News AMD Is Retiring Driver Support for R9 Fury and Older Cards Including Pre-Ryzen APUs

plateLunch

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Mar 31, 2017
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Nooooooooooooo.

Still using my HD 6850, HD 6570. Just picked up an R7 250 on eBay.
What I really need is a driver update for my HD750 ATI TV Tuner though. MS changed something with Win10 and the old drivers don't initialize the card properly any more. But if I do a "Restart", everything works fine. sigh
 

ezst036

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Oct 5, 2018
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I feel bad for my fellow Windows users stuck on closed binaries. But I'll be using my AMD products in that series for years to come because AMD makes their drivers open source on the Linux side and these drivers still receive support/updates from time to time. Heck even the i915 driver (Intel) just recently got an update.

Forced obsolescence has been, to some extent, made obsolete and just isn't necessary anymore. You just have to upgrade away from Windows and closed-source vendors to realize it.
 
Forced obsolescence has been, to some extent, made obsolete and just isn't necessary anymore. You just have to upgrade away from Windows and closed-source vendors to realize it.
You don't need to be running the latest graphics drivers for a card run perfectly fine in the vast majority of games. All this really means is that the older cards won't see game-specific driver optimizations (which generally won't focus on older hardware anyway), or new driver features, so it likely won't matter all that much. There's no real "forced obsolescence". We're talking about hardware that is already over 6 years old at this point, and with relatively few exceptions, isn't going to provide an ideal level of performance in the latest games anyway.

And in terms of game-specific optimizations and advanced driver features, the drivers on open-source platforms tend to fare worse to begin with, and game support in general won't be as good, so it would hardly be an upgrade to move to them as a solution.
 
I'm surprised earlier GCN is being killed because RX400/500 and even the Vega56/64/ 7 are still based on it and the compiler differences are minimal in terms of optimization.

I mean my 7970 died after 8 years last year. But it was still highly playable for a number of games.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I feel bad for my fellow Windows users stuck on closed binaries. But I'll be using my AMD products in that series for years to come because AMD makes their drivers open source on the Linux side and these drivers still receive support/updates from time to time. Heck even the i915 driver (Intel) just recently got an update.

Forced obsolescence has been, to some extent, made obsolete and just isn't necessary anymore. You just have to upgrade away from Windows and closed-source vendors to realize it.
And we could also 'feel bad' for our Linux buddies, with little game support.
So there's that.

"End of support" does not mean that the thing simply up and dies.
It will continue to run, just like it ran last week.