Support for older graphics may not end, but that’s not certain.
On Friday, we brought you information about the end of support (or transition to “maintenance mode”) for the RX 5000 and RX 6000 series video cards, respectively the RDNA and RDNA 2 architecture. AMD has received a lot of criticism for this from customers, as well as journalists and reviewers dedicated to hardware. So it didn’t take long for the company to come out with another announcement, but we’re not too wise about it.
An AMD spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware magazine: “New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be provided on a maintenance basis based on market needs.” Some owners of old cards immediately began to applaud, but the whole situation is a little more complicated, the statement is given in very careful words and could mean, in fact, anything.
“Market needs” is such a general term that it could mean optimizing for all games that will be optimized for RDNA 3 and 4, or just a few of the biggest games per year, or none at all. After all, it’s not even clear when such optimizations will come, whether they will be the same as with newer graphics, or with a lower or higher latency. In short, there is virtually nothing we can learn from this statement and we can only wait to see what it will look like in reality.
But the fact remains: AMD has divided the drivers into two versions: one for RDNA 3 and higher, the other for older video cards. This in itself says enough that they will definitely not be the same.
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Source : Zing
