• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

AMD Retires driver updates for ALL VLIW4/5 GPUs/APUs

rtho782 said:
So people buying a Trinity APU in May 2013 have had about 2.5 years of drivers, less than the 3 year warranty AMD APUs are sold with.
Click to expand...

I doubt someone who bought a Trinity APU in 2013 is expecting to play the latest games at any sort of decent settings anyway. Plus there will still be drivers for older hardware but optimization will now be for GCN 1.0 and beyond only. Which makes sense, as far as I'm aware Nvidia's older generation cards are legacy also. This is just standard practice.
 
andybird123 said:
NVIDIA current drivers still support all the way back to the GTX480 Boom.
Click to expand...

Boom? didn't Nvidia promise DX12 for Fermi, yet haven't delivered it? Didn't Nvidia spend 6 months with dire support in terms of optimisation for performance on cards only a year old, boom.

The reality is DX12 is a game changer. 95% of driver development and optimisations and probably 75% of games next year will be around DX12, thus DX11 hardware is semi dead already.

It was pretty much a given that non GCN architectures were going to take a significant back seat as of Windows 10, I have no idea why anyone would believe otherwise.

Lets be honest, the last non GCN architecture launched in late 2010 and it wasn't far removed from the architecture that launched in late 2009.

Has anything deemed high end or high performance launched on a non GCN architecture in the past 5 years, maybe, the 6990 I guess, I can't remember when the hell it came out, I seem to remember it took longer than the 5970 to appear.
 
Lol

DX12 support is supposed to be coming end of the year I thought?
Cant find anything about them dropping that statement unless anyone's google skills are better than mine?
 
andybird123 said:
Lol

DX12 support is supposed to be coming end of the year I thought?
Cant find anything about them dropping that statement unless anyone's google skills are better than mine?
Click to expand...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9472/windows-10-launch-day-gpu-support-summary

Read that ^

Also, do you just like trying to cause an argument? This a thread about AMD retiring drivers for 5-6 year old chips... I came here to talk about that. I don't give a damn what Nvidia do/don't do.

Anyway, you could see this coming from a mile away. They're getting old and obsolete now.
 
Last edited:
andybird123 said:
Yeah, it says delayed, not cancelled... After that article NVIDIA said "end of the year"... I've not seen them update that or say cancelled?
Click to expand...

I highly doubt they'll ever see DX12, it would hardly benefit them. Plus Nvidia want people to buy their latest and greatest, not hold onto old cards.
 
So AMD had working DX12 drivers for everything they said they would at launch, so did Intel, Nvidia don't have support for the oldest architecture with incidentally almost no real DX12 support anyway but were happy to shout about support for those cards for a year before Windows 10 launched. So now this old generation of cards with basically nothing new happening with it in years for some reason isn't ready?

It's not like Nvidia lie though. I believe the whole 144hz/woeful power efficiency problem they have was ignored for a year, finally exposed to which they immediately promised a driver fix, which has since been restated (fairly quietly) as probably not being fixable without an architecture change. So how long of Maxwell is uber efficient, pair it with our overpriced 144hz g-sync panels, or the even worse priced overclocked panels which(I'm not sure on this) AFAIK aren't even guaranteed at that higher speed... which completely breaks the power efficiency of the architecture. So use 70-80W less while gaming for a few hours a day but use 100W more for the other multiple hours people leave their computers on a day.

970 3.5/4GB issue, Nvidia lie, a hell of a lot. They said it would have support from launch, it didn't. There isn't an obvious reason why it shouldn't except if they found out they just can't get the cards working with DX12, in which case it's another lie.

If they realised they couldn't support it I'd absolutely expect Nvidia to lie about it for a while and hope everyone forgets and just never deliver the driver.
 
Boomstick777 said:
I doubt someone who bought a Trinity APU in 2013 is expecting to play the latest games at any sort of decent settings anyway. Plus there will still be drivers for older hardware but optimization will now be for GCN 1.0 and beyond only. Which makes sense, as far as I'm aware Nvidia's older generation cards are legacy also. This is just standard practice.
Click to expand...

Ssh, overclockers dream is getting old now so this will be the new AMD beating stick lol
 
The only issue I have with this is that it means that chips still under warranty are not going to get driver updates (APUs 2.5 years old).

That's assuming all Trinity products vanished from the market when Richland came out, which... they didn't.

Hell, the R5 230, which I know is low end, was released in April 2014. It's only just 18 months old and now it will no longer receive driver updates?
 
Does this mean that you can't game on old cards anymore? The drivers wont be adapted for new games so they'll run like crap or not at all? I play with someone who has crossfire 5870s still.
 
MooMoo444 said:
Does this mean that you can't game on old cards anymore? The drivers wont be adapted for new games so they'll run like crap or not at all? I play with someone who has crossfire 5870s still.
Click to expand...

You won't get driver updates for the old cards, so he won't ever see another crossfire profile, so he may as well bin the 2nd card with regards to games released from today.

From the article:

Furthermore AMD is not planning on any further driver releases for these cards – the announcement makes no mention of a security update support period – so today’s driver release is the final driver release for these cards.
 
MooMoo444 said:
Does this mean that you can't game on old cards anymore? The drivers wont be adapted for new games so they'll run like crap or not at all? I play with someone who has crossfire 5870s still.
Click to expand...

lol, so while people who bought 2x Fury or 980ti's yesterday can't get SLI/xfire in Fallout 4, it's the guy with the 6 year old 5870s who will really suffer without xfire :p
 
MooMoo444 said:
Does this mean that you can't game on old cards anymore? The drivers wont be adapted for new games so they'll run like crap or not at all? I play with someone who has crossfire 5870s still.
Click to expand...
Not at all. I don't know where this recent nonsense about needing a new driver for every game release came from really. I was using a 4870 until mid-2013, which AMD dropped driver support for in early 2012. I played through Bioshock Infinite on it about a year after driver updates stopped and it was fine. Actually ran a whole lot better than I expected it to on such an old card. I might have even kept using it for another year until my new build had it not died a couple of months later.
 
Lmao, I've only just realised that DM's diatribe at me was because he thought I was saying BOOM! When I was just referring to the previous poster in short hand, Boomstick777.
 
Aretak said:
Not at all. I don't know where this recent nonsense about needing a new driver for every game release came from really. I was using a 4870 until mid-2013, which AMD dropped driver support for in early 2012. I played through Bioshock Infinite on it about a year after driver updates stopped and it was fine. Actually ran a whole lot better than I expected it to on such an old card. I might have even kept using it for another year until my new build had it not died a couple of months later.
Click to expand...

You do need crossfire profiles though, for anyone running a pair of older cards or a dual-gpu card like the 6990.
 
Those 4 or 5 year old chips include the FM2 APU's that still available on sale from this very store today, so not quite so 4 or 5 years old after all.
 
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2939

So because this is still on sale here

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pali...file-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-019-pl.html

despite coming out 5 years ago it's still current and should be supported in the same way for the same length as say a 980ti? Old products stay in stock around the place, it doesn't change the fact you're buying what is a multiple year old product and that comes with a less up to date support than you'd get for a newer product.

Supporting products forever is just asking for current products to have less work and time put into them. A 5 year old architecture that doesn't support DX12 as the entire industry shifts to DX12 really shouldn't be supported heavily more.

AMD tend to have less trouble with new games and less need for game ready drivers. I don't upgrade drivers very often at all and plenty of games I play work well on old drivers. These cards won't stop working because there are no new drivers. DX9-11 development is dead. There are going to be very few new features or innovative stuff happening with it. If you can run a DX11 game out today on that architecture chances are it can do everything any dev will ever be able to produce on DX11. Meaning there isn't going to be an awful lot of buggy new DX11 code happening, all the new stuff will be happening on DX12 which those cards won't support.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom