AMD Driver Symbol Server

When opening a 64-bit crash dump you will find that you will not necessarily get a sensible call stack. This is because 64-bit crash dumps need to have all the binaries available to them in order to resolve the callstack properly.

Typically crash dumps don’t come from your machine but someone else’s, be it from your Quality Assurance lab or one generated by a customer out in the wild. This means you might not have the correct versions of all the binaries to hand that were referenced in the dump. Thankfully, the symbol server in Visual Studio comes to our rescue! This allows the call stack resolver to search for the binaries at the locations supplied to the symbol server and it will find the correct version for you as long as it is hosted at one of the listed addresses. 

By default, the symbol server is only aware of the Microsoft® symbols but you can now also point it to the AMD driver binaries. This includes the DirectX® 11, DirectX® 12, OpenGL™, Vulkan™, Mantle, LiquidVR™ and Crossfire™ driver binaries. We host symbols for all of the drivers we publish, and we update it when new drivers are released.

Please note that we currently just host the binaries (in our case these are a set of DLLs), not the PDBs which is what you would need to resolve function names. There are currently no plans to release the PDBs.

So to add support for the AMD driver binary symbols, all you need to do is add “https://download.amd.com/dir/bin” to your symbol server search path, and then you are good to go.

Enjoy!

Updates

  • Updated 23rd May 2018 to include the new paths.
  • Updated 8th January 2018 to include the new paths.
  • Updated 7th February 2017 to show the https path.
Gareth Thomas

Gareth Thomas

Gareth Thomas is a Developer Technology Engineer at AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Enjoy this blog post? If you found it useful, why not share it with other game developers?

You may also like...

Getting started: our software

New or fairly new to AMD’s tools, libraries, and effects? This is the best place to get started on GPUOpen!

Getting started: development and performance

Looking for tips on getting started with developing and/or optimizing your game, whether on AMD hardware or generally? We’ve got you covered!

If slide decks are what you’re after, you’ll find 100+ of our finest presentations here. Plus there’s a handy list of our product manuals!

Developer guides

Browse our developer guides, and find valuable advice on developing with AMD hardware, ray tracing, Vulkan, DirectX, UE4, and lots more.

Words not enough? How about pictures? How about moving pictures? We have some amazing videos to share with you!

The home of great performance and optimization advice for AMD RDNA™ 2 GPUs, AMD Ryzen™ CPUs, and so much more.

Product Blogs

Our handy product blogs will help you make good use of our tools, SDKs, and effects, as well as sharing the latest features with new releases.

Publications

Discover our published publications.