Nvidia still supports its USB-C variant, Virtual Link, to this day, despite no GPUs since the RTX 20 series having the port. In fact, the company supported its Maxwell and Pascal graphics for roughly a decade, with the GTX 10-series being part of the day-one priority list all the way up until September of last year, a whole eight years after it first debuted. Perhaps that's what you can do when you're the richest company in the world. Contrast that to RDNA 1/2, and even with the RX 7000/9000 hierarchy in mind, the decision seems baffling.
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Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
-Fran- AMD really needs to come out and clarify this further. Typical AMD screw up. Regards. Reply
LordVile I doubt they’ll drop drivers for bespoke devices with large multinationals. Likely just the desktop parts Reply
hwertz Just put Linux on it. They have Vulkan support down to GCN1.0, fully supported, fully up to date, still receiving speedups, bug fixes, support for new Vulkan versions as they come out, with no plans to put it in some 'maintenance mode'. (And fully supported drivers going back about 20 years for Intel and AMD/ATI GPUs.) Reply
enb141 I've been saying this for years, AMD support is crap, I got an 6400 a few years ago because getting an Nvidia back then was an impossible task. Back then I said that card had crappy drivers, nobody listened to me, now a few years later, time proved me right. Reply
edzieba LordVile said: I doubt they’ll drop drivers for bespoke devices with large multinationals. Likely just the desktop parts If they were willing to continue developing optimisations for the RDNA2 architecture, there'd be no reason to drop that for consumer cards but keep doing that work for OEM ones. It's a minimal additional overhead to the actual work, but with a big public relations backlash. hwertz said: Just put Linux on it. They have Vulkan support down to GCN1.0, fully supported, fully up to date, still receiving speedups, bug fixes, support for new Vulkan versions as they come out, with no plans to put it in some 'maintenance mode'. (And fully supported drivers going back about 20 years for Intel and AMD/ATI GPUs.) If the issue is lack of ongoing per-game optimisation, "switch to Linux" is an anti-solution. AMD aren't stopping bugfixes or security updates for older cards. Reply
Steelninja1977 enb141 said: I've been saying this for years, AMD support is crap, I got an 6400 a few years ago because getting an Nvidia back then was an impossible task. Back then I said that card had crappy drivers, nobody listened to me, now a few years later, time proved me right. Dude that's just a crappy card. I had been with AMD 15 years right up till my Rx6800 and the drivers were great. Literally no issues. I moved to Nvidia and bought a 4080 super and had driver issues out the box. Nvidias main 4080 super drivers just didn't work. I had to go to the manufacturer website and get them. It's been fixed since then. But the 4080 super wasn't even a new card. I never had that issue with AMD. All I had with AMD was FTL drive in elite would drop to like 15 fps and it took them about a year to fix it. On my R9 390x back in the day. But that was game specific. Reply
LordVile edzieba said: If they were willing to continue developing optimisations for the RDNA2 architecture, there'd be no reason to drop that for consumer cards but keep doing that work for OEM ones. It's a minimal additional overhead to the actual work, but with a big public relations backlash. If the issue is lack of ongoing per-game optimisation, "switch to Linux" is an anti-solution. AMD aren't stopping bugfixes or security updates for older cards. They’ll have deals with AMD to keep it up to date or will provide the support themselves à la Valve. Linux is useless anyway for most people and isn’t user friendly unless you have a steamos type overlay. There’s a reason why the Linux crowd number in the dozens Reply
Ogotai hwertz said: Just put Linux on it. close minded thinking, once again. not every one can, or knows how to use linux, or what they use a pc for, may not be viable as its all windows based.. sorry but " just switch/use linux * is not a good answer or alternative.. Reply
helper800 LordVile said: They’ll have deals with AMD to keep it up to date or will provide the support themselves à la Valve. Linux is useless anyway for most people and isn’t user friendly unless you have a steamos type overlay. There’s a reason why the Linux crowd number in the dozens There are about 33 million people on Linux worldwide, while about 100 million are on mac OS. Windows has about 1.4 billion people. If there is nobody on linux, then there mind as well be nobody on Mac OS either. Reply
JayGau Steelninja1977 said: Dude that's just a crappy card. I had been with AMD 15 years right up till my Rx6800 and the drivers were great. Literally no issues. I moved to Nvidia and bought a 4080 super and had driver issues out the box. Nvidias main 4080 super drivers just didn't work. I had to go to the manufacturer website and get them. It's been fixed since then. But the 4080 super wasn't even a new card. I never had that issue with AMD. All I had with AMD was FTL drive in elite would drop to like 15 fps and it took them about a year to fix it. On my R9 390x back in the day. But that was game specific. You are both doing the same thing, using your own anecdotal experience to convince people that your favorite brand has the best drivers. But I have never heard about any widespread problems with the rtx 40 series drivers. They got some issues during the first months of the 50 series but it's solved now. And if I do the same thing too, my 4080 worked awesomely out of the box and never had an issue (until the 50 series launch but it's fine now). Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpu-drivers/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpu-drivers/amd-decision-to-put-rdna-2-gpus-in-maintenance-mode-could-spell-trouble-for-handheld-gaming-systems-including-rog-xbox-ally-company-backtracks-on-rx-7900-series-usb-c-functionality-but-not-on-rdna-2-support#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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