AMD is weaning the market off its older gaming graphics card series that predate the Radeon RX 5000 series. The company is reportedly putting older GPUs based on the "Vega" and "Polaris" graphics architectures on a slower driver update track, which means driver updates to these GPUs will be less frequent. The company's RX 5000, RX 6000, and RX 7000 series, on the other hand, will continue on with the current driver update track that includes one or more driver releases each month, including releases to fix glaring game bugs, or day-zero performance updates.

AMD over the past couple of months began segregating RDNA (RX 5000 series and later) and pre-RDNA (older than RX 5000 series) GPUs through their driver releases. The latest drivers come in an RDNA-only package (denoted by "rdna" in the installer's file name), which is around 600 MB in size; and a larger 1.1 GB package that supports both RDNA and pre-RDNA GPUs. The company now announced that the pre-RDNA GPUs will switch to a slower driver update track as is characteristic with older-generation GPUs that AMD wants to discontinue support for.

AMD has released its latest Adrenalin drivers for Radeon graphics cards. With support dating back to RX 400, the latest Adrenalin 23.3.1 WHQL drivers bring a lot of improvements to the table, as well as support for Halo Infinite Ray Tracing Update and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty game. Most importantly, the new driver has a series of fixes, including intermittent driver timeout, system freeze, or BSOD, with the latest Radeon RX 7000 series. Problems in games such as Premium Gold Packs in EA SPORTS FIFA 23 and Dying Light 2 lighting effects corruption have been fixed. As far as Radeon RX 6000 series goes, this driver release manages to fix corruption in certain scenes with ray tracing enabled observed in the Returnal game. Check the list below for the entire set of changes.Download: AMD Radeon Graphics Drivers 23.3.1 WHQL here.

AMD Radeon RX 400 series and RX 500 series graphics cards based on the "Polaris" graphics architecture are simply unable to run "Forspoken," as users on Reddit report. The game has certain DirectX 12 feature-level 12_1 API requirements that the architecture does not meet. Interestingly, NVIDIA's "Maxwell" graphics architecture, which predates AMD "Polaris" by almost a year, supports FL 12_1, and is able to play the game. Popular GPUs from the "Maxwell" generation include the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 960. Making matters much worse, AMD is yet to release an update to its Adrenalin graphics drivers for the RX Vega, RX 5000, and RX 6000 series that come with "Forspoken" optimization. Its latest 23.1.2 beta drivers that come with these optimizations only support the RX 7000 series RDNA3 graphics cards. It's now been over 50 days since the vast majority of AMD discrete GPUs have received a driver update.

AMD today announced the brand title of its 2017-yearender driver release, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition, which is named after the Adrenalin Rose. Scheduled to release some time in mid-December, under version number 17.12 WHQL, the drivers are expected to introduce performance enhancements across the board for GPUs based on the "Polaris" and "Vega" graphics architectures (Radeon RX 400 series, RX 500 series, and RX Vega series), while introducing new features.

AMD today posted a video presentation announcing the new drivers.

AMD today released the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.11.2 beta software. The drivers come with launch-day optimization for "Star Wars: Battlefront II." The drivers also fix a handful issues related to Radeon ReLive game video capture/streaming software, in which chroma artifacts would show up on the screen, and an issue which caused recording to fail when switching between borderless fullscreen and fullscreen modes. The drivers also address WattMan issues, in which undervolted values wouldn't correctly apply on some "Polaris" (RX 400 and RX 500 series) GPUs, and underclocked GPU memory values not reflecting in the user-interface. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.11.2

The change-log follows.

Hold on to your ETH hats: you will still be able to cash in on the ETH mining craze for a while. However, you should look towards your 3 GB and 4 GB graphics cards with a slight distrust, for reasons that you should know, anyway, since you have surely studied your mining cryptocurrency of choice. Examples are the GTX 1060 3 GB, or one of those shiny new 4 GB RX 480 / RX 580 which are going at ridiculously premium prices right now. And as a side note, don't you love the mechanisms of pricing and demand?

The problem here stems from ETH's own design for its current PoW (Proof of Work) implementation (which is what allows you to mine the currency at all.) In a bid to make ETH mining unwieldy for the specialized silicon that brought Bitcoin difficulty through the roof, ETH implements a large size data set for your GPU to work with as you mine, which is stored in your GPU's memory (through the DAG, which stands for Directed Acyclic Graph). This is one of the essential differences between Bitcoin mining and Ethereum mining, in that Ethereum mining was designed to be memory-intensive, so as to prevent usage of ASICs and other specialized hardware. As a side-note, this also helps (at least theoretically) in ETH's decentralization, which Bitcoin sees more at risk because of the inherent centralization that results from the higher hardware costs associated with its mining.