Vya DomusHere we go again.

No matter the driver support neither AMD or Nvidia is actively optimising drivers for 5 year old architectures.

*3 years old for the 6xxx series.

This really isn't acceptable. Don't whitewash it.

R-T-B*3 years old for the 6xxx series.

This really isn't acceptable. Don't whitewash it.

Tell you want, if anyone can find a single example of Pascal cards getting noticeably better performance in some game because of a driver update in the last year I’ll concede and admit that this is a super big deal.

Vya DomusTell you want, if anyone can find a single example of Pascal cards getting noticeably better performance in some game because of a driver update in the last year I’ll concede and admit that this is a super big deal.

Pascal cards aren't three years old, this is some extreme whatsboutism. I bet I COULD find examples three years into their life.

Vya DomusTell you want, if anyone can find a single example of Pascal cards getting noticeably better performance in some game because of a driver update in the last year I’ll concede and admit that this is a super big deal.

maybe you didn't notice that THEY ARE STILL SELLING THESE CARDS

R-T-BPascal cards aren't three years old, this is some extreme whatsboutism.

It isn’t, people assume driver updates = game optimisations for the whole time. Let’s see if it’s true.

Vya DomusIt isn’t, people assume driver updates = game optimisations for the whole time. Let’s see if it’s true.

The cards aren't at all the same age at the termination of support man. Wow.

No more game optimizations on 5K/6K series? Great. It's entirely on developers and they should be competent enough to fix problems.
We all know it's a coinflip that it's actually going to happen but it puts accountability back exactly where it belongs.
AMD should be squarely focused on day 1 driver optimizations on 7K/9K series cards and I'm not sure how long either one lasts.
The day the jump to UDNA happens will NOT be a favorable improvement, rather just a combination of Graphics+Compute controls.
I'm not thrilled about this but I'm not going to add to the pile of bitching. Every one of these cards are faster than my RX 580.
Yes the 5K/6K cards are long in the tooth but there's also a MAJOR jump in design philosophy and features of these cards leading to 7K/9K.
I'll probably switch over to the 9070 XT very soon. It's probably the new minimum support floor for competitive gaming.

I'll juggle GeForce/Quadro drivers to find a proper fit for production. Pascal isn't on the way out but JFC I had no idea green drivers were slop.
For either one I'll probably sit on those driver versions for about half a year until better appears. Glad I got my priorities straight early this year.

These cards are now mature. I don't see a problem with AMD doing this. It looks to me that they want to put more resources on UDNA.
Anyhow, its not like games are going to now run like garbage on these GPUs. People are overblowing this out of proportions IMO

That said, the other side of my brain is telling me that the RX 6000 series is still quite expensive to buy, the 6800xt for example costs over $1000. Spending such cash, you would expect this GPU to run as smooth as silk for older games and for newer games, including the upcoming titles, hence it might require optimizations. Oh Boy,

R-T-BThe cards aren't at all the same age at the termination of support man. Wow.

What does it matter ? Officially supported driver updates = game optimisations, correct ?

RDNA2 is 5 years old, Ampere is the closest match give me an example of that then.

sepheronxBut somehow I think people will just in the end go further to nvidia.

Loosening the purse strings is probably the better choice for most people. After all, who has the patience and nerves to switch from Windows to Linux?

MakaveliBeen using Radeon since the first Radeon DDR 64 :)

And I said goodbye to ATI/AMD at the end of “Catalyst.”

With a friendly smile,
Fred.

^^linux drivers don't give you game optimization

FR3D1Loosening the purse strings is probably the better choice for most people. After all, who has the patience and nerves to switch from Windows to Linux?

It isn't just spending more it's also trusting a sketchy power connector, I'd rather avoid it for as long as possible.
But I have to question who has the patience or nerves for Windows 11, Linux has been easier to use than Windows, unless of course you have a need for Windows only applications.

Whoa, just seen this.

The desktop 6750GRE is from October 2023, and I know that was only a late-cycle refresh, but that potentially falls foul of the 2 years support/warranty rules in the EU.

Laptops with the 6450M, 6550S, and 6550M also toe the line with EU regulators with their Jan 2023 launch date. It would have taken a few months for those designs to make it into laptops you could buy, and those would have been considered "current models" for legal purposes until the laptop vendor updated to RNDA3 variants.

What's not clear is how RDNA2 IGPs will be affected. Arguably the 2CU RDNA2 IGP in modern AM5 9000-series CPUs isn't really relevant; AMD have repeatedly said that it is basic graphics solution for 2D/media output and not much else. On the other hand, here are a couple of examples that spring to mind:

[INDENT]Ryzen 7 7735HS (Rembrandt-R) - released April 2023[/INDENT]
[INDENT]Steam Deck - Custom Van Gough-based RDNA2 - still being sold as current model[/INDENT]

as much as i hate nvidia i dont think ill come back to amd next time and ive been a life long amd fan boy but between the dogshit drivers always with issues especially the first 2-3 years rdna2 was launched, the time they took to support pytorch on windows, the subpar video encoding, and now this nonsense drop of support when afaik 6000 and 7000 are basically the same thing but in chiplets, unacceptable i rather go nvidia as much as it pains me and be free of headaches.

the frame pacing on some games is horrible it just feels laggy and yeah i have freesync premium pro so there is no excuse the thing thats supposed to avoid all of that is not doing anything or making things worse i suspect in quite a few games

TheinsanegamerNReally puts a harsh buzz killer on buying into uDNA when it comes out. nVidia has done the same, but only to the 2000 series from 2018, not the 3000s.

Precisely this... and now you can understand why people are not ready to just trust this company. I have to admit, AMD is going to have to release a truly magical product now for me to buy in on their GPUs again.

I keep saying... consistency is everything. It creates trust. AMD is doing their damnest best to erode trust in their customer base. Its mind blowingly stupid - this is the same company that is now seeing the return on a dedicated long term Zen investment, it literally saved their asses, but naaahhh we don't want to apply that principle to GPUs! That would make far too much sense considering there is console volume to carry RDNA anyway, right?

The longer I think about this, the more pissed I get about such rampant idiocy.

Vya DomusTell you want, if anyone can find a single example of Pascal cards getting noticeably better performance in some game because of a driver update in the last year I’ll concede and admit that this is a super big deal.

What the fuck? Pascal is one of the best supported generations in history, and that goes for 90% of Nvidia's GPU releases by the way.
They just deliver. Your comment makes zero sense in the face of a wavering AMD that has since ATI acquirement been flip flopping and being random about support periods. Two words... fine wine. I'll leave it to your own cognitive skills to consider why this is a term that got stuck to AMD. If the GPUs actually did surpass Nvidia after X years, the fine wine wouldn't become vinegar. But alas. And now we have that same company just dropping the ball altogether.

It ain't the first time either. R9 Fury was even worse.

You are now talking about game support / driver tweaks for games like Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo 4, etc. that got released in, for example, 2023, which is 6-7 years after Pascal released. Driver updates include stability patches, which in the hypothetical case of owning an AMD card over that time period would just not have been delivered to you. Games that otherwise run on toasters, mind you, so for sure you'll want to play them.

Dr. DroI'm going to be truthful with you, I am not upset at AMD's decision. But I am also privy to certain details that the general public is not, so that's a very important consideration as to why I am not raising my pitchforks when I would usually be the first to moan about this. I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it, so I won't, but just trust me when I say that there actually is a valid technical reason for this decision.

All and all, it sucks for those who opted to buy a RX 6000 over an RTX 20 or 30 series GPU some time ago, and doubly so for late adopters, but I suppose that they knew they wouldn't get the same level of software support and longevity as they would have with the Nvidia card. Pretty much every review and forum mentioned that to some extent, of course, with pushback, but that was to be expected. No use being surprised.

If there are technical reasons then they shouldn't have pushed RDNA 2 for so long and still are pushing it. The latest RDNA 2 dGPU was from Oct 2023, not to mention the APUs, with Rembrandt-R being from early 2023, Granite Ridge (desktop Zen 5) from mid 2024, the re-refreshed Rembrandt that they announced some days ago...

(Steam Deck doesn't matter since it's supported by linux drivers)

If there is some technical flaw that makes RDNA 2 unable to cope with some modern features then they shouldn't have kept releasing new products with it for so long. Those features are actually known years in advance to them so they can actually prepare new hardware...

And for some things, you can do software fallbacks like how Nvidia did a software path for Pascal in RT, which sucked, but at least worked or how you can run RT-only titles in linux with Vegas/RDNA 1 and it can work surprisingly well. But AMD just seems to be completely unwilling to spend on software.

At this point, I really guess that Nvidia is the actual finewine company. Anyone who brought a Turing card back in 2018 can still enjoy using the latest DLSS 4 and it seems that after months, maybe FSR 4 will come at most to RDNA 3.

I have 2 ways of seeing this.

The bad one: Eventually there will be a game that comes out that requires drivers to fix something specific and there won't be a driver to fix that which already did happen in the RX 480 in the past.
There might be a severe lack of performance compared to nvidia counterparts in a specific game.

The good one: Game Ready Drivers/gaming optimized does pretty much to nothing. I could be 1 year of lagging behind drivers and at launch of a release game with a release driver for that game that performance would be the pretty much the same, people are stressing out over something that almost means zero.

Nvidia also don't release any gaming updates for my GTX 1650 Super for years now, I defy to anyone search something Turing related regarding optimizations on their drivers, but yet they don't go public about the lack of their driver support.

So I don't know exactly how to think, I will see how my RX 6700 XT fair in newer games without the active driver support and depending on how it goes, this might shape my next GPU purchase.

Add it to the long list of reasons to avoid buying a Radeon GPU, specially if all you use is Windows, a total slap in the face to consumers. I find it kinda funny because on Linux Radeon are very good but I guess that's because AMD has no control over the open source drivers development and can't make unilateral decisions like this.

The AMD GPU division really are their own worse enemy.

Chrispy_What's not clear is how RDNA2 IGPs will be affected. Arguably the 2CU RDNA2 IGP in modern AM5 9000-series CPUs isn't really relevant; AMD have repeatedly said that it is basic graphics solution for 2D/media output and not much else. On the other hand, here are a couple of examples that spring to mind:

Steamdeck won't be effected because Linux, but the ROG Ally will, as well as all the laptop and APU chips.

noel_fsas much as i hate nvidia i dont think ill come back to amd next time and ive been a life long amd fan boy but between the dogshit drivers always with issues especially the first 2-3 years rdna2 was launched, the time they took to support pytorch on windows, the subpar video encoding, and now this nonsense drop of support when afaik 6000 and 7000 are basically the same thing but in chiplets, unacceptable i rather go nvidia as much as it pains me and be free of headaches.

Brand loyalty is a silly thing. I always said that my system is not a charity and I am not going to a brand just because they are the underdog, I always try to choose the best tool for the job and honestly for the past 10+ years that has been Nvidia. I've been through years of pain with AMD drivers on Windows, the amount of hoops I had to jump through just to make something work, the time wasted... I don't know whether to consider it comical or depressing, maybe both. It was refreshing to be able to just go to the website, download a driver, and everything just worked out of the box without any tinkering.

Dr. DroI'm going to be truthful with you, I am not upset at AMD's decision. But I am also privy to certain details that the general public is not, so that's a very important consideration as to why I am not raising my pitchforks when I would usually be the first to moan about this. I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about it, so I won't, but just trust me when I say that there actually is a valid technical reason for this decision.

All and all, it sucks for those who opted to buy a RX 6000 over an RTX 20 or 30 series GPU some time ago, and doubly so for late adopters, but I suppose that they knew they wouldn't get the same level of software support and longevity as they would have with the Nvidia card. Pretty much every review and forum mentioned that to some extent, of course, with pushback, but that was to be expected. No use being surprised.

'I know this info, but I can't tell you, but its real cool!'

Mate... we are past high school aren't we.

y2faulty^^linux drivers don't give you game optimization

They actually do afaik, just a random look in mesa gitlab and one of the newest MR is about having a workaround for a specific game bad behavior. Which is not actually a driver bug or anything, it's something not allowed under the vulkan specification.

gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/38180

ObscureAngelPTThe good one: Game Ready Drivers/gaming optimized does pretty much to nothing.

This is the main takeaway. Many of us are on these cards because we decided on purse strings to a point.
The split between early performance and late features split things apart and UDNA is the unifying future.
Many of us on the older cards don't care about RT, CUDA, DLSS or upscaling technologies, just pure raster.
What are we doing on that performance? Right, OLDER GAMES because current world eagerly wants 30%.

So for the few people actually competing on those 5K/6K cards, yeah they're probably gonna ree and hard.
The rest of enthusiasts on 5K/6K (even entry cards) aren't gonna care about this. They notice NO difference.
Those of us on 7K/9K are positioned to receive good updates for competitive gaming, VR or live streaming.
Did I miss anything or are old games and emulators just magically off the table for some reason?

they would notice FSR4 on RDNA2 for example. Which at this point is obviously NOT coming, even though the cards themselves are 100% able to use it.

DaemonForceThis is the main takeaway. Many of us are on these cards because we decided on purse strings to a point.
The split between early performance and late features split things apart and UDNA is the unifying future.
Many of us on the older cards don't care about RT, CUDA, DLSS or upscaling technologies, just pure raster.
What are we doing on that performance? Right, OLDER GAMES because current world eagerly wants 30%.

So for the few people actually competing on those 5K/6K cards, yeah they're probably gonna ree and hard.
The rest of enthusiasts on 5K/6K (even entry cards) aren't gonna care about this. They notice NO difference.
Those of us on 7K/9K are positioned to receive good updates for competitive gaming, VR or live streaming.
Did I miss anything or are old games and emulators just magically off the table for some reason?

If you play old games you can make do with a second hand or older or low tiered card.

Not exactly the money makers for companies like AMD are they.
And old games are not off the table, but the GPUs in question here are powerful enough to be running new content too. And its generally also what they're bought for.

Vayra86Pascal is one of the best supported generations in history, and that goes for 90% of Nvidia's GPU releases by the way.

So nobody can give me a concrete example of this super long amazing support translating into actual game optimisations all the way till the end. Got it.

Anyone who thinks that Pascal, for example, was receiving game optimisations till the end of driver support is uhm… being silly.

Vya DomusSo nobody can give me a concrete example of this super long amazing support translating into actual game optimisations all the way till the end. Got it.

Anyone who thinks that Pascal, for example, was receiving game optimisations till the end of driver support is uhm… being silly.

Try reading the whole post