Mark Walton
After a few years of cryptocurrency- and pandemic-fueled shortages, 2023 has been a surprisingly wise time to purchase a brand new graphics card. New midrange GPUs like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 have not been big upgrades over their predecessors, however they’re at the least dependable performers you could constantly purchase at or beneath their launch costs.
For those who’ve been hanging on to an previous AMD Radeon GPU, although, there’s some dangerous information: In keeping with AnandTech, AMD is starting to tug again on driver assist for a few of its late-2010s-era GPUs, most notably its Polaris and Vega GPU architectures. Assist for these GPUs has already been faraway from the corporate’s Linux drivers, and Home windows drivers for the GPUs shall be restricted largely to “vital updates.”
“The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, steady and performant and don’t profit as a lot from common software program tuning,” reads AMD’s official assertion. “Going ahead, AMD is offering vital updates for Polaris- and Vega-based merchandise by way of a separate driver package deal, together with vital safety and performance updates as obtainable. The dedicated assist is bigger than for merchandise AMD categorizes as legacy, and players can nonetheless take pleasure in their favourite video games on Polaris and Vega-based merchandise.”
The Polaris structure powered a number of the hottest graphics playing cards AMD has launched within the final decade or so, together with GPUs just like the RX 480 and RX 580, which have been well liked by reviewers on the time due to their low costs and stable efficiency relative to previous-generation GPUs. The RX 580 was launched in 2017, and it stays the most-used devoted AMD graphics card within the Steam {Hardware} Survey as of 2023.
The Vega structure was utilized in devoted GPUs, too, but it surely turned way more prevalent because the GPU structure that AMD used for its Ryzen lineup’s built-in GPUs, beginning with the Ryzen 2000G collection in 2018. Although newer Ryzen processors use GPUs primarily based on the still-supported RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 architectures, many nonetheless use Vega, together with its most up-to-date desktop APUs (the Ryzen 5000G collection) and a few of its current-generation Ryzen 7000 laptop computer processors.
That leaves AMD within the awkward place of providing restricted ongoing driver assist for some merchandise it’s at present promoting.
On the one hand, AMD is correct that these older GPUs typically stand to profit much less from new drivers, as most optimizations have already been made, and the {hardware} is unlikely to assist new options like FSR 3. Eradicating assist for older playing cards may assist maintain the obtain dimension of the motive force package deal a bit extra manageable for individuals who have newer GPUs.
However to the extent that AMD nonetheless supplies fixes and optimizations for brand spanking new video games with new drivers, house owners of older playing cards (and, once more, many fashionable built-in GPUs) will start to overlook out on a few of these fixes.
