Linux users have no reason to worry about recent AMD GPU driver changes

By Liam Dawe - 31 Oct 2025 at 1:55 pm UTC

Last updated: 31 Oct 2025 at 3:29 pm UTC

This is a little PSA to Linux users and Linux gamers, with news reports out there about AMD shifting focus away from certain GPUs.

What's happening? People noticed in the Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 release notes how it says "New Game Support and Expanded Vulkan Extensions Support is available to Radeon™ RX 7000 and 9000 series graphics products" signaling a shift away from earlier generations like the popular Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series. According to computerbase.de, they've had confirmation from AMD that the RX 5000 and RX 6000 series are indeed going into "maintenance mode".

The thing is - this only concerns the Windows driver.

Linux uses a very different driver system with the open source Mesa project that contains many drivers, and AMD recently discontinued their AMDVLK to give their full support for Mesa's RADV. So, you don't need to worry about it if you're on Linux, as we've seen from updates to Mesa for some pretty old GPUs at times. And, with Mesa drivers being open source, anyone can pick up the torch anytime if an older driver stops being updated by the existing maintainers. Something that's not the case with closed-source drivers.

Oh, and of course we have Valve with SteamOS Linux with the Steam Deck using an AMD APU - it's not like Valve are going to stop all the driver upgrades any time soon either which benefits all Linux users.

Anyway, the recent news is nothing to worry about for Linux gamers.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: AMD, Drivers, Misc, Open Source

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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8 comments

Stella 7 hours ago

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Crazy that they would drop support for products that are only 2 years old, RDNA2 is from 2020 and some RDNA2 products lower in the stack are from 2023,such as the relatively unknown Radeon RX 6550S and Radeon RX 6550M and some China variants of the 6750. Nvidia still fully supports Turing in their Windows/Linux drivers and that's from 2018

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CatKiller 7 hours ago

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Nvidia still fully supports Turing in their Windows/Linux drivers and that's from 2018

Nvidia currently supports Maxwell, from 2014.

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Breizh 6 hours ago

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Nvidia currently supports Maxwell, from 2014.

But what kind of support? Do they add new features or are they only fixing bugs?

Because AMD says that "RX 5000 and RX 6000 series are indeed going into 'maintenance mode'.", which means they’ll continue to maintain it, just not add new features.

And when they created FSR, it was supported on a lot of GPUs that didn’t had big drivers update anymore at the time, so I don’t think it’s a big deal.

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mi1stormilst 5 hours ago

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My GTX 1060 is still a perfectly serviceable 1080p gaming card for reasonable settings on a lot of games. I do not like the fact that companies just get to decide when I don't get to keep using my hardware how I want. My iPhone 13 worked as good as most phones up until I decided to trade it in 4+ years later for a 17 Pro. My soundbar keeps doing its job for as long as I want it to. My TV does not stop playing shows and movies 10 years later. The core function of any product should continue to be supported indefinitely for it's core functions. The real issue here is that these companies have R&D and marketing strategies that have created markets where some products are replaced too frequently only for the purpose of revenue. My fridge is 10 years old and still keeps my food cold. I had a 40-year VW Beetle that I drove to work every day for 10 years. It was up to me to sacrifice my safety and modern amenities for a cheap way to commute.

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CatKiller 5 hours ago

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But what kind of support? Do they add new features or are they only fixing bugs?

Everything. The current branch (580) has Maxwell support. They've said that they'll drop pre-Turing from the next branch, though, whenever that happens, after which 580 will be a legacy branch.

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Jarmer 4 hours ago

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Agree with others: it's wild to me that the 6800xt will now be considered in "maintenance mode" on windows machines. I used that card right up until recently and it's still perfectly capable of running anything at all on 1440p ultrawide at high settings. I even ran Avowed this year on it which is a shitty ue5 engine game (the engine being shitty, not the game lol, the game is great) and it ran 60fps on high. Which is incredible!

That's some pretty shitty behavior by AMD. But I am still glad we've got Mesa on linux!

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Shmerl 4 hours ago

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For the reference, I linked it in the other thread, but if you are curious, here are places in Mesa and dxvk/vkd3d-proton that deal with game specific fixes:

* radeonsi (OpenGL) and non radv Vulkan: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-mesa-defaults.conf [External Link]
* radv (Vulkan): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-radv-defaults.conf [External Link]
* dxvk: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/config/config.cpp#L21 [External Link]
* vkd3d-proton: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/master/libs/vkd3d/device.c#L541 [External Link]

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Pyrate 3 hours ago

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Can't imagine my 6800xt being considered maintenance only. Thank god for Mesa emoji

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