AMD pulls back on drivers for aging-but-popular graphics cards and iGPUs
- Thread starter JournalBot
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I understand dropping Polaris, but even if the notable updates are few, it's a bad look to drop Vega since it's still being sold...
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I understand the reduced support for Polaris, but it's pretty inexcusable for Vega to receive the same when they are currently selling products that include it.
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I think it would maybe be better to characterize this as a driver split; the new hardware will have separate drivers and will be updated more frequently.
The older hardware doesn't really need the driver churn, as long as it still gets timely bugfixes. It's not getting new features, so it shouldn't need updates except when there's something wrong.
The older hardware doesn't really need the driver churn, as long as it still gets timely bugfixes. It's not getting new features, so it shouldn't need updates except when there's something wrong.
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AMD produces wonderful hardware but seems to have an almost ingrained lack of respect for the importance software plays in using that hardware to its full potential.
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Helpful comment! Also, this line:
While accurate, AMD actually provides excellent support to the open source Mesa driver maintainers (this still doesn't contradict my earlier comment of their in-house software support for their hardware).
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For years they were extremely underfunded vis-a-vis Nvidia, so it made sense to focus on hardware for the spec sheets. Even now, Nvidia has an overwhelming advantage. The flip side is there’s a lot of low hanging fruit to improve performance.
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Ok, why does AMD keep shooting itself in the fucking foot....
From the FSR3 Antilag+ fiasco, now to this....
Edit: I'm wrong about this... nvidia game ready drivers only support back to GTX 900s. But even then, that's still released in fucking 2014.... 9 years ago, while AMD already dropping Vega that's released 7 years ago...
From the FSR3 Antilag+ fiasco, now to this....
Edit: I'm wrong about this... nvidia game ready drivers only support back to GTX 900s. But even then, that's still released in fucking 2014.... 9 years ago, while AMD already dropping Vega that's released 7 years ago...
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I wonder how this will affect the drivers for laptops that have Vega based GPUs in the chipset and NVidia based dedicated GPUs. Those were already a weird combo from a driver perspective as they required the machine to switch between two different architectures based on load. As an owner of a machine with a Ryzen 9 5900HS and a 3060 I'm not pleased that this Vega deprecation might make those drivers worse or less frequently updated over time.
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According to Anandtech, AMD says this:
So it doesn't look like they are totally abandoning driver support for the architectures.
So it doesn't look like they are totally abandoning driver support for the architectures.
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They're still coming out with laptops that have Vega integrated graphics, and I bought one not too long ago, so I really hope "legacy functionality and security support" doesn't mean "only patch 0-days and take months to fix any performance issues."
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For anyone who also doesn't know what architecture their AMD graphics card is (I'm getting old, I used to be interested in these things..): If your GPU starts with RX followed by a 4 digit number you should be fine.
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My trusty RX570 8gb is on it's second life in my son's gaming PC. Still does a remarkably good job as a video card especially considering how cheap it was as an upgrade at the time.
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I don’t know about that. They have likely extracted most of the performance out of these older cards. your card isn’t magically gonna grow new features so what is that you think that newer drivers will give you? I mean, other than the imaginary “teh snappy” feeling that installing new drivers sometimes give can give.
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New games still require optimizations, though. Although the integrated Vega graphics that they're still using probably won't be powerful enough for any of those games anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter.
Whoever still has a Radeon VII might have a reasonably valid complaint, though. It's not that old and still offers reasonable enough performance for newer games.
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Meanwhile, Nvidia is still putting out game drivers for GTX 900 series... released 2 years before AMD Vega GPUs...
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Bug fixes and better support for new games I'd imagine. It's not that uncommon that new drivers give sizable performance improvements for newly released games.
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The RX480 8gb was the best value card I ever got. Performed well enough that it served me for about 5 years and then sold to crypto bro miner for more than I purchased it for new rotf.
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Come on. Maybe I’m old fashioned but 7 years is an eternity in driver support in my opinion. as for nvidias support of older cards, how often do they release new drivers for them and what differences do they actually contain? Perhaps the same frequency as what AMD will release drivers for their older cards?
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Maybe a silly question, why do AMD and Intel offer basically one super driver for all their supported cards as opposed to, I don't know, an on-installation utility that identifies the precise card on the system and downloads a specific (and presumably smaller) driver? Could even make this utility spit out a URL or other driver ID so a user could obtain the specific driver if the device is offline.
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After reading the first sentence I was thinking of countering with some of the old classics such as the GeForce 8800 or the 9700 pro or what it was (god how long ago was that?), but yeah I had completely suppressed memory of that whole crypto mining fiasco of the last few years.
Such a weird situation that was.
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Nvidia GPUs that still have Game Ready driver support all get new drivers at the same time.
Also, Vega is closer to 6 years old than 7, the Radeon VII, the newest Vega card, isn't quite 5 years old, and they've released new models of APU as recently as this year that still have Vega integrated graphics.
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Why do games always need driver fixes to get them to work? I thought the point of a standard API like direct3d etc.. is supposed to solve that issue?
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I'd certainly honor my old GTS 8800 320MB with tying my old RX 580 8GB. Those are both legendary cards that kept being good buys and good GPUs for way longer than their price and place in the landscape would suggest.
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Right, but what are the ACTUAL differences in the driver for the older cards? Do 9 year old nvidia cards typically receive any kind of performance increase or feature addition?
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I think it's mostly bug fixes to make sure that new games at least operate properly as opposed to significant performance increases. It's not the same level of optimization that newer cards get, for sure. AMD actually has a reputation for the performance of their cards increasing more than Nvidia over time. Of course, you could say they put more effort in on optimizations for longer, but you could also say that they just took longer than Nvidia to get all of the performance possible out of the hardware.
The question here is going to be if new games will be playable on Vega at launch, or if it's going to take a month or three for a driver update that AMD considers something of an afterthought. Or, worse, if they just don't fix issues with games released after this announcement. The way they worded their announcement "gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products" kind of sounds like the latter. We'll have to wait and see.
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The RTX 4060 is not a midrange card. It's an entry level card with a midrange price. 7600 is slightly better price wise but it's still a last-gen TSMC N6 process node. These would be budget options if the price wasn't so high.
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View: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6yewg3/firefox_certain_youtube_videos_freezes_with_rx/
Still going strong on this "bug" till today. Crashes machine with a reboot.
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They likely still have a higher number of users for those cards than AMD does for Vega. There's definitely a cost-benefit calculation going on with what level of card still recieves support over time, and Vega just must have fallen under whatever arbitrary line AMD drew. The GTX 900 series will have the same happen to it.
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Obviously, the standard APIs are very large with lots of different features so there is always chance for edge cases and bugs that are only hit on new games doing things slightly differently. Hopefully that sort of thing should be ironed out by the game manufacturer testing a head of time but given how often there are day 1 patches to fix things on games that's hard to ensure. Outside of that, one of the common game specific things that improve performance is shader replacements that optimize the games included shaders to run better on specific hardware. Even old well tuned hardware can still potentially benefit from that type of game specific improvements, especially if the game maker isn't putting work into things for the old cards.
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Even if that were true, it's pretty absurd that the line is being drawn on a product they are still actively selling and releasing CPUs with.
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If I understand correctly, the message to Linux users is that there's nothing to be gained by downloading separate drivers for Polaris and Vega GPUs, because the drivers that come with your distribution are just as good. Therefore there won't be any more separate drivers for these GPUs, but you'll receive updates the usual way through your distribution.
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So, you're saying that because they get to skimp on support because they're in a worse competitive position.
I guess older AMD cards resale values has just fallen off a cliff from this lol
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Just a friendly reminder that the underdog of the GPU wars is still a giant corporation and not your friend.
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The upstreamed RADV drivers are usually as good or better than the AMDVLK ones, and as recently as last week had improvements for Vega. The AMDVLK drivers share a codebase with the Windows drivers, which makes sense for AMD development purposes, and since AMD releases them as open-source, the RADV developers are free to pick and choose the best parts to integrate into their driver without the compromises of a shared code base. It is a bit unintuitive that the two efforts didn't merge when AMD started releasing their driver as open source, but the current arrangement is working well.
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I've been running my 580 since 2018, just ordered a new 6800 XT yesterday. I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas.
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These cards (Polaris and Vega) and others much older are still fully supported by Linux's open-source Mesa driver stack. This is the 'built-in' driver for Linux and most distros these days will plug-and-play "just work" with most any AMD GPU. The above news only affects those who wish to download and install AMD's proprietary driver stack.
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That's my laptop. I've been happy using a laptop with a Ryzen 7 5800H for a little over a year now.
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Back in the olden days, one would finish debugging software and then it would be deemed "done" and it would be left alone as a finished product. It was Microsoft that concocted the process of never finishing software and releasing it with bugs and then "updating" it constantly to introduce new ones, and then artificially cancelling "support" for the product they never did actually finish to replace it with a "new" version to get you to pay again for it.
It looks to me like AMD is just saying that it is done the Vega product and now it is ready to use.
It looks to me like AMD is just saying that it is done the Vega product and now it is ready to use.
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