Discussion AMD Radeon HD 7970 gets brand new WHQL Driver. Is this "AMD Fine Wine ??"

[Metal Messiah.]

Hi guys,

Do you own an aging legacy AMD GPU ? Well, as the title reads, AMD's decade-old and also, the world's first DX12 GPU, the Radeon HD 7970, has received a brand new Adrenalin 22.6.1 driver. The driver adds support for the entire Legacy GCN GPU lineup as mentioned here.

Blast from the past, more like. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 launched all the way back in December of 2011. It was based on the then brand new GCN architecture which would continue to be featured in various products from the red team until finally being replaced by the new Polaris & Vega cores. So why is this newsworthy ?

Well, AMD had actually discontinued its driver support for the entire GCN family starting with the Radeon HD 7000 series last year, but now the company has silently released a new driver for its flagship HD 7000 cards, the Radeon HD 7970.

The new driver, Adrenalin 22.6.1, is a WHQL release and the AMD Radeon HD 7970 only receives the Windows 10 64-bit flavor of the release. There are no release notes but the driver itself was released a few days ago for the current Radeon graphics products and aims to fix Windows 7-related installation issues.

However, there's no new Windows 7 driver listed for the Radeon HD 7970. So it seems like there might be some hidden GPU improvements or fixes within the new Adrenalin software.

If you still happen to be using the AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, you can find the latest graphics driver in the link below:

• AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 2.6.1 (WHQL) - Windows 10 - 64-Bit Edition

The AMD HD 7970 was the first official graphics card to be DirectX 12 compliant and did end up getting performance improvements way after its launch which has since been touted as AMD's 'Fine Wine'. Now more than a decade later, AMD has its flagship, the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which is almost 7 times faster and we are soon going to get a new generation in the form of RDNA 3-powered 'Radeon RX 7000' series.

News Source: Nedjo Kovačević

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1540670006349860867

View: https://twitter.com/NedjoK/status/1540670006349860867

 

[Metal Messiah.]

Update.

It appears that this driver is actually based on an older branch, like a year old. Appears to be using the same kernel branch as 21.5.2. It’s still an old driver but probably got refreshed with some security fixes. 22.6 is just the release name and it matches the June 2022 timeline.

Windows 7 OS support is till missing though. Those gamers who have an old/legacy GPU are most likely to be on Windows 7 OS, though the user base might be small.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I never understood the "fine wine" analogy. If it takes years until the hardware performs at its best, something seems wrong.

 

[spentshells]

My fury x was amazing until I stopped using it last year, I found it's performance to be on par with my 1070ti @1080P high another gcn update would make it an astounding 1080p gaming card considering its age

 

[Metal Messiah.]

I never understood the "fine wine" analogy. If it takes years until the hardware performs at its best, something seems wrong.

I think that's a term coined by AMD fans themselves. But also, I never understood why this FINE WINE analogy only applies to AMD cards. Why not NVIDIA GPUs as well ? Because I have hardly seen anyone mention ''fine wine'' for Nvidia cards though. lol

I think the whole point here is that GPU vendors are still trying to support older-gen GPUs, by releasing new WHQL drivers, rather than increasing their performance. I could be wrong though.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I think that's a term coined by AMD fans themselves. But also, I never understood why this FINE WINE analogy only applies to AMD cards. Why not NVIDIA GPUs as well ? Because I have hardly seen anyone mention ''fine wine'' for Nvidia cards though. lol

I think the whole point here is that GPU vendors are still trying to support older-gen GPUs, by releasing new WHQL drivers, rather than increasing their performance. I could be wrong though.

Well, that does sound like the RTG marketing team. The only time I think they'd use it was when there was some major overhaul to the driver package and went "look! We gave you 10-20% boost on all these games!" I think they were trying to spin their driver woes as their hardware ages like wine... which doesn't make sense to me. I mean, if it really aged like wine (or other foods you age), shouldn't a Radeon HD 7000 card perform as well as a RX 6000?🙃

 

[spentshells]

For the fine wine, debate.

gtx 680 was about 15%-20% faster than the 7970 on release, within a year it was 10 after a bump to the clock speed it was as fast as the 680/770... now years later the two cards aren't even comparable performance wise. It's actually not even close.
Drivers were developed to push the hardware as it got older it aged like fine wine.

 

[Metal Messiah.]

Well, that does sound like the RTG marketing team. The only time I think they'd use it was when there was some major overhaul to the driver package and went "look! We gave you 10-20% boost on all these games!" I think they were trying to spin their driver woes as their hardware ages like wine

Yeah, I can definitely agree on this point of view.

 

[hotaru.hino]

gtx 680 was about 15%-20% faster than the 7970 on release, within a year it was 10 after a bump to the clock speed it was as fast as the 680/770... now years later the two cards aren't even comparable performance wise. It's actually not even close.
Drivers were developed to push the hardware as it got older it aged like fine wine.

That just means AMD sold a card that couldn't perform as well as it could, due to poor software quality of the drivers. From a business standpoint, that's bad. If the card performed as well as it does when launched, it would entice people to buy AMD more than NVIDIA. If it takes like 4-5 years for a card to get better, that's too long. Historically that means two generations have already been released and I'm now looking for a new card. I mean, it's good for people who hold onto hardware until the end of time, but that's a small amount of people.

Again, it's just RTG's marketing spinning the development team's inability to deliver quality software.

I mean, would you say "Windows ages like fine wine" or "Bethesda games age like fine wine" or "Cyberpunk 2077 aged like fine wine"?

 

[digitalgriffin]

Hi guys,

Do you own an aging legacy AMD GPU ? Well, as the title reads, AMD's decade-old and also, the world's first DX12 GPU, the Radeon HD 7970, has received a brand new Adrenalin 22.6.1 driver. The driver adds support for the entire Legacy GCN GPU lineup as mentioned here.

Blast from the past, more like. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 launched all the way back in December of 2011. It was based on the then brand new GCN architecture which would continue to be featured in various products from the red team until finally being replaced by the new Polaris & Vega cores. So why is this newsworthy ?

Well, AMD had actually discontinued its driver support for the entire GCN family starting with the Radeon HD 7000 series last year, but now the company has silently released a new driver for its flagship HD 7000 cards, the Radeon HD 7970.

The new driver, Adrenalin 22.6.1, is a WHQL release and the AMD Radeon HD 7970 only receives the Windows 10 64-bit flavor of the release. There are no release notes but the driver itself was released a few days ago for the current Radeon graphics products and aims to fix Windows 7-related installation issues.

However, there's no new Windows 7 driver listed for the Radeon HD 7970. So it seems like there might be some hidden GPU improvements or fixes within the new Adrenalin software.

If you still happen to be using the AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, you can find the latest graphics driver in the link below:

• AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 2.6.1 (WHQL) - Windows 10 - 64-Bit Edition

The AMD HD 7970 was the first official graphics card to be DirectX 12 compliant and did end up getting performance improvements way after its launch which has since been touted as AMD's 'Fine Wine'. Now more than a decade later, AMD has its flagship, the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which is almost 7 times faster and we are soon going to get a new generation in the form of RDNA 3-powered 'Radeon RX 7000' series.

News Source: Nedjo Kovačević

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1540670006349860867

View: https://twitter.com/NedjoK/status/1540670006349860867

I think gaming specific fixes and optimizations are still a "No"

However new features like FSR2 is being universally implemented as the GCN foundation was easily implemented on GCN 1.0 since they did it on RX4xx/RX5xx GCN 4.0

 

[spentshells]

That just means AMD sold a card that couldn't perform as well as it could, due to poor software quality of the drivers. From a business standpoint, that's bad. If the card performed as well as it does when launched, it would entice people to buy AMD more than NVIDIA. If it takes like 4-5 years for a card to get better, that's too long. Historically that means two generations have already been released and I'm now looking for a new card. I mean, it's good for people who hold onto hardware until the end of time, but that's a small amount of people.

Again, it's just RTG's marketing spinning the development team's inability to deliver quality software.

I mean, would you say "Windows ages like fine wine" or "Bethesda games age like fine wine" or "Cyberpunk 2077 aged like fine wine"?

those are all software, but I understand

it was always a good product it was only made better

 

[hotaru.hino]

those are all software, but I understand

it was always a good product it was only made better

Yes the hardware was always that good, it's just that it was the software keeping it on a tight leash. So in essence, the software examples still apply so to speak, it's just that something different is affected.

Or I guess we just differ on perspectives. My view is the hardware was always good, it was just held back. It didn't get better, it's just the chains of what was holding it down were released.

 

[Metal Messiah.]

I think gaming specific fixes and optimizations are still a "No"

Yeah, gaming performance optimizations might be a rare sight with these drivers, except in few cases I think. But mostly older gen GPUs lack the features implemented for the current gen cards.

Imagine the AMD Radeon HD 7970 somehow playing CRYSIS and Cyberpunk 2077 on 1080p !