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

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

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

Nvidia currently supports Maxwell, from 2014.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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]

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

I'm annoyed on behalf of my friend since she has a RX 6700 XT. I picked out the parts at the beginning of 2023 because her now husband wanted to surprise her with a new computer. We went with it because it was the same price as the 3060 12gb at the time. She has no need for an upgrade as the main games she plays e-sports games, games like peak and R.E.P.O, and alot of FFXIV. Tho she hates updating drivers so she probably wouldn't mind too much.

I used to not recommend AMD cards to my friends do to not liking the Vega windows drivers when I was on windows, do to bugs I had and the terrible OpenGL performance since we played a lot of Minecraft back then and it would prevent us from playing games on Citra together.

I started recommending AMD cards again (if they where just gaming) starting with her computer because AMD resolved those issues. But now I question it since me and my friends don't upgrade computer that often and we don't all have a lot of money. We just upgraded half our GPUs from basically high school this year RX 580 4gb --> 2080ti(Does Video editing and 3D modeling), 1660 ti --> 5070 ti(just wanted to stay on Nvidia), Vega 56 --> RX 7700 XT(Me). I just recommended a RX 9070 to a friend since they want to upgrade their whole computer from high school (it can't update to windows 11 and they can't use Linux) we build for $500 with a RX 570 4gb and want it to last some time but now I question how long that card will get updates and if I should tell them to change it to a 5070 since they are still saving up for it.

i'm not sure what AMD is aiming for here...

not going bankrupt?

going bankrupt faster?

protecting the Steam Deck from being used on Windows?

forcing other handheld gamers to replace windows with GamerOS?

making win10 users hate win12 even more when they are forced to jump?

🤔