AMD Retires Legacy GPUs, GCN Only Going Forward

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They'll proceed (for Windows) like Nvidia does it : they'll release updates only if a security problem appears in their last WHQL driver for that generation.
On Linux, the best driver is their open source one now anyway - it's (almost - tessellation is WIP, sound and video acceleration are OK) feature complete, more stable, and as fast if not faster than Catalyst.
 


Whilst true that the 700 series is now listed as legacy they are still supported by the latest driver, so are the 600, 500 and 400 series.
 


These cards are not from 2013. AMD launched the 7000 series, with GCN, in December 2011. The cards we're talking about are mostly from late 2009 to early 2011.
 
I wrote above that cards from 2013 are too young to be retired, but i went to Nvidia's website to see their Legacy Products and it looks like almost entire 700 series (750ti is not included) is there, even Titan. So retiring cards from 2013 is an industry thing, not an AMD thing.


http://www.nvidia.com/page/legacy.html
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The difference here though is that Nvidia is still providing drivers for legacy products, they just are products that are no longer being manufactured. They just released a driver that includes updates for the GTX 460 this month.
 


You're going to bother buying a new card just because there won't be new driver updates for old graphics cards? Most people don't even bother updating except when necessary anyway.
 


Nvidia's cards have all used the same basic cores since the GTX 400 series. AMD switched instruction set architectures with GCN, so it's a lot more difficult to support the VLIW5/VLIW4 cards from the same generation as Nvidia's Fermi cards. It doesn't help that VLIW works very differently from GCN.

Look at Nvidia's drivers for their stuff before Fermi. Sure, they do still release occasional drivers and I agree that AMD should too, but they're much less often and they're just bug fixes of old versions. Fermi and up have 359.00, but previous archs have 341.92, so Nvidia hasn't released an actually new driver in a long time for these cards. That's not to say it's a bad thing; if the old driver works, then it doesn't really matter. It's not like they're going to bother squeezing more performance out of old cards even if they could.
 
I wrote above that cards from 2013 are too young to be retired, but i went to Nvidia's website to see their Legacy Products and it looks like almost entire 700 series (750ti is not included) is there, even Titan. So retiring cards from 2013 is an industry thing, not an AMD thing.


http://www.nvidia.com/page/legacy.html
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except that Legacy support for Nvidia and Legacy for AMD are two different things. Nvidia still releases driver updates for everything back to the 400 series. they just label anything not running their current architecture legacy.
 
Considering AMD did wait until Windows 10 was used widely enough to provide a driver for R600/R700 for WDDM 2.0 that is stable, no one can say it's a bad thing they're ending support : DX9 to DX12 support is there, these cards supported OpenGL 3.3 to 4.2 at most, and couldn't handle Vulkan - what would be the use for a new driver? Game profiles? There's enough community support for those very few cases where the default profile won't do.

They did the same in 2013 for HD4xxx and older cards, at a time when there actually was still new hardware with these chips being sold (IGPs like the HD4290), and considering Windows 10 can work with WDDM 1.x drivers, it means you have support for up to DX11 for these chips on Win10. Such old silicon wouldn't support DX12 anyway.
 


Not so, the cores after the 500 series are rather different. That's why all models from the 600s onwards need so many more cores to achieve the same performance, and why the 580 is still so strong for CUDA.

Ian.



 
Really irresponsible move from AMD. Lots of capable gaming machines harboring VLIW video cards, even APUs from 2013! It's one thing to release a driver for them less often, it's another to completely forgo the video cards, even if the architecture is widely different, it's a matter of principle and duty.

It's not only about peak performance, it's about solving issues when they arise. VLIW may have matured in (normal) game performance, but in an age of broken games that need driver fixes, ceasing support like this is utterly unacceptable. They didn't even provide DX10 cards a legacy driver for Windows 10. Nvidia still supports their 8000 series in Windows 10, the latest driver being released this month.
 
Cant wait for the 14/16nm stuff.

Im overdue for an upgrade, but the 28nm stuff just doesnt excite me at all. If i was going to buy a 28nm chip i would have done it 3 years ago.
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Yeah, I was kind of excited about the Fury, it would have been my first "top-of-the-line" graphics card purchase, but when I heard it's the same old 28nm I just lost all interest.
 
The GTX 400 series were released in 2010, on April 12th. That is over 5.5 years ago. Their latest driver? Released November 19th 2015 for Windows 10. Find me a Windows 10 driver for the...say HD6950. It's not this whole bad news, I wasn't gonna buy AMD GPUs anyway, their latest cards are really unappealing, a lot fo bullshit and tradeoffs. I'm just disappointed to hear this with an HD6950 2GB CFX that works perfectly fine even with 3 screens hooked to it. Since the Crimson driver has no support for the "oh-so-old" cards, where can we get the latest driver that works with these cards? Not on AMD's website, as far as I can see. Stupid move.
 
I don't see why people are upset. The drivers have 5+ years of updates. So they wont support updates its not like the card stops working all the sudden. People gripe about there drivers being bloated then gripe when the drop support to include driver updates to GPU's 5+ years old, to guess what make the drivers less bloated. Cant win for loosing I guess.
 


Why we are upset? I can tell you why I am upset: I have a lot of GPU horsepower under the hood as far as Windows 10 is concerned, an OS that was designed in Microsoft Paint, then had transparency added so that people started calling it Windows 10, instead of Windows h8. It's the latest one - apparently without support for the HD6900 series...or anything older than the HD7700 series. I do suppose Windows 10 will have its own driver for these older cards, but no support from AMD on this front is too much. Well, nVidia's winning some more customers. Last I checked, AMD's marketshare wasn't impressive in the GPU department. Definitely not gonna improve after this news - it wasn't gonna get any better after they revealed Fail X anyway.
 


+1 to that.

Not to mention that 99% of Windows software is written in .Net. He probably never even programmed in .Net to know how helpful it actually is.
 
@unksol that's where your wrong. AMDs competition keeps releasing new features that developers are compelled to use in their games. Physix, hair fx, god rays... Certain AA filters that intentionally cripple a card for a very very small gain in visual fidelity compared to older ways of doing it. AMD isn't wrong in dropping support, but it wouldn't be as big an issue if tye y didn't have to constantly find workarounds for proprietary instruction sets.
 

I agree. Between the HD5770 and R7-250, the performance difference is minuscule considering the four years age difference. It would be easier to see support for older chips go if they were clearly outclassed by modern equivalents but here, we are still roughly in the same performance class.
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Are you for real?

The equivalent for the 5770 in the HD5000 series would be like 390 TODAY. The 5770 was the 5th card as performance in that lineup, if we're excluding the dual GPU. Or really, the flagship GPUs were the 5870 and 5850. Current flagship GPUs are Fury X and Fury. Enthusiast GPUs now are 390X and 390, like the 5830/5770 back then.

 
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