AMD Begins Polaris and Vega GPU Retirement Process, Reduces Ongoing Driver Support

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. From a report: 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."

For AMD users keeping a close eye on their driver releases, they'll likely recognize that AMD already began this process back in September -- though AMD hasn't officially documented the change until now. As of AMD's September Adrenaline 23.9 driver series, AMD split up the RDNA and GCN driver packages, and with that they have also split the driver branches between the two architectures. As a result, only RDNA cards are receiving new features and updates as part of AMD's mainline driver branch (currently 23.20), while the GCN cards have been parked on a maintenance driver branch - 23.19.

Maybe about time

[UMichEE]

I've got an RX 580 (Polaris). It's getting to the point where it doesn't run a lot of the newest releases well. I suppose there's not much point in updating drivers for a new game like Starfield if the GPU can't actually perform well enough for a game like Starfield. Still, it's only 6 years old.

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[higuita]

well, my RX480 is still good enough, just like yours RX580 ... the problem is really some new games are HEAVY, assume you have the top CPU and GPU and even on those the performance isn't that high... half finish optimization, or even lack of , and unfinished/unpolished games, many studios are really releasing early access games, not finished games anymore

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[mccalli]

My RX480 hit its first problem this year - the Elder Scrolls Online Necrom expansion [elderscrollsonline.com]. There were parts of that where the machine literally just switched off in the middle of the battle at high detail and even medium detail. Forced me back to low res for a bit.

Thing is a GPU upgrade for me would likely trigger a machine upgrade rather than just GPU (Skylake-era i5, can't run Win11), and I just don't see the value for me personally. It's just a games launcher to me, I use other platforms as my home and pro

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[Narcocide]

The machine just switched off at high load? That sounds more like an issue with your power supply.

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[drinkypoo]

It could be, or on an equally mundane level it could be a GPU VRM problem, or a thermal compound failure causing overheat shutdown.

OTOH I had a laptop with the nvidia G71 die bonding failure and that was thermal. Quadro 1500FX, which was very impressive for what it was until it started failing. Was it let down by the cooling, maybe, but I doubt it since it was an Elitebook and it had massive airflow.

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[dunkelfalke]

I replaced a RX480 with a RTX2060 on a much older sandy bridge Xeon machine. Worked well enough.

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[Mal-2]

Check the GPU fan(s). I've had them fail silently before, and the only sign of trouble was incredibly high GPU temps, which would induce throttling in less than a minute. Then it started crashing, and by that time it was too late to save that GPU.

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[alvinrod]

Polaris was a mid-range product even at release so it's hardly surprising that it's struggling with newer titles after six years, especially if you bought the one with only 4 GB of VRAM. They've certainly gotten better support from AMD than the Pascal generation of cards released around the same time got from Nvidia.

so?

[drinkypoo]

I have a laptop with Vega graphics. It has like 2 or 3 GPU cores so it's not expected to do gaming. But I have zero need to use the closed driver. The Free/open one works great. The performance is as bad as you would expect from a bottom of the line APU, but it seems to me like all the features work including suspend resume, opengl, etc. it's not going to affect me if there is no corporate driver support. I will keep running Linux and it will probably keep working fine.

Interestingly this machine came with Windows 10 and the closed source video driver crashed repeatedly RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX. Like when I used the machine for the very first time, the way it was shipped from HP, the graphics driver was trash. I might have run windows on it for a moment if not for that. Instead I immediately put mint on it. It's running Devuan now. I pity anyone actually depending on AMD for video drivers. Crap like that is why I only buy discrete GPUs from Nvidia. They just keep putting out drivers for old GPUs. I'm fact I JUST upgraded the driver on my desktop, which has a 1070. That's from 2016, it's quite a bit older than my laptop with Vega graphics.

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[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

A couple of points there,
- I think this is about the amdvlk driver for Linux, you and I use the amdgpu driver.
- I don't have any machines left with nVidia GPUs, basically because I used to have problems with the nouveau driver and the closed source ones were unusable.

This story had me really worried until I ran lsmod and checked which driver was loaded, some of the comments here also made it clear that this is not a problem for me.

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[drinkypoo]

- I think this is about the amdvlk driver for Linux, you and I use the amdgpu driver.

Right, that's my very point.

- I don't have any machines left with nVidia GPUs, basically because I used to have problems with the nouveau driver and the closed source ones were unusable.

I'm using the closed source nvidia drivers right now. I am on Devuan. I run the installer. The driver works great. I'm gonna go play me some Halo here in a second, for some reason I got the urge to play through the whole series again. I think later I might update stable-diffusion and play with it, I haven't done that in a while. What's the problem?

Wait, what?

[G00F]

So when I look up my laptop hardware, it's release was 2021 (I bought in 2022) it's already being EoL?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

And my desktop 480 (still good by my standards but looking to maybe upgrade) is being EOL too. sucks....

Such short life cycles...

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[sconeu]

5700XT is Navi, reasonably priced, and works for my (non-gaming) purposes.

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[G00F]

Thanks!
not bad, but damn is that thing power power hungry!

But how is it's Windows 7 support? ;)

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[serviscope_minor]

Not exactly.

It sounds like it's no longer getting new features.

Awkward.

[blackomegax]

They just released a 7000 series laptop APU with vega for graphics...many new on shelf products have vega APU to this day. Meanwhile nvidia is out here still supporting GTX700 and GTX900 series.

No more driver for their most current desktop APU?

[ffkom]

The most recent AMD APU on the market for desktop PCs is the 5700G, which has "Vega" GPU cores. And AMD stops supporting those? That sounds crazy... at least as crazy as the fact they did not bother to sell any desktop APU in their 6000 or 7000 series.

AMD reduces support for the Steam Deck and...

[damas]

... their most popular products. These are the top AMD graphics cards on Steam:

• * AMD Radeon Graphics @ 1.47% - all APUs using Vega cores
• * AMD Radeon RX 580 @ 0.72% - Polaris
• * AMD Custom GPU 0405 @ 0.59% - Vega Steam Deck
• * AMD Radeon RX 570 @ 0.52% - Polaris

Great job!