issues.
This could be a case in which neither Microsoft nor AMD had any idea Windows was causing these AMD-related GPU problems, and, somehow, some of the changes in the latest security update accidentally fixed said problems. Regardless, this is a win-win situation for AMD GPU owners who have been struggling with these problems for months. Mass reports of GPU hanging and driver instability have been happening since the RX 9070 XT launch in March 2025, and seem to affect RX 7000 series GPUs somewhat as well (though RX 9000 series GPUs have been suffering the most).
This situation is very similar to the problems Nvidia was having with Microsoft’s updates. A month ago, Nvidia released a hotfix driver that regained around 50% performance in affected games on Nvidia GPUs — the performance issues were caused by a security-related change in one of the Windows 11 updates in October.
If you have a modern AMD graphics card, it’s worth installing the December Windows 11 security update to see if any graphics issues you are having go away. Of course, the update is non-optional, so your system will likely get it automatically over the next week if it hasn’t already. Just remember that there is no guarantee any issues you have will be fixed, and Microsoft and AMD have not officially confirmed any AMD-specific GPU fixes yet relating to Windows cumulative/security updates specifically.
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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.