AMD RDNA 1 & 2 GPU Driver Support Moved To “Maintenance” Mode, Game Optimizations & New Tech For RDNA 3, 4 & Beyond

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AMD RDNA 1 & 2 GPU Driver Support Moved To “Maintenance” Mode, Game Optimizations & New Tech For RDNA 3, 4 & Beyond

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The first and second-gen RDNA lineups are being ditched so quickly, and as per the company’s latest statement, these will only receive critical updates.

AMD Confirms End of Game Optimization and Feature Updates for Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 Series

AMD’s first RDNA GPU series, aka Radeon RX 5000, is hardly 6 years old, and if you think it is too early to see a drop in official optimization and feature updates, then we have the same news for RX 6000 GPU owners. If you checked the latest release notes for AMD’s latest Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2, which officially adds support for Battlefield 6 and Ryzen AI 5 330 APU, you will also see that the new driver only brought “Game Support” and “Expanded Vulkan Extensions Support” for Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series.

This means only RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 got these latest game optimizations, but the absence of RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 families indicates that AMD isn’t treating them with the same love. PC Games Hardware asked about it, and AMD confirmed to them that it has indeed dropped the game optimization and features updates for these two GPU families.

RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security fixes and bug resolutions. To focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for its latest GPUs, AMD is placing the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode with the AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 release. Future driver updates with targeted game optimizations will be focused on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs.

This clearly indicates that the RX 5000 series, which debuted in 2019 along with the newer RX 6000 series that entered the market in 2020, will no longer have the latest features or game support from now on. It’s really sad to see that AMD is ditching these GPU families so soon, considering the RX 6000 kept expanding for a few more years. Cards like RX 6750 GRE, which was launched in 2023, will be excluded from the latest optimizations as well, which is outrageous.

AMD will now only deliver critical security updates and bug fixes for these GPUs, but will shift its focus entirely to the RX 7000 and RX 9000 series. This creates uncertainty and reduces consumer trust, since AMD might do the same for both RDNA 3 and even RDNA 4 GPUs when the next one or two GPU generations arrive. Contrary to AMD, NVIDIA continued the support its Maxwell and Pascal series for nearly 10 years, which is what most consumers look forward to with their newly bought GPUs.

Source: AMD RDNA 1 & 2 GPU Driver Support Moved To "Maintenance" Mode, Game Optimizations & New Tech For RDNA 3, 4 & Beyond

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Pretty shit move, these amd guys keep shooting themselves in the foot. 6000 isnt that old, and esp 6600 was being sold for quite some time as best entry level card.

Linux drivers will probably do better in future i guess for new games.

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They are still going to provide day 1 support for bugs etc. Just don’t expect any new features which is fine ig. I don’t think nvidia have dropped an update for 750ti in a long time those are still “supported”. Too soon for this move tho.

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This doesn’t really inspire confidence with the 9000 series… especially considering all the talk about new technologies for the next generation of consoles.

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They are already not providing features for older cards. Above says that they wont optimize drivers for new games too, shit move.

Linux drivers are opens source, so there is a decent chance that those will work better for newer games, but probably without official fixes.

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Support for Pascal and Maxwell is being dropped at end of Q4

The 750Ti was launched in 2014.

AMD is dropping support for a product that is still available new in stock and is moving to a maintenance branch that gets quarterly updates historically.

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It’s absolutely criminal that a 3080-class gpu will cease to get driver support now. Radeon management needs public flogging for this.

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Oh thats nice. Probably for bf6

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Will we get a price drop in the RDNA 1/2 cards due to this ?

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On linux, it seems they dropped their own driver - ‘AMDVLK’. There is another open source vulkan driver which was developed by valve among others and is better. But in some cases, like RT, AMDVLK could be better.

Apparently you can switch between the two easily so it was a good option to have and now they discontinued it. This is some userspace thing, so its only part of the driver.

If they dont start working on the other driver, they will end up making linux options worse too. wtf are they doing.

Perhaps they will work on RADV, and maybe bring it to windows too which might explain why they would drop support on 6000 and older to reduce work. Just wild guessing, but that would perhaps be good going forward to have a common driver code like Nvidia apparently does.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nhxh98/amdvlk_has_been_discontinued_as_amd_are_throwing/

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/16x40zv/why_does_amdvlk_exist_when_radv_is_superior/

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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

It’s not that amd changed their decision, it was what they meant to say but marketing team fugged up. The reddit trolls panicked and started bashing amd.

When I read the first news I knew immediately it wasn’t making sense and everyone was misinterpreting what they meant. Allowing driver updates to older gens is probably as easy as a man job because when they’re not adding new features it’s probably an automated deployment and testing before release. Why would they stop driver support altogether? It costs them close to nothing

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Still unclear, wtf does market needs mean and its still in ‘maintenance mode branch’.

New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be
delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch,

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It means they’ll ignore the older cards until everyone makes a big fuss about it. They’ll continue for now then quietly stop updating down the line and hope no one yells at them. If a big popular specific game (like BF6) releases say a year later and is broken, they’ll fix it if there is an uproar. For any niche games with issues they’ll just ignore it.

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Yes that’s what i feel too. Else no need for that kind of language.

Lets see what happens but they have put a big question mark around lifetime of their products, esp say few years after launch.

Only positive is that linux should be safe because drivers are open and valve seems to make a big contribution to this stuff including game optimizations.

Useful or not, someone even added code to support RT in very old gpus

Indiana jones running on 5700xt and vega

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https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/s/ePoTdSfdUL

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