AMD is ending support for the RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards.

Out of the blue, AMD announced the end of support for RDNA and RDNA 2 graphics architectures in 2019 and 2020, respectively. At first, this information appeared only in the form of a discreet mention in the changelog of new drivers, but then the company confirmed the change to the German magazine PC Games Hardware. Thus, RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards should go into “maintenance” mode, where they will receive critical bug fixes, but no optimizations will occur for new games.

While the situation with the RX 5000 series is still quite clear, the removal of RDNA 2 support is quite surprising. Although the oldest models are already 5 years old, AMD has released other versions in subsequent years. There was a small update in 2022, and two new models were released for the Chinese market in October 2023.

However, we are not just talking about desktop cards: RDNA 2 is also actively present in the laptop and portable device market in general. This will affect a number of portable Windows devices, including the recently released ROG Xbox Ally, namely the lower version with the Z2 A chip. The higher one uses the newer RDNA 3.5 architecture.

Conversely, the popular Steam Deck portable PC uses open source drivers for its SteamOS operating system, which AMD doesn’t control, so nothing needs to change. The same, of course, applies to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles, where the controllers are handled by Sony and Microsoft respectively.

In any case, this is very unpleasant news for a number of users, because ending support for video cards that are already several years old (besides the fact that they are so popular and in use) is not exactly a habit. Rival Nvidia just a few weeks ago stopped supporting the 2016 Pascal series (while promising security updates until 2028), but still supports the 2018 Turing series.

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