Just purchased a registered copy, assuming my MSI Radeon R7 250 met the requirements of DirectX 10.1 or above. Loading Humminbird recording, the viewer initiates loading of the .dat file and hangs at the end of "loading sidescan data". AMD reporting tool reports "amd driver timed out". Please help. Upgraded my graphics card solely to utilize this app. Please advise on any additional information needed. I'm not sure which error logs to provide. Thank you.

Sorry to hear that the SV is crashing after you bought a video card especially - that is frustrating. I wish you had contacted us prior, as I would have advised against getting an AMD card because some users have had similar compatibility issues in the past. We have actually bought 3x different AMD cards over the past year to try and reproduce and fix this issue, but have been unable to replicate the crash. It might be worth experimenting with AMD card settings and possibly even driver versions to see if this makes any difference - I know that users of other applications have had similar issues with AMD and have resolved this way. If you can't get it working, all we can do is offer to refund - please contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I can process that.

Firstly Matt, I want to thank you for your prompt reply to my concern. I also want to thank you for offering the refund If I'm unable to work through this issue. This is a really cool tool for the angler, and there aren't many out there like it. I'm going to continue troubleshooting and researching possible solutions over the next couple of days. With luck, someone may chime in with a solution they've come up with. Lastly, I would urge you or whoever has responsibility for documentation on this product to clearly note in the system requirements that there are are some preferred graphic cards for this product known to work, that some AMD cards are not recommended, that some AMD cards will not work (despite meeting the directx 10.1 and up specification). Some sort of graphic card compatibility list. Maybe this is a niche product and you'll take software sales as they come, but I would argue this dated, generalized, and incomplete product documentation costs Reefmaster sales revenue. I only prepped my system as I would guess anyone would do, based on the requirements outline on your website specifically on your product's hardware requirements. Having discovered that my prior, much older, graphics card did not meet the directx 10.1 specification, it was rational for me to conclude that was the sole requirement to be addressed with an upgrade. Again, thank you for your response. I hope you will receive my feedback with the same respect in which it was offered.

Steve Avery

Update. Looks like I have a solution. I'll share here in hopes to assist others, although of course I cannot say this will work in all cases. The AMD R7 series is a legacy card for sure. I sought a low cost solution to address the directx 10.1 or above requirement for sonar viewer. For this card, AMD has "legacy card" windows 10 x32/x64 drivers available as recent as 6/2021. This would be a logical choice, and while it installs great, it still crashed the sonar view when pulling up a recording. My solution, once completely removing that "current" driver, was to select the windows 8 x64 version ( the latest of which is dated 2014). I ran that install in windows 8 compatibility mode. The installation completed, but the driver didn't take - the microsoft display adapter remained. In Device Manager, I forced an update to the Radeon driver, selecting the driver folder within the install folder on the c: driver which was setup with the 2014 driver software installed. There was some oddness with screen scaling, but an adjustment was available within the driver software. All my sonar files seem to be pulling up just fine. I'm not so good with pasting pics and such, but I'll try if someone needs additional details. I suppose the main idea here is that you may have success by reverting to older, perhaps pre-windows 10 drivers, using compatibility mode, if you're having graphics card related issues with sonar viewer.

Thanks for the update Steve, I'm glad you got it going and that is really useful information. I have long suspected driver issues when users have had AMD compatibility issues although, having not been able to reproduce the same issue here, it has been hard to verify. I have on occasion spent time on other forums where people experience similar issues with other applications, and there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to which driver versions an application will "like". Although I think the vast majority of AMD users have no issues I will take on board your earlier comments. Certainly if I was recommending which card to buy specifically for the sonar viewer I would say a low-price NVidia, since we don't seem to get support requests for those.