Tuesday, June 22nd 2021
Ten Years in, AMD to End Support for Radeon HD 7000, R200, R300 and Fury GCN Graphics Cards
AMD is ending support for the Radeon HD 7000 series, R200 series, R300 series, and R9 Fury series graphics cards, based on the oldest versions of the Graphics CoreNext architecture. The HD 7000 series debuted in 2011, R9 200 series in 2013, with the R9 300 series essentially being rebadged. The R9 Fury series joined the ranks in 2015. This would make the Radeon 21.5.2 the final drivers from these graphics cards, giving AMD the opportunity to clean-break its drivers from the RX 400 series "Polaris" and forward. A conclusion of driver support would mean that upcoming driver releases, including the 21.6.1 drivers released today, lack support for GPUs older than the RX 400 series. Should AMD encounter glaring security flaws with its drivers, it can, in the future, release special driver updates.
Sources:
AMD, VideoCardz
99 Comments on Ten Years in, AMD to End Support for Radeon HD 7000, R200, R300 and Fury GCN Graphics Cards
r9 390 is slower than an rx 580 which currently stacks as a higher low end card at this point. That's the progress and the cards are getting obsolete faster because the gaming industry is rapidly progressing. So you want the old r9 390 to keep up with a card like rx 580 in a 4 years time from now? The rx 580 could be obsolete by then if things keep going as fast as they do now.
Use the old driver for your r9 390 and call it a day. You won't be able to play any game in 4 years time but you will be able to play older titles.
Beyond that is untenable, no support for new tech, no enhanced features etc, beyond a point your wasting power unnecessarily by using outdated old tech.
And if you think any company is going to miss people who buy every decade going to the competition, you are confused.
Calm the butt hurt, this is the way, and it has been the way a long time.
Of course, past some point, you have to forget about older hardware. But AMD seems a little more eager to do so than Nvidia. Not to mention you can't really count the first year or two as "support" as that's the period when you have to wait for the "fine wine" to kick in.
I'd guess the only reason AMD was continuing support was nvidia's kepler was still supported, and if they cut support first the internet would go insane, as it tends to do. Notice how all the GPUs they dropped have 4GB or less VRAM? fury was 4GB, 290x was 4GB, everything else was 3GB or lower. Nothing dropped here is a threat to pascal or higher, and even maxwell is awfully long in the tooth. Maxwell and pascal both obliterated the r9 series in total sales, hence why the 290x was at one point $220 brand new. The market today, 6+ years later, is far too small to warrant continued support.Bruh. Just........bruh.
The 300/200 series are the 7000 series. That was peak rebrandeon. Some of us warned fanbois that their support would be limited due to their age, but nobody was listening back then. The 280x is a 7970, the 380 is a 7870, ece. Then the r9 300 series were slightly updated GCN versions with similar core counts and performance to the 7000 series. We all knew that once rDNA gained traction it would be lights out for GCN, but some didnt want to listed to reason.
None of those cards perform well by today's standards. The r9 390x barely keeps 60 FPS at a mix of high/ultra settings at just 1080p, and that is the most powerful discontinued card here other then the fury. And just look at the steam hardware survey, the entirety of GCN 1.0 combined is only 0.34% of the market, less then the mighty vega 3 iGPU, nvidia geforce 710, or the RX 460. The r9 300 series doesnt even show up on steam anymore. The geforce 970 alone has 5 TIMES as many GPUs on steam right now as all the discontinued AMD GPUs on this list put together. Why should AMD continue to put resources into their old GPUs when most of their customers moved to polaris and rDNA or to nvidia?
As for dropping fury, so what, it was a bit of a turd day one , six years in and all the updates you Could do won't make that turd shine, AMD moved on, anyone rocking that six year old card now SHOULD expect it to be shit by now because it's efficiency is totally effing abysmal at this point, Both vendors moved the efficiency and performance goal posts way on, and that's forgetting about architectural, and technology improvements that also are not available.
R200 - Oct 2013
R300/Fury - June 2015
So... ten years in since what?
Pretty much everything is playable and since FSR came out, 7970 might still run games at 60 fps at 1080p high. That's very respectable for card this old.
I get why AMD wants to do this aside from the obvious cost cutting reasons. GCN is old and wanting to clean up the driver code base makes sense but the R300 series isn't really that old and they are still supporting R400/500 which is GCN based which they obviously have to as those are only a few generations back so how much of a thing is that really? I think in a different market that was anything remotely normal where you could actually get a modern replacement this wouldn't be that big of deal but I feel like pulling the rug out from under some decently useful cards that people are still getting by with is a bad move.
From here
community.amd.com/t5/blogs/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/ba-p/477423
Hell, the footnote for FSR says "RX 500" without mentioning 400 series, so I'm not even sure if original Polaris is supported (in theory they should, but I'd like official confirmation)Actually, forget this. RX 460 to 480 are also supported.
There's also no information on whether it's technically feasible to implement FSR on GCN 1-3. Anandtech's article implied that GCN 4 was very different from previous GCN iterations, which could be the reason why it works there and not on older GPUs (hence AMD deciding enough was enough and dropping support for older GCN iterations)
Tested Riftbreaker Prologue demo on my old 7850, definitely improves the graphics but the performance scales badly and is all over the place...
Given the shit state of the GPU market I think it would be the right thing to do, 300 series isn't that old.
The old cards could also might get a similiar performance boost if they would get the same driver support... Oh well..