AMD has been making some very significant moves lately, from the debut of their Advantage Framework laptops to the launch of their FidelityFX Super Resolution technology.
However, this latest move might irk some of AMDs’ long-standing user base. The manufacturer has decided to shift all their GPUs and APUs before Polaris/GCN 1.4. to the ‘legacy’ category. They will also not be supported by the new Radeon Software Adrenalin releases.
AMD has stated that products ranging from the A-series APUs to the Radeon R9 300 series (and the R9 Fury) will now be considered ‘legacy’ and will not be getting new releases from their mainline driver. The company published the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.6.1 release on Monday, with 21.5.2 being the final for the pre-Polaris GPUs.
This would mean that all their GPUs prior to 2016, when the Graphics Core Next 4 was launched with the Radeon 400, are now ‘legacy.’ The Radeon Software support announcement wasn’t made on community.amd.com.
All of this is related to the Windows driver and the Radeon Software packaged driver. Those who are using the mainline open-source AMD Radeon graphics drivers won’t be affected. The Radeon and AMDGPU kernel drivers will remain a part of the mainline kernel, and there are no plans to eliminate those while the R300g/R600g/RadeonSI OpenGL drivers remain in Mesa.
AMD’s Linux open-source developers have been primarily focused on the latest generation of GPUs but, because of the open-source nature, support for older GPUs will still be made available in the community as capable individuals can continue to improve support for older GPUs.
For example, Gert is still working on a NIR back-end for R600 Gallium3D, and many other individuals are also constantly offering support for the older Radeon GPUs. But, don’t expect any significant updates to come from AMD engineers in the future.
One of the most sought-after improvements for GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs on Linux was the ability to migrate the default kernel driver from Radeon DRM to the AMDGPU DRM, which could result in better performance, Vulkan support, and other valuable features. Currently, users can still shift to the AMDGPU driver, but there haven’t been any efforts to make it the default change. This changeover has been kept on hold due to the AMDGPU code.
AMD may mark the Pre-Polaris support in Radeon Software for Linux drivers as end-of-life, but the packaged driver isn’t exactly popular outside of Linux environments. So, Linux users will be barely impacted by this decision.
About Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
AMD develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. AMD’s main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers and embedded system applications.
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