After about two hours of playing a game in fullscreen mode, a small window suddenly appeared in the exact center of the screen and covered part of the game. It was roughly 14×10 cm, had a white, blue, and gray cloudy-looking background, and displayed "AMD Radeon" along with a gear icon in one of the top corners. It stayed visible for around five seconds without showing any obvious message or activity, then disappeared on its own. I use the normal AMD Adrenalin Edition software, but this looked different from its usual red interface. Malwarebytes and Windows Offline Scan found nothing, and I have not found any related files or logs. Reliability Monitor did show crashes involving Microsoft Desktop App Installer and mmc.exe around that day, although the timing did not exactly match. Could this have been an AMD driver or shader-cache process rather than malware?
3 Answers
A graphics-driver update, background Radeon service, or game-related shader compilation could briefly interrupt fullscreen mode. Since the game had already been installed for a couple of weeks, it would not necessarily be connected to the initial installation; shader caches and driver tasks can run later after an update or cleanup operation.
It may have been a brief AMD driver action, such as shader-cache maintenance or a cache rebuild triggered by the game. Driver components can occasionally display a temporary Radeon-branded interface even when the main Adrenalin window looks different. The fact that it identified itself as AMD Radeon and disappeared after a few seconds makes malware seem unlikely, especially with clean scans.
The crashes for Microsoft Desktop App Installer and mmc.exe do not prove they caused the popup, particularly if their timestamps do not line up. Reliability Monitor often records unrelated background failures. I would check the AMD Adrenalin event history and Windows Event Viewer around the exact time, then update or cleanly reinstall the graphics driver if the popup keeps recurring.
I checked the available logs but could not find anything corresponding to the five-second window. It has not happened again so far.
That seems possible, although I was hoping to find a screenshot or file that matched the window. I have not found anything left behind.