AMD recalls drivers for older but popular graphics cards and iGPUs – Ars Technica

After two years of cryptocurrency shortages and the pandemic, 2023 was a surprisingly reasonable time to buy a new graphics card. New mid-range GPUs like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 aren’t huge upgrades over their predecessors, but at least they’re reliable performers that you can consistently buy at or below their launch prices.

If you’re holding on to an old AMD Radeon GPU, there’s some bad news: According to AnandTech, AMD began rolling back driver support for some of its GPUs in late 2010, most notably the Polaris and Vega GPU architectures. These GPUs are already supported They have been removed from the company’s Linux driversWindows drivers for GPUs will mostly be limited to “critical updates.”

“AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable, high-performance graphics architectures that do not benefit much from normal software tuning,” AMD’s official statement read. “Moving forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as they become available. Committed support is greater than for products that AMD classifies as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy Their favorite games are on Polaris and Vega based products.”

The Polaris architecture powers some of the most popular graphics cards released by AMD in the past decade or so, including GPUs like the RX 480 and RX 580, which were admired by reviewers at the time for their low prices and relatively strong performance. to previous generation GPUs. Launched in 2017, the RX 580 remains AMD’s most widely used dedicated graphics card Scan Steam devices As of 2023.

The Vega architecture has been used in custom GPUs as well, but is becoming more widespread as the GPU architecture that AMD has used for integrated GPUs in its Ryzen lineup, starting with the Ryzen 2000G series in 2018. Although newer Ryzen processors use GPUs based on With supported RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 architectures, many are still using Vega, including the latest desktop APUs (Ryzen 5000G series) and some current generation Ryzen 7000 laptop processors.

This leaves AMD in the awkward position of providing limited, ongoing driver support for some of the products it currently sells.

On the one hand, AMD is right that these older GPUs will generally benefit less from the new drivers, as most of the improvements have already been made, and the hardware is less likely to support new features like FSR 3. Also, removing support for older cards could That would also help make the driver package download size a little more manageable for people with newer GPUs.

But to the extent that AMD is still providing fixes and improvements for new games with new drivers, owners of older cards (and again, many modern integrated GPUs) will start to miss out on some of these fixes.