AMD Product and OS Support changed with release of Drivers 12.6.1

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Truder, Jun 22, 2021.

  1. nosirrahx

    nosirrahx Master Guru

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    The only case I know of where Nvidia pulled some serious BS was with the 9XX series and Windows XP. Some of the GTX 9XX cards had support and some didn't, even though 100% of them had full compatibility. The incompatible cards were artificially blocked through the removal of device IDs from the driver packages. As with with all artificial incompatibility there are simple bypasses:

    https://mattpilz.com/windows-xp-drivers-nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-980-980-ti-titan-x/
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2021
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  2. nosirrahx

    nosirrahx Master Guru

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    Well........Ryzen happened and Intel started saying stuff about AMD's "crappy glue together chips" so you can see how things went down hill. When these devices were conceived AMD was at best a low end CPU company with a few decent budget parts but today AMD is beyond legit and so is the war. It sucks but I don't see them coming together to do the right thing for what amounts to a few thousand users of these niche devices.
     
  3. Truder

    Truder Ancient Guru

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    Fury X yeah against the 980 ti has been sad but I wouldn't say it's been overall bad, certainly troubled but it's held up rather well despite the VRAM limitation, when you account for that it still manages to do its job.
    Fury against the 980 though has done remarkably well in comparison (those are their respective market positions).

    While some are saying GCN1.2 or GCN3 or however AMD wants to refer to GCN iterations is still comparable to Polaris, the fact is, they are old and power hungry cards. While it seems unfair to reduce support compared to their release counterparts of Maxwell, speaking as a Fury owner, there is really little more to gain in continuing support, we should be upgrading our hardware to more efficient architectures. Heck the image sharpening, even though that is supported on Fury which was the last "new" feature to be introduced, you wouldn't believe how much it increases the workload on the GPU (even though the FPS impact is very minimal) heat output of the card increases dramatically. Sometimes, new features on older hardware just aren't worth it because of possible complications.

    Having said all that, I do agree that the timing of this is a bit of a kick in the teeth with regards to current market conditions and to add more salt to the wound is, on AMDs support page regarding the legacy information, they say
    which, I for one certainly do want to upgrade but the market is too chaotic to be able to reasonably consider purchasing a new card.
     
  4. rl66

    rl66 Ancient Guru

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    You are right, but quite similar doesn't mean the same...
    Sadly for Fury owner the card were expensive, energyvore and perform lesser than Polaris despite more power on the GPU...
    With latest driver they gain back some advantage and perform very well even now... But Polaris too.
    Most of the time they let 3 gen alive, it's not new, we know that it should happen at one time (and yes polaris will be the next one) but their "legacy" driver are still very good with less bug ( see there is good point too).
     

  5. rl66

    rl66 Ancient Guru

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    You are right but we have time before they put them legacy, as this announcement will be effective in next future so the post generation will be legacy in a year or two.
    And anyway it is way better than Intel that on low end sell new IGP that are already in legacy drivers before they reached the shop...
     
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  6. Yxskaft

    Yxskaft Maha Guru

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    Intel is horrible in the way that they never update drivers with new functionality, but they do have quite a long support time for security fixes. They still release security fixes for Ivy Bridge.

    But driver development is the reason I do occasionally look up the situation for Linux, Intel in particular is cool there because even Ivy Bridge supports Vulkan, whereas Haswell doesn't even on Windows.
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2021
  7. rl66

    rl66 Ancient Guru

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    But on linux there is a lot of active developper even on drivers that help too... so you are right (and linux is better :) ).
    On windows you still have security and some update on legacy driver, on whatever brand NVidia,AMD or Intel, it's just slower but not halted, and will still work some year after put in legacy segment.
     
  8. chispy

    chispy Ancient Guru

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    I agree the timming of this end of support for gcn arch is way off due to the crazy prices and market on new gpus than nobody can find in stock. In my opinnion they should have waited until gpu prices and market stabilize completely as not everyone can update to the latest and greatest gpus. Bye bye Windows 7 we had a great run together :D
     
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  9. Agonist

    Agonist Ancient Guru

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    I currently have a fury x i play with. Honestly I dont seen a problem with this.
    Card didn't age that great.
     
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  10. SamuelL421

    SamuelL421 Master Guru

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    I think the truth is somewhere between these points you both made. The fury lineup weren't big sellers and they compare more closely with the previous generations than they do with RDNA 1/2. AMD is leading in x86 cpus (for now) and competitive again for high end GPUs. No one from AMD is ever going to say this publicly, but supporting older, much slower hardware long-term does your brand no favors in terms of moving up-market. Look around at most high-end products - especially tech - and you'll see that planned obsolescence is definitely a part of the brand strategy. If anything we should just be thankful that polaris managed to escape the chopping block for now.
     

  11. MonstroMart

    MonstroMart Maha Guru

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    I dunno about that. Not optimizing your drivers for 1 generation old hardware because you want to push ray tracing is a pretty dick move in my book. As a past owner of a 1070 i can tell you this card was end of support the day RTX was released. The drivers still supported the card in the sense it did install and work but it was not optimized at all anymore for the card. It went from as good as Vega 56 to 20-30% behind Vega 56 in a lot of the newer titles. In Hitman 3 Vega 56 is 35% better than 1070 at both 1080p and 1440p. In CP 2077 Vega 56 is 30% better at 1440p and 21% better at 1080p. In ACV Vega 56 is 32% better at both 1440p and 1080p (last 3 games reviewed by Guru3d with 1070 numbers). I experienced this first hand when my 1070 all of a sudden was often not good enough anymore for new titles while apparently the vega 56 still was "forcing" me to upgrade to avoid reducing the quality. My choice of a 5700XT was mostly due to me being pissed off by nVidia.
     
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  12. H83

    H83 Ancient Guru

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    I have to agree with this. Sometimes the difference between being supported or not is just related to marketing.

    After 3 or 4 years the updates pretty much dry up even if the card remains being supported for another 3 or 4 years...

    But the cards continue to work so my advice is to save the most stable driver you guys have and enjoy the cards as much as possible.
     
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  13. Kaarme

    Kaarme Ancient Guru

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    Haha, yeah. That's true. I have rejected drivers a couple of times because I wasn't happy with them.
     
  14. Astyanax

    Astyanax Ancient Guru

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    AMD are historically more likely to kill hardware support than nvidia, with nvidia typically providing 6+ years of architecture support and AMD moving products to legacy within 5.

    Fermi got 8 years
    Kepler got almost 10 years for christs sakes.

    AMD has history of leaving the last legacy driver in a broken/crippled state.
    I believe terrascale had opencl completely broken amongst other issues.
     
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  15. user1

    user1 Ancient Guru

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    if it costs X dollars to design, manufacture and support a gpu, and it doesn't sell well enough to cover those costs, then dropping support after 5-6 years doesn't seem unreasonable, 5-6 years is about the same as what the hd 4000 series and hd 6000 series got as well. I think the only reason gcn1&2 series got such a long life span was due to its 3-4 rebrandeon reincarnations, and that amd was not able to replace them due to budget constraints.


    vega lives on in their professional and compute products, so i doubt those will be dropped anytime soon , they've got at least another 3-4 years.
     
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  16. evolucion888

    evolucion888 Guest

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    BINGO! It also happened with Kepler and Maxwell that nVidia would stop optimizing for older generations when a new generation arrived, the issue is that they tend to have different ISAs across GPUs that one optimization won't pass into older generations like AMD does as one of the biggest culprits in optimization with nVidia, is the monumental effort to hand tune the scheduler in a per game/per engine basis while AMD's scheduling is mostly done on the GPU, but Fury X and Polaris are ISA compatible to even Vega but the changes in Polaris made it more straightforward when optimizing for it, Fury X has a severe geometry and front end bottleneck that an RX 580 with nearly half of the die size is as fast or faster even with its 55% core count deficit.
     
  17. moo100times

    moo100times Master Guru

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    As someone still riding the 295x2 until prices stabilise, I am not that surprised that the 2xx series support is ending. They have been around a while, great GPU's for their time but every dog has their day.
    I really have more resentment towards the dx12 and mgpu functionality touted never being realised rather than eventual driver support being discontinued 8 years later.

    As @schmidtbag stated, linux might be where to turn to for these gpu's to enjoy their twilight years.
     
  18. Mineria

    Mineria Ancient Guru

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    It's AMD as how they are used to be.
     

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