AMD Bids Farewell To GCN Architecture, Ends Driver Support For Radeon 7000, 200, 300

[badsykes]

https://wccftech.com/amd-bids-farewe...raphics-cards/

Please don't cry ...

[acroig]

Please, upgrade.

[Sasquach]

GG

I'd like to upgrade to RDNA but i want to be able to actually afford everyday items too.....

[bill dennison]

Please, upgrade.

Please make enough so we can upgrade

[acroig]

Please make enough so we can upgrade

[Sasquach]

Please, upgrade.

I'll start a gofundme page so you can contribute to my upgrade plight!

[Trunks0]

Article is wrong/flawed. RX400,RX500(Polaris) and Vega are still supported and those are all GCN based. So it's not farewell to GCN just yet.

[acroig]

I'll start a gofundme page so you can contribute to my upgrade plight!

I'll send my fiddy cen contribution right away.

[LordHawkwind]

Article is wrong/flawed. RX400,RX500(Polaris) and Vega are still supported and those are all GCN based. So it's not farewell to GCN just yet.

They're retiring GCN 1, 2 & 3. I think Vega and Polaris are GCN 4 & 5. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16775...s-win7-support

[Trunks0]

They're retiring GCN 1, 2 & 3. I think Vega and Polaris are GCN 4 & 5. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16775...s-win7-support

Yea but that feels kinda pointless given how heavily related they all are . But oh well.

[Crawdaddy79]

I am not proud of the fact that I'm bringing this up again, but when I used my 7970 over last Summer I had no expectation that current drivers would support it, and was happy that they did. But at the same time, I don't know that any improvements were made, save for cosmetic UI upgrades.

[Falck]

It's a weird decision, IMHO, to retire up to and including 300/Fiji series as they are GCN 3. GCN 4 brings nothing new instructionwise to the table. So in my mind they could still include GCN 3 in the driversupport program.

[Crawdaddy79]

They still have to spend time and money to test it all out with each driver release.

[Falck]

They still have to spend time and money to test it all out with each driver release.

Well, I think it was a weird time to retire the cards then, they did all testing up to 21.5.2 with the cards now retired.

I could understand it more if the line was fluid, followed with a new release. Like the 200 series got retired when RDNA was launched etc.

[badsykes]

Based on the dates of lauching Fury series in 2015 and their discontinuation date seems like polaris / Vega will be out of support around 2024.

[LordHawkwind]

Hopefully they're doing this because they're ramping up 6600/6500XT cards and maybe with Crypto prices dropping the cost of the cards might be OK.

Driver support ends at some time it's just the way of the world. As Crawdaddy79 said they might have been included in driver updates but they don't actually get any improvements.

I'll admit I loved my Sapphire Tri-X Fury card it was great and I still have it somewhere. HBM memory which didn't do much but it was the only card that had it. The world moves on. It had 4GB of Vram and now I have 24gb it's crazy really.

[Trunks0]

Oh I get that time wise it makes total sense. It just doesn't make sense from a architecture perspective. GCN 1,2 & 3 are almost identical to 4 & 5. So if AMD is going to still support 4 & 5 there is almost no reason to drop 1,2 & 3.

*late edit*... other than more cards are coming out and I gotta imagine the test bench/room is probably only so long/big

[Falck]

I have a hard time believing that they actually tested all the cards 21.5.2 driver supported.

21.5.2:


21.6.1:


I see that this can make testing more accurate when you don't have to support 9 years of GPU's. So I hope this will show results in form of more fixes, perf. improvements for etc. for the more current GPU's.

I understand they cannot support all GPU's indefinetly, but IMHO it was a weird time cutting the cord. Especially when there's a GPU shortage. According to steamsurvey there's still people using HD7000 series and 380, but if that's accurate I don't know.

[Sound_Card]

A minimum of 5 years of driver support seems like a pretty good deal to me.

[acroig]

A minimum of 5 years of driver support seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Oh, hi there!

[Nagorak]

To be fair, it's not like when they end driver support your card immediately stops working, you just can't install newer drivers. I know I often go some time between updating my GPU drivers, and usually games still work perfectly fine.

[Nunz]

To be fair, it's not like when they end driver support your card immediately stops working, you just can't install newer drivers. I know I often go some time between updating my GPU drivers, and usually games still work perfectly fine.

I think AMD is cleaning up driver support before Win11 beta and official release. I don't know if Win11 drivers will be like Win10, which applies to Win8 and Win8.1 as well.

[bittermann]

I think AMD is cleaning up driver support before Win11 beta and official release. I don't know if Win11 drivers will be like Win10, which applies to Win8 and Win8.1 as well.

From the Win 11 leaked gaming benchmarks it looks like the Win 10 drivers just plain work and performance is literally on par with Win 10 or slightly better. Seems more like Win 10.1 on the backend. Which is a good thing in my opinion.