This public statement backs up the response Tom's Hardware received from AMD at the tail end of last week.
"New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch," an AMD spokesperson told Tom's Hardware last week.
This probably puts to bed any ideas of those older AMD cards getting the latest upscaling support, despite what modders have already proved is possible . AMD's early cards were notoriously and significantly behind the Nvidia curve when it came to upscaling and ray tracing support. With how much greater focus recent generations of AMD hardware and the latest games have placed on these technologies, perhaps it makes sense for AMD to keep its efforts for these new features focused on the future and recent past.
Either way, it's good to know that game optimizations will remain for those on older cards, even if they won't get quite the same shiny new features as the latest designs.
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Jon Martindale Freelance Writer Jon Martindale is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. For the past 20 years, he's been writing about PC components, emerging technologies, and the latest software advances. His deep and broad journalistic experience gives him unique insights into the most exciting technology trends of today and tomorrow.
Makaveli Their marketing person could have worded it better for sure however the tech tubers and the rage bait all these guys caused over this was incredible. It seems none of them understands maintenance mode does not equal no driver support. But when I think about the viewers of those channels it make sense majority are just gamers and don't actually know anything about computers. Reply
DS426 I appreciate AMD making these clarifications. It also makes sense to me that drivers would be forked at this point between RDNA 1+2 and 3+4. Reply
jlake3 Makaveli said: Their marketing person could have worded it better for sure however the tech tubers and the rage bait all these guys caused over this was incredible. It seems none of them understands maintenance mode does not equal no driver support. But when I think about the viewers of those channels it make sense majority are just gamers and don't actually know anything about computers. I've been amazed by the number of people who don't understand "Maintenance" != "Abandoned", the number of people who don't understand that different architectures require different code paths (even if Nvidia bundles them into a single exe file) and the number of people with absolutely unreasonable expectations for what can actually be done in a drivers (10 years of new feature development is really hard when there isn't support in silicon for RT, mesh shaders, or new codecs) I'm seeing so many things that are incomplete/misleading at best and outright wrong at worst getting upvoted ("history shows no AMD product the maintenance track has ever gotten a driver update" being one of the claims that really hurt my brain, because like… check their driver page?) , while anything that doesn't agree with the "Radeon bad" narrative gets buried. AMD certainly did themselves no favors with how long they've kept RDNA 2 on the market or with their communication, but moving RDNA 1+2 to a more stable driver branch with a slower cadence because there's less to gain and more that could break seems very reasonable. Especially with all the QC issues on the Nvidia side over the last year. Reply
thestryker While I agree the overreaction is real AMD's original notes indicated that it wasn't going to be getting day one game support anymore. That would imply that they're not actually going to be kept up to date with RDNA 3/4. Now this obviously didn't happen when they had shifted Vega over, but there was no indication otherwise then either. I'd say I'm amazed when companies are tone deaf and create these problems for themselves, but Intel axed their marketing department as cost cutting. Despite not being as pivotal as engineering to the success of a tech company institutional knowledge is still important to avoid repeating past mistakes and ensuring proper communication of what's actually going on. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
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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-clarifies-its-clarifications-on-controversial-rdna-1-and-2-driver-note-company-will-continue-game-optimization-support-after-all#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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