As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD’s remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well.
Under AMD’s extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and “functionality updates as available.”
What’s odd is that AMD is still selling these as integrated GPUs to this day, and they, too, are getting this treatment. That’s a pretty shitty deal for people buying these products today.
I am equally confused with this. Does that mean they are dropping support for their 2023 chips that use Zen3 arch like the 7730u? Surely that can’t be right? That would be enterprise suicide wouldnt it?
No only the 2200G and older. Source is transfered to the FSF as i understood it. It is the death knell for windows drivers, pretty much, It is rather good news for BSD/Linux/Haiku/OS2 and the others though where the new innovations to the newer architectures ca be adopted and trickle down to older cards. Morphos for example still benefit from mesa/minigl/egl advances even though the last fully supported chip is the 9250 and it’s variations and the fastest is the smaller node 8500XT called 9100PRO.
I feel a bit sorry for windows users in this case, since the gcn5 is not “that old” but i get it. AMD has to focus their development on their most current cards and most of all vulkan, freesync and fidelityfx. the company’s position fails without those three projects.
Freesync is now available on all new Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Dell screens so that is also a hughe win over g-sync. Vulkan is the biggest change to GL in userpace since GLide and it makes no sense to make games in directx any more if you target the switch, playstation, linux or any other plattform alongside windows and yes AMD is still a leading developer for vulkan even though they have transfered most code and rights to khronos group (intel has been a huge contributor as well lately to reach feature parity with the competition for their ARC cards as well as their integrated sollutions that benefits massively over the dx layers)