AMD is weaning the market off its older gaming graphics card series that predate the Radeon RX 5000 series. The company is reportedly putting older GPUs based on the "Vega" and "Polaris" graphics architectures on a slower driver update track, which means driver updates to these GPUs will be less frequent. The company's RX 5000, RX 6000, and RX 7000 series, on the other hand, will continue on with the current driver update track that includes one or more driver releases each month, including releases to fix glaring game bugs, or day-zero performance updates.
AMD over the past couple of months began segregating RDNA (RX 5000 series and later) and pre-RDNA (older than RX 5000 series) GPUs through their driver releases. The latest drivers come in an RDNA-only package (denoted by "rdna" in the installer's file name), which is around 600 MB in size; and a larger 1.1 GB package that supports both RDNA and pre-RDNA GPUs. The company now announced that the pre-RDNA GPUs will switch to a slower driver update track as is characteristic with older-generation GPUs that AMD wants to discontinue support for.
In a statement to AnandTech, AMD says:
The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don't benefit as much from regular software tuning. Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available. The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products.
So what are these pre-RDNA GPUs? These would span the Radeon RX 400 and RX 500 series "Polaris," the RX Vega series, and the Radeon VII. The Radeon RX 5000 series is now over 4 years old in the market, which makes the RX Vega series 6 years into the market, the RX 500 series 7 years, and the RX 400 series 8 years old.
127 Comments on AMD Puts Radeon Vega and Polaris GPUs on a Slower Driver Update Track
Now you say your card may have got too hot, and the cooling wasnt optimal.
"Someone" might think the drivers arent responsible for that.
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They only get security patches. Nvidia phases old gens out just the same. Its just that AMD is a bit messy in its release cadence. So you get parts that are still selling that are past their 'dedicated' driver support period.
Its not much unlike Microsoft's OS support, it transitions into a new phase as new stuff comes out.
If there are really optimizations that are tangible or driver has some bug fixes for specific game you can be sure that they will be in the release notes (vide Forza Motorsport driver from AMD that finally fixed my and other people issue with game crashing on rewards screen). If it's just a note that "provides the best expiernce for x game" then it's probably nothing. Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody made comparisons with before and after with every driver release.
For the record, If Nvidia was selling the GT730 as a RTX 4010 iGPU in chipsets or CPUs, and did this, I would ABSOLUTELY disagree with ending support, because these are STILL CURRENT PRODUCTS. Nvidia hasnt MADE GT730s in years, the current sales are leftover inventory. But you know these are not the same situation. They EOLd that card two years ago
nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3473/~/eol-windows-driver-support-for-legacy-products Slower cadence is the final step before being EOLd for AMD. They've done this before. And most of us are not OK with drivers being slowed down for current hardware from a company with a higher market cap then INTEL. They use that Perception to justify price hikes, so that argument can take a hike. They are acting like a premium brand, they need to provide support like one. Remember, over $60b in revenue and a market cap higher then intel. So they are providing good support for legacy hardware, still providing compatibility updates. As they should. Nobody expects a revolution on 6 year old hardware, so I'm not sure what your point is. And this is where you are wrong. Security only patches applies to KEPLER, not MAXWELL. Maxwell is still on the game ready driver. Given AMD's history of straight up abandoning 6 year old cards, not just for feature updates but also security updates, them being "messy" is utterly inexcusable. $60b in revenue and they cant figure out how to maintain security updates in a timely matter for their most popular card. SMH.
*Note: Our hardware-transcoding system has technical support for many dedicated AMD graphics cards, but we haven’t done official, full testing on those. Support for AMD GPUs is provided “as is” and your mileage may vary. It is recommended that you use Intel Quick Sync Video or a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. Who is most of us? Most APU users don't even care about drivers, Windows will install them for them. If they will get any issues then they might install latest ones from AMD website and that's it. Yes, first you get frequent driver updates, then you go for slower releases and then your product is EOL. What exactly is strange or wrong about this? Now they are on slower cadence, who knows when they will be EOL. They will be sooner or later because time passes. What is a "Game Ready" driver? Do you need a latest driver to run the game? If so which ones? The will be performance differences for Vega and Polaris? If yes how much?
GPGPU applications often are limited by the applications implementation than GPU's driver. Some cases even follow the same story as the graphics API. See Blender ditching OpenCL for HIP. Must be nice, not going all "this one will finally make wayland work!" every month...
Yes for around $60 USD... This card is garbage in normal countries it's price is $0.
Ps. Also this which is from 2010 too. WoW.
Slower driver cadence is not ending support or even making them EOL. Sure, in a few years they'll probably be EOL.
Let's also not pretend that AMD has the same resources as Nvidia for driver support. Not sure where you came up with that random $60b in revenue. Neither AMD or Nvidia are that high, even if you combined the two:
AMD's yearly revenue is around $21b, split between 2 major development programs, CPU & GPU.
Nvidia yearly revenue is around $32b, almost entirely focused on GPU's.
Nvidia's yearly revenue is approximately 50% higher than AMD, and their profits are often 100% or more than AMD. A company with 2x or higher the resources able to support older cards should not be surprising.
I agree Nvidia's support is doing better on legacy parts, granted. Its in the order less than 4 FPS most of the time. But its not just FPS averages, game ready sometimes straight up improves frametimes / consistency. That's also what I expect out of optimization. Them taking away the clogging in the render pipeline. Its even better though when games just work out of the box. And frankly, most games do, curiously, its mostly triple A content that needs a lot of TLC. A lot of that is related to a money aspect. Smaller devs will just make damn sure they work within the boundaries of what the GPU can just do, because they're less likely to get Nvidia support coming over.
It's fine when the support goes lower for the old products, or even ceases if the drivers work fine. It's even ok if company delays the driver release, but to have it working flawlessly, and includes the fixes, compatibility with last games and features, as much as the architecture allows so.
As an example the HD series legacy driver for windows, which worked amazingly good after the entire architecture went EoL. Sadly it took for them too long, as it should've been done while the cards were new. Nonetheless, the driver is capable of today use. If this is the case, there's no problem, at all.
Why this is concern. Because AMD lacks consistency, in both HW and SW. They should make the image of reliable supplier. Not only for enterprise, but also for all people, who already bought, or is going to buy. For all platforms. It's great, that Mesa/Linux drivers are good. But they weren't with Zen/Zen+ APUs. And it shouldn't be a matter of switching an OS, in order to use the HW.
Also, such notions of "slowing down" the driver update track, have a negative confidence effect, not only on "old" and existing Vega APU's, but this also comes to the current and future RDNA 2-3.5 and others. This can lead to huge part of customers will move away, because they, or their acquaintances to have some issues with an APU or dGPU, and will avoid buying AMD products, due to the fear of being abandoned. Even if there's no serious issues, it still has an impact in long term. What a bunch of crap. Vega APU is great for HTPC, educational, office work, or even normal gaming. And no matter how many devices being sold. AMD made a decision to produce and sell the entire series these to the market. What's point to do this, if they were not up to support this HW. So if there are problems with SW and drivers, they should be fixed. Doesn't matter how big or small the amount of devices being sold!
This is like selling the new car, with "partial" support, and without steering wheel. And people who bought APU's did it with intention to use iGPU, which isn't a "free" addition. Otherwise they'd buy regular CPU.
If something is sold as new, it should have support out of the box. I did mistake, by forgetting to add the revenue number, and not clarifying that $60B is in total asset (which is irrelevant in this case). My bad.
But this doesn't change the fact, that nVidia once was not a trillion bucks revenue company, and yet they maintained Windows drivers more or less in good condition. And AMD on the other hand got no change in this area. And if they want to brake that trail of "bad drivers" meme, since they have much more money, compared to their "dire times", they no longer are in, they shouldn't push such messages.
BTW, this underdog meme should die as well.
Best regards to everyone!
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If it was left over inventory then the cards would have sold out a long time ago.
Both products are currently being sold, per your link the Fermi cards technically ended even receiving security updates in January of 2019, so it is almost been five years. You want me to believe they have five years' worth of excess inventory?
Once again, AMD isn't ending driver support for these Vega GPU, only slowing down the cadence of releases. And? We don't know how long the slower cadence will last, it might last another year, it might be two years, it might be five years. What support do you need on a 15 watt APU that is going to be primarily used for hardware accelerated video decoding and external monitor video output?
I'll save myself the time and assume the rest of your post is similarly mistaken.