AMD RDNA 1 & 2 GPU Driver Support Moved To “Maintenance” Mode, Game Optimizations & New Tech For RDNA 3, 4 & Beyond

Wolzard

Wolzard

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RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security fixes and bug resolutions. To focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for its latest GPUs, AMD is placing the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode with the AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 release. Future driver updates with targeted game optimizations will be focused on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs.
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wccftech.com

AMD RDNA 1 & 2 GPU Driver Support Moved To "Maintenance" Mode, Game Optimizations & New Tech For RDNA 3, 4 & Beyond

AMD has ditched both RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards when it comes to game optimizations and new features, but will receive critical updates
wccftech.com wccftech.com
 
This is such a stupid move by AMD. Not only these these cards are still recent, but there are a ton of APUs released with RDNA2 on the market being sold today.
Nvidia ended official support for the GTX900 and GTX1000 series last month. But they still fully support the RTX2000 series, which released on the same year as RDNA1.
 
winjer said:
This is such a stupid move by AMD. Not only these these cards are still recent, but there are a ton of APUs released with RDNA2 on the market being sold today.
Nvidia ended official support for the GTX900 and GTX1000 series last month. But they still fully support the RTX2000 series, which released on the same year as RDNA1.
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And the RTX 2000 series received support for DLSS4, RTX Super Resolution, RTX HDR, Ray Reconstruction, etc.
 
Wow, that's a really bad move on them. Support is primordial for them to keep the very small base they have happy. It only adds doubt for buying AMD cards if support is so flimsy.
 
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The 6800 and 6950 are faster than a 9060XT ffs, the 6750XT isn't far off either... ditching support for these cards is utterly retarded.

Guess every RDNA2 owner will upgrade to an Nvidia card in the future.
 
You Are Dumb Mario Lopez GIF
 
do drivers really need to be updated that much? This probably sounds silly but does it matter as much as people say? I know that updating does help in some things but often causes issues. I still consider myself new to pc gaming (been around a year) but my experience with driver updates has been to wait as long as possible rather than go right away.
 
Crayon said:
Yeah. Though it seems "maintenance" mode keeps it running fine? I'm not sure what those with rdna2 are missing here. Was it the possibility of new features coming?
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Support for newer games, optimization updates, etc…

Basically it's likely only security updates will happen going forward.

Also, Xbox ROG Ally just released this month…. That kind of sucks.
 
StereoVsn said:
Also, Xbox ROG Ally just released this month…. That kind of sucks.
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I'm not disagreeing with you at all here. With that said, RDNA2 is only being used on the lower end versions of most of these devices. I figure the kind of person that's buying the low end version probably isn't getting it for cutting edge gaming, and probably won't care that much for whatever new features AMD could pursue.

Honestly we just need to wipe the slate clean with UDNA and unified, scalable feature sets. Entire product categories being locked out of certain features sucks. FSR4 on handhelds is such a fucking game changer it's not even funny. Thank goodness you can jerry rig it into most games. I would really really like to see AMD officially release it for older cards. Its obviously possible, even with a bit of a performance hit.

It does feel in poor taste to release a product and then the chip manufacturer immediately pulls support for it. This couldn't have been a last minute decision. They would have been thinking of this for a while now and just... didn't say anything. It's a mess all the way around.
 
good idea AMD... it's not like there are enough reasons not to buy your cards already...

Nvidia still supports 10 year old cards btw.
 
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StereoVsn said:
Support for newer games, optimization updates, etc…

Basically it's likely only security updates will happen going forward.

Also, Xbox ROG Ally just released this month…. That kind of sucks.
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Yah they would have known. Idk if this is really going to affect stuff all that much.
 
Well, that's unfortunate. Especially since they kept selling RDNA 2 cards for a long while (IIRC 7000 series cards were rather scarce for a relatively long period of time), and RDNA 2 iGPUs are present in a lot of current SoCs.

I get that RDNA 1 was an undercooked panic release, after the failure of Vega (and the ensuing corporate drama), and RDNA 2 itself is a hack job with hastily-slapped on (underperforming) RT cores. I get that RDNA 3 has RT/machine learning functions that actually work most of the time, instead of occasionally (RDNA 2). I get that having a unified set of drivers which (broadly-speaking) apply to all architectures, instead of having to do (time-/money-consuming) per-arch optimizations is considerably more efficient.

But it's still bad optics, and AMD will definitely catch flak over this decision. I hope they'll backpedal (at least partially, for RDNA 2), like they eventually did with Ryzen 5000 support on x370 chipsets.
 
Big error by amd. They should have only announced this for RDNA 1. For 2, they should have kept it on the main drive branch but slowly reduced the amount of game optimizations it received. Only focusing on big games really.

Now they just created a big pr nightmare for themselves.
 
Nikodemos said:
Well, that's unfortunate. Especially since they kept selling RDNA 2 cards for a long while (IIRC 7000 series cards were rather scarce for a relatively long period of time), and RDNA 2 iGPUs are present in a lot of current SoCs.

I get that RDNA 1 was an undercooked panic release, after the failure of Vega (and the ensuing corporate drama), and RDNA 2 itself is a hack job with hastily-slapped on (underperforming) RT cores. I get that RDNA 3 has RT/machine learning functions that actually work most of the time, instead of occasionally (RDNA 2). I get that having a unified set of drivers which (broadly-speaking) apply to all architectures, instead of having to do (time-/money-consuming) per-arch optimizations is considerably more efficient.

But it's still bad optics, and AMD will definitely catch flak over this decision. I hope they'll backpedal (at least partially, for RDNA 2), like they eventually did with Ryzen 5000 support on x370 chipsets.
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RDNA 3's RT has BVH hardware culling, which is missing on RDNA 2's RT cores i.e. just the box and triangle test.

Independent hardware BVH transverse is missing on all RDNA 2/3/3.5/4 GPUs, but RDNA 3.5 and 4.0 have a double-texture I/O bandwidth for BVH workloads.

NVIDIA's ADA has hardware support for DXR Tier 1.2's Shader Execution Reordering (SER) and Opacity Micro-maps (OMM).

For CyberPunk's path tracing, it's already using OMM and SER via NVAPI on ADA GPUs. Earlier RTX GPUs have OMM. NVIDIA is already using DXR Tier 1.2-like future performance improvements.

AMD support for SER is available in this preview driver for RDNA 3 (7000 series) and RDNA 4 (9000 series) GPUs.
 
That's ridiculous because the consoles are based on Radeon 1 & 2, so along with the consoles these cards form the baseline for this generation. Therefore, they should at least be supported with game-tailored drivers until the PS6 is launched.
 
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Zuzu said:
That's ridiculous because the consoles are based on Radeon 1 & 2, so along with the consoles these cards form the baseline for this generation. Therefore, they should at least be supported with game-tailored drivers until the PS6 is launched.
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PS5 RDNA has RDNA 2's RT and RDNA 2's higher clock speed, but missing the rest of RDNA 2's DX12U.


From https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-25.1-RADV-AMD-BC-250

"Adds experimental support for AMD BC-250 mining board.​
​
Kernel recognizes its GPU as Cyan Skillfish.​
​
It seems to be basically RDNA1/GFX10 but with added support for image_bvh_intersect_ray ray tracing instructions. LLVM seems to be calling this variant gfx1013.​
​
After this set of patches applied, this chip is properly detected and is usable on modern kernels. Tested on kernel 6.12.9.​
Many games are reported to work. Quake2 RTX using the ray tracing pipeline works (not very fast, but 3-4x faster than RADV_PERFTEST=emulate_rt). Custom compute load that uses ray query a lot also works reliably."​

AMD's BC-250 recycles partly failed PS5 APUs i.e. 6 CPU cores and 24 CU GPU operational.
 
Wolzard said:
And the RTX 2000 series received support for DLSS4, RTX Super Resolution, RTX HDR, Ray Reconstruction, etc.
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For a while, it seemed like AMD was going to release FSR4 Int8 for RNDA2. Though not as good as DLSS4 and RR, it was a step in the right direction.
But now it seems this is no longer going to be the case.
This decision sends a bad message to all potential customers, that AMD will abandon them much sooner than nvidia. And people will consider this when buying their next GPU.
 
For me it was either get a 6700XT or a 3060Ti - I picked the former due to the VRAM.

Even with this decision - surely having +VRAM with no game-driver optimizations is better than -VRAM and optimizations?
 
AMD Fine wine™ aged like milk here

I recommended RDNA 2 and 3 to colleagues for their first PC build as it was like way cheaper than Nvidia in Canada for a while, now I look like a fucking fool having recommended it.
 
I just read that the support for 1000 pascal series ended but actually that nvidia was as of October still supporting GTX 700, 800, 900 series? That's insane

And they say while driver updates stop for games, quarterly security updates are promised up to 2028
 
dotomomo said:
For me it was either get a 6700XT or a 3060Ti - I picked the former due to the VRAM.

Even with this decision - surely having +VRAM with no game-driver optimizations is better than -VRAM and optimizations?
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No, VRAM is preferable in this case. 8 to 12 is a huge difference, even though the 3060 Ti is faster.
 
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Trogdor1123 said:
do drivers really need to be updated that much? This probably sounds silly but does it matter as much as people say? I know that updating does help in some things but often causes issues. I still consider myself new to pc gaming (been around a year) but my experience with driver updates has been to wait as long as possible rather than go right away.
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As an owner of a 6900XT this impacts me - but by how much? I have never actually noticed any difference after installing a driver update that is supposed to help a specific game. Anyone got any examples, especially on the AMD side?
 
Woah, never would I have ever thought. That jumping from 6700xt to 9070xt in March would have saved me an headaches later on...

Guess when then time comes to upgrade from 9070xt to something newer I'm gonna look more towards Nvidia, their Linux drivers seem to improve also.

Speaking of Linux drivers, I'm curious if RDNA1 and 2 will be supported more on Linux than on Windows. Lmao.
 
Maintenance is not EOL. While this is unusually short by about 2 years, it doesn't mean your card is never getting updates or will stop working.
 
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Allandor said:
Whoa .. I can understand rdna1 but 2, too....
And that in days when games get fixed by drivers over and over again...
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But if AMD wants to compete with nvidia, they need to keep support for at least as much as them.
Nvidia is still supporting the RTX2000, that was released in the same period as RDNA1.
 
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