Wednesday, November 8th 2023
AMD Puts Radeon Vega and Polaris GPUs on a Slower Driver Update Track
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:
Source:
AnandTech
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.
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
We should get you on a direct line to AMD, your insight is going to save their company from certain failure !
Thread title
"AMD Puts Radeon Vega and Polaris GPUs on a Slower Driver Update Track "
and somehow people read "AMD is stopping all driver support for Vega and Polaris GPU's!!!!! Panic Now !!!"Maybe we can organize a collective trip to an Opticians ?
Was thinking of updating over the Christmas holidays........maybe.........if I have time ;)
Linux + AMD =:peace:
Hell, being able to write to /proc to overclock your GPU is awesome.
There is pretty cool tricks that you could do without needing extra tools!
Rather than releasing pointless drivers for old cards, it's much better to bring features to them that are not locked to newest gen of cards. How can someone ignore the fact that Vega or Polaris user can still use FSR2 and 3, while with nvidia DLSS2 is locked to RTX cards, and DLSS3 to 40 series and praise that GTX980 gets new features with those drivers?
If I was a 980 owner or 1080 I would rather have DLSS version that can run on my card rather than "Game ready" drivers every month that do not do anything.
videocardz.com/newz/amd-fluid-motion-frames-can-be-used-for-videos-a-return-of-fluid-motion-video
www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-23-30-afmf-tech-preview
www.techpowerup.com/315602/amd-releases-preview-driver-for-fsr-3-fluid-motion-frames
gpuopen.com/fsr3-in-games-technical-details/
Fluid Motion is back and working on RX6000 and RX7000 (RDNA2 and 3) gpus
note: 5xxx was lacking the asic chip to do FM, also even before it worked only in OpenCL
The fellow who purchased a GTX 980 would be wasting 400 (500?)MB of their internet quota every couple of month on a software that has benefits exclusive to newer cards.
Furmark will stay running without issues....
Which is kind of hilarious after the whole grandstanding about Maxwell and Pascal having no async compute or whatever (which isn't even true), and contemporary GCN 2/3 hardware being a distant memory and long since unsupported and abandoned by AMD. Poor Volta.
Also if anyone is living on a metered residential internet plan, especially one with a quota so strict that 400 MB of data count as precious because their ISP's battered infrastructure and/or boundless greed gets in the way, they should be evaluating how to adopt Starlink as soon as possible IMHO
As far as hardware is concerned, GCN1, 2, and 3 did receive some d3d feature-enabling patch-love (for whatever that was worth). No different than Maxwell.
Also interesting about that 6900XT losing perfomance because it did not had a new driver for 3 months. You have any benchmarks comparing those? Would love to see them.