I'll explain the final time, and won't bother anyone again.
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.
Vega APUs are supported but won't get gaming software optimizations because Vega APU gaming is done by how many people? And would a 20% performance improvement in a new game like Alan Wake II from 16 to 19fps at 720p Lowest actually mean anything? Of course not.
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.
Your understanding of AMD 'still selling' old GPU's is flawed. Do you really think AMD is still producing and selling 580's? The 580's left on the retailer stores are leftovers from the GPU mining boom and are being sold by the retailers. AMD already
sold them
to the retailers, years ago.
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 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.
As for nVidia, thy are still seems looking for CPU market, even if it's ARM.
BTW, this underdog meme should die as well.
Best regards to everyone!
