AMD has released Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1, an optional driver that fixes "excessive writes to the system drive" at idle on Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards and above. Owners have to download the installer themselves.
The bug traced back to a misfiring utility in AMD's driver suite. Some owners reported their SSD health dropping by up to 1% per month, according to user reports. The fix is listed at the top of AMD's release notes.
The scope is the open question. AMD's wording points to RX 7000-series and newer, yet some user reports mention RX 6000-series cards. Nothing in the notes says whether a fix for those models is coming.
SSDs wear out in proportion to how much data gets written to them, which is why this bug stung. A graphics driver is not supposed to be a storage workload, and writes made while the PC sits idle buy the owner nothing. At the worst reported rate, simple arithmetic puts a drive at zero health in under a decade, on top of whatever normal use adds. That is slow, not catastrophic, but it is damage with no upside, and replacement drives are not cheap.
The "optional" label is the odd part. It is how AMD often ships fixes between full driver releases, but the known-issues list suggests this build is not fully polished. AMD lists crashes and driver timeouts in Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, War Thunder, and Cyberpunk 2077 with FSR enabled. That list is no longer than the one for the previous release, apart from one addition: visual corruption on character hair in Phantom Blade Zero on RX 9000-series cards.
For most affected owners, the trade is easy. A glitchy hairstyle in one game costs less than steady wear on the drive that holds the operating system. The harder case is the RX 6000 owner, who may have the same symptoms and no confirmed patch.