Thursday, October 30th 2025
No More Game Optimizations for AMD Radeon RX 6000 and RX 5000, Still Part of Main Driver Branch
In a rather shocking move, AMD has given the Radeon RX 6000 series and RX 5000 series GPUs a partial retirement by removing it from the regular monthly game optimization cycle. While the monthly driver updates will continue to support them, the game optimizations included will only be meant for RX 7000 series and RX 9000 series. The monthly driver releases will address critical security vulnerabilities and fix bugs. What makes the move surprising is the fact that the Radeon RX 6000 series in particular is less than 4 years old, and gamers who purchased those cards did so at extremely inflated prices because RX 6000 series, along with NVIDIA's RTX 30-series, were released amid the cryptocurrency mining rush that saw miners soak up GPU inventory.
In a statement to PCGH, machine translated from German, AMD says:
Sources:
PCGH, VideoCardz
In a statement to PCGH, machine translated from German, AMD says:
RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes. To focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 is placing Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode. Future driver updates with targeted game optimizations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs.
286 Comments on No More Game Optimizations for AMD Radeon RX 6000 and RX 5000, Still Part of Main Driver Branch
We've already seen what happened with rDNA2 when 3 came out. The 6800xt went from competing with the 3080 in new releases to competing with the 3070. That magically fixed itself when AMD started optimizing again.
Now the performance of this card sits between RX 9600XT and RX 9700. It lost more than half of its value now and is terribly energy inefficient compared to new AMD cards.
You could get 5060 Ti 16 GB for half the price and with half the power draw now with slightly better performance.
Where am I going with this. I need to leave the PC now.
WORK IN PROGRESS
I think I will continue with something like
"this card is no good today anyway and should be thrown away".
and
"You can still enjoy a lot of games even if you decided to keep the card for whatever strange reason."
edit:I was going to post that.
Now the time proved me right.
The problem is that AMD does not understand the marketing power that gaming GPUs provide. Nvidia does. Let's be honest, at this point, the GeForce cards are basically a charity operation. There is so much demand for datacenter GPUs and AI accelerators, that Nvidia would be perfectly justified in ending their consumer operations all together and devoting 100% of their TSMC silicon to the AI business. Every GeForce card could have gone into an AI card and sold for 10x more money instead.
So why does Nvidia keep making consumer GPUs, with all the accompanying expenses (R&D, software support, having an entire datacenter run 24/7/365 improving DLSS, etc.)? Because it's invaluable as a marketing tool. GeForce might be "money lost" in opportunity costs. But DLSS and Frame Generation means Nvidia presents itself as the best AI company to the general public. The wide availability of GeForce cards with tensor cores and CUDA support meant that ordinary people could experiment with AI and Nvidia's software stack. Having "the world's most powerful gaming GPU" means your company is percieved as the best, even if it's $3000 and extremely rare.
AMD does not do this. Their RDNA product lines are extremely disjointed and artificially segmented. They shot themselves in the foot by not supporting DX 12 Ultimate on RDNA 1. ROCm support on consumer cards is an afterthought provided months or years after release, if their cards are supported at all. Their flagship cards haven't competed with Nvidia for close to a decade now. Nobody looks at their consumer GPUs and goes "wow, AMD is a great company."
This year I bought a RX9070XT to sunset my worn and aging RX580 but I'm still holding onto it.
I also bought a P620 less than a week later because I'm not gonna pass up NVENC at $30.
You don't even have an encoder engine on the RX6400. Why the hell would anyone get it during the coof?
A display out? The RX6750XT was much more capable in price to feature+performance but it doesn't matter.
When you are glued to crap cards, expect crap drivers. The normal Wattman app is probably too much for you.
Optimizations and features that function at the user mode level can be backported to the 25.10 branch, and this is what AMD has committed to providing going forward with the "maintenance mode" schedule. I don't think FSR is a kernel mode function, so regarding that concern, I don't think this changes anything, at least regarding FSR 4. Redstone, perhaps, maybe, I don't know what changes would be necessary to make that tick.You got it all right, down to the last detail. I'm in full agreement, I just have to point out the elephant in the room, though. The true problem here is technical debt, and fundamentally why I make the argument that this is a positive thing in the long run. The changes they made in the structure overall (and the reason RDNA 2 had to go) are directly pertaining to this.
Nvidia spent the R&D over the years, always developing, supporting and making every optional API extension under the sun at least functional, if not performant. AMD, on the other hand, has always taken the shallower road that required the least engineering and development time possible. This is what made it possible for Nvidia to support their cards for so long, mostly because the work was already done. You want to use some extension that will help you gain performance, optimize, or run something odd? The Nvidia card will do it. The AMD one will go belly up and croak.
The DirectX 11 driver command lists issue, the software RT driver that Nvidia provided but AMD refused to, RDNA/2 being unable to do HAGS, these are just smaller examples of the big picture I'm trying to present here. People glossed over the 5700 XT forgoing DirectX 12 Ultimate, calling RT needless, and all the other improvements and optimizations "superfluous"... this is your bill, and you should pay it in due. The new work graphs function they just added support for (exclusive to RX 9000 series, btw) in the new driver? Nvidia supports it in Ampere and has done so for over a year.
Now that HTPC has an RTX 4060. The 6400 is getting dust as their drivers.
It stirred up quite the fuss; was this AMD's own self-made PR Nightmare? :laugh:
www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpu-drivers/amd-clarifies-that-rdna-1-and-2-will-still-get-day-zero-game-support-and-driver-updates-discrete-gpus-and-handhelds-will-still-work-with-future-games
They are going to catch a ton of deserved flak for this, it would have been wise for them to have a sit down with the press to explain it or release a video regarding it. AMD's unilateral way of doing things is akin to Big Corpa but it would be greatly beneficial for them to collaborate and communicate more with the community. If they have a good reason, they should state it. People are still going to be pissed but at least they'd know why.
They could have implemented the RT part of DX 12U in software but the rest of it like mesh shaders, VRS and so on aren't really possible. And since those things are decided years in advanced, I bet they probably were kinda aware but just ignored it, maybe thought it wasn't going to be important.
It's sad and funny at the same time as some things like saying they would BVH Traversal at the RT cores (i.e. implementing it in hardware) is something that Nvidia does since Turing...
Again, AMD doesn't understand that "technical debt" is a small price to pay for the marketing that consumer GPUs provide. At this point in the AI bubble, all consumer cards are "technical debt." Enterprise AI gives you 10x-100x more money for the silicon. Maybe this decision frees 10 driver engineers up to work on UDNA. But if nobody buys UDNA GPUs because of this decision, AMD has shot themselves in the foot again.
Are we getting there yet?
We both know the FSR issue specifically isn't a driver problem but rather, an artificial segmentation decision. The architecture might not be as fast, but it was never a showstopper. And I genuinely do think that there's more that RDNA 2 can offer, since it's DX12 Ultimate compliant, which makes that some well earned scorn. It's more of a PR disaster than anything, though, and I'd be lying if I said that I wouldn't be upset if I had been affected. It's more than a valid argument, just as @persondb mentioned there are products affected that are barely a year old.
That’s the equivalent of Nvidia dropping support for the RTX 4090.
Nvidia keeping driver support for as long as they do is just change found under the sofa cushions for them, a rounding error for a $5 trillion dollar company. And the "optical flow accelerator" turned out to be a bunch of BS as to why previous generations didn't get every feature for quite a while. Even so there never was any outrage for previous gens not getting frame gen.
Consumer cards are especially technical debt for AMD when Nvidia gets closer towards a full monopoly, or who knows how many driver engineers AMD has, freeing up 10 gaming graphics driver engineers for UDNA may help if they only have a team of 30 people.