PC Drivers & Software

[End_of_life_user]

Simple question.

How can AMD justify killing support for a laptop device that's less than 3 years old?

I have a Lenovo 330, A9 chipset machine, and with the release of the new Radeon software 21.6.1, effectively, my machine is unsupported, so if Microsoft updates Win 10, and breaks something, I've nowhere to go, and that means replacing a machine that does what I need, in a reasonable time frame, and it still has plenty of storage etc. It wasn't an end of life machine purchased from a back street clearance house, the retailer was still selling a similar model to mine 12 months ago, it had the same CPU/GPU content, just a different drive and memory.

Looks to me like AMD has just well and truly lost any loyalty I might have had to them, and I am going to be very reluctant to buy anything with an AMD sticker on it going foward.

Am I the only person who thinks that AMD is no longer a good place to be looking when considering hardware in future?

[LivingTheDream]

I too am deeply disappointed by the total and utter lack of notice or advance warning of deprecation of support. I purchased an R9 Fury brand new in box back in 2016 with the expectation of roughly 8 years of support, not FIVE, and I certainly expected some advance notice as someone who purchased a flagship GPU. In the meantime Maxwell equivalents (gtx 980/980ti) are still fully supported by Nvidia and to be completely frank I find it downright astonishing that the company that purported itself to be the "value" proposition dumpsters its customers whenever they want while Nvidia will give easily a year's notice of impending driver deprecation.

Considering this isn't the first time this has happened (My AMD Richland APU laptop was deprecated from support TWO years after purchase) I'm done recommending AMD GPUs or APUs to anyone and my next purchase will be Nvidia for sure.

I was looking for a feedback email where I could submit my feedback but I guess this will have to do.

Just wanted to add that this was pulled during an unprecedented chip shortage and price hike that has made GPU upgrades inaccessible to many, the loss of my job in 2020 was a big part of why I couldn't afford an upgrade.

[cimamura]

THANK YOU! I was looking for a post about what I am seeing today. I was about to download and update my driver when I see that my R9 Fury X is now a legacy card and this will be its last driver. I got it with my Alienware and its been running even the newest of games. I know its old, but sheesh, this was not a good surprise. Gonna have to think about which GPU now. Seems a lot of games are going green. My very first upgrade card in my old Dell was a 128MB card lol, Nvidia I got at now closed Frys Electronics. Maybe time to make a full circle?

[throau]

"expecting" 8 years of support on any hardware is a bit rich...

Warranty is 3 years, microsoft release new platforms every 7 years or so.

[hitbm47]

@throau 

In times like these and considering the amount of bugs & performance issues they still have to fix it is not irrational at all to expect them to at least fix the things they have broken.

Furthermore, they supported Windows 7 until 21.5.2 and Windows 10 still have years ahead of it, so that is not a valid reason since most of the cards they dropped could run on Windows 10.

Thankfully, I still have a supported card but I find it funny how usually the people making and liking these "justifiable" comments are the one's with the latest hardware and how inconsiderate they are towards the people that made just as much investment as you.

Honestly, I do not expect them to still be supporting the R9 200 series, maybe still the high-end of all these cards, but at least fix the bugs they have dragged through the years for all these cards.

*Some performance issues; for example, -OpenGL performance still very bad in a lot of cases, -Game performance optimizations lost in some games with 17.7.2 and onwards, -VR not working on supported cards, -Radeon Chill disabling itself in certain low poly-count in-game areas, -DirectX11 not multithreading as well as it could, -Wait for Vertical Refresh still only working in OpenGL, CryEngine games running bad on Windows 10 with AMD GPUs vs Windows 7, etc.

[End_of_life_user]

Who said anything about 8 years, I certainly didn't, but I think it is absolutely appropriate to expect that AMD will provide support for a chip that is less than 3 years old, as according to your comments, that's the warranty, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect support to go beyond the warranty period. There is of course the issue that the chip I'm referring to is part of a family that is older, and it would seem that the relevant product managers at AMD are perhaps not as familiar with the age of some of their products, so decisions have been made based on incomplete or inaccurate information, with I am sure, other factors in mind, it's become clear from the timings that AMD rushed the announcement out to get it into the public domain before Microsoft made the official Win 11 release announcement, as they were already aware that there was a clear plan to not provide any ongoing support for a whole range of chips for the "new" windows, and while that's nothing new, I suspect that there were fears that they might get problems, it's clear that "Win 11" is not new, it's yet another rehash of the existing Windows with a few new things in there, and some other things depracated, and from what I can see of it, the hardware I have here is capable of running Win11 if the processor was being supported, everything else meets the Win 11 spec. As to what the performance is likely to be like, that's more likely the reason for killing it, I have yet to see a release of Windows that uses less space and performs better than the previous version, and the sad part about it is that in so many areas, Win 11 won't do that much more than was done by Win 3.1.

Time to move on, there are processors etc that are a lot better than this one, but I don't need a screaming performer, most of what I use a computer for these days is pretty simple stuff, and I don't need massive gaming type performance any more, those days have gone.

Right now, a decent Intel chip with NVIDIA graphics is looking very tempting, if nothing else, it seems that NVIDIA are still providing support to much older chip sets.

[throau]

The OP mentioned 8 years.

[hitbm47]

Just tested Far Cry 5 on driver 17.7.1 to see if it would work; since as we have found after 17.7.1 a lot of UE3 game optimizations were lost; which forces one to jump between drivers as if your on linux and using proton; and even though Far Cry 5 seems to be working properly, there is a persistent UPlay notification box stating that it might be beneficial to use a new driver.

As shown in the screenshot below, this might be the type of experience one is going to have on capable hardware due to AMD's decision:

Who knows, some games may even prohibit itself from opening with new updates, even if the hardware was originally in the requirements.

Kind regards

[trek]

Android phones have usually support only two years and many of them are much more, several times expensive than graphics card (or were before scalping prices) and nobody is complaining. Even after that, some mobile phones manufacturers push update to intentionally slow hardware of that phone. You have Android phone, you get two updates and goodbye.

It is fault of graphics card manufacturers that they taught users to have luxurious support many years and for free. Graphics card drivers support should be a subscription service 5 USD per month at least.

[hitbm47]

Hi @trek 

Why whould we be complaining about mobile phones on a graphics driver topic? Furthermore, yes it is ridiculous the amount of money a lot of us spend on phones, which is why I have been using mine since 2017, but that is a bit of topic here, although AMD has in a sense hogged performance with negligence.

A luxury? Seems you got your graphics card for free?, since I paid 4600ZAR for a RX 480 due to income tax, 3rd world country, etc. The point being, you buy an expensive unfinished product (prototype in sense) that has to be ironed out with graphics drivers to be compatible with future/existing applications, and indirectly graphics drivers are also their advertisements (since reviewers review new games on new drivers) and advertisements boosts sales, therefore driver quality boosts sales of cards.

Your logic doesn't make a lot of sense here, since they have to prove their product is worth using and think what a gamble it would be if you paid monthly above the mountain of money you already paid for the card hoping that you would get driver fixes.

I don't know which country you live in, but usually if you buy a new car from; for example, Ford you get a three year service plan in terms of ironing out recall issues, etc. Since that is called Quality Assurance of a product. On top of that, you still have to buy new games, pay for Internet, etc. so once again they have to prove their product is worth using.

But with logic like yours, who knows, AMD might force a monthly fee at some point and beat Ngreedia.

[trek]

When you buy graphics card, you  buy hardware with software at that given time and industry standard is to provide 2 years of additional support. In all other areas people accept that, but in graphics cards 7 or how many years is not enough?

That sort of customer ungratefulness to AMD, which is donating luxurious long term support and constant customer requests screams for monetization of drivers after 2 or 3 years, all companies do that but graphics card manufacturers are requested to provide infinite support free.

Try to find drivers for other devices, motherboards or various USB devices, I must use Windows 8 drivers for some USB devices, where is support? I paid so much for those...

AMD should unteach free drivers by introducing paid variant, which would after couple of years completely replace free one. It is clear that they need financial injections to support software and support teams. You see that AMD people running these forums can barely compose meaningful sentence and those drivers  ... Those people are burned out, probably overloaded with work, they need more money and quality people.

[hitbm47]

@trek 

I do not argue that they are probably burned out a lot of the time, and no 2 years is a generalization for the industry standard. Most of my products has had at least a 3 year warranty standard, which I am more grateful for than you would realize, since it saved one of my two monitors.

Once again you go on a free luxurious rant. Where did you get your card for free? In addition, from your comment I can tell you did not comprehend a lot of what I pointed out in the last comment. If AMD were to implement a extra subscription plan; which is apparently the only part you have to pay for; they would likely go broke/backwards in the GPU market. I can guess half of AMD's loyal customers does not have the "luxury" to afford a new graphics card.

In addition, 5-7 years are very acceptable for driver support for graphics cards, and barely anyone argued against that, the contradiction here being that the consistency was not very acceptable over the last 5-7years, broken features originally working for a lot of the cards, bad timing.

Furthermore, another point you are missing is that Graphics cards require greater compatibility for more applications over the years to justify their expense versus the USB ports you are comparing them to. Your USB ports does a very few amount of things, namely transferring files efficiently, hence why they only need a shorter amount of time-span to get it working efficiently for the rest of its' 5-10 years. Think further, with your logic people will stop buying Radeon's due to extra expense which team green and blue are not requiring of its' customers.

They are making more than enough money with owning the console market and now making the fastest processors, and clearly they are spending a lot of it in making the fastest hardware but missing just short with driver management.

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47  isn't Far Cry 5 Dunia (modified Cry Engine) not UT3 engine?

If we're talking gamers, I'd also suggest that 5-7 years is far to long to be keeping core hardware like a video card. There are far too many improvements not just in performance but also features in that long a period. 5 years takes us back to roughly GTX10xx and RX4xx series. Just looking at high end the current gen of cards are literally twice as fast at UHD across a huge range of games and have Ray tracing, more VRAM for higher res.

If you go back 7 years we're talking GTX7xx and r9 2xx series. In which case the differences start getting ridiculous.

Yes I know people have a budget but that's the reality. Games aren't really written with an r9 290 in mind now. And the manufacturers need to keep pace and focus on that.

@trek  I agree with what you're saying. Sort of... Your final point about "paid drivers" is a concern. I think that's a terrible idea even if it is the logical result of discussions like this. Subscription software is a terrible thing for consumers because too many companies write poor software that *needs* updates (I'm sure hitbm47 would put AMD in that basket). Or they milk customers by producing minor updates that barely improve anything.

It's absolutely common to buy a cutting edge product and have issues with drivers and compatibility in the first few months. If we had to pay extra for the updates that made it work properly they'd have to reduce the price of the product in the first place or there'd be people returning them since they were not fit for purpose at time of purchase.

And that's just bugs or oversights in programming. There are undoubtedly unscrupulous companies that would release deliberately gimped or broken drivers expecting people to pay for fixes. Not saying AMD is one of those, but if paying for drivers became common practise some companies would be doing it.

The only way a subscription type model could work was if your initial hardware purchase included say 3 years of free subscription. Then after that you could pay more to keep getting driver updates. Of course even that model has to fail eventually. After all the number of subscriptions would drop over time as hardware died or was replaced with newer ones. Until you get to a point where you've got a handful of subscriptions wanting updates and it's not cost effective again.

[ScornfulWizard]

Wow, the amount of people sucking up to a big company and defending its practices/choices here is evidently the proof as to why we can't have nice things as consumers. Sadly, this is the mentality that runs deep in almost any sphere of life - and it's very unfortunate. I don't even understand the reason behind this white-knighting for multi-billion companies because it won't bear any benefit for you, and the maximum that you'll get is a pat on the back with a phrase "good boy".

We've already seen the amounts of f*ck ups AMD can get with their products due to their own twisted decisions in the marketing and developing departments. Thankfully, for one good instance, they got sued for their quasi-cores in FX-series CPUs because there were enough people who were conscious enough of their consumer privileges and willing to bring justice upon such a disservice from the company they put their money into.

Anyone advising the TS to cope with the issue and accept the state of things is just promoting giving up and surrendering to the problems - and this can only lead to the worsening of the quality of consumer services. No one is talking about continual product support, extensive warranty or anything like that - the main point of this whole argument is to make AMD accountable for not fixing the glaring issues in their products for many years! For example, I'm still extremely reluctant to install any new drivers for my GPU because I've had tons of unpleasant experience with AMD's drivers royally f*cking up my system. And each time AMD releases new GPUs there's a ton of issues with them (was evident on this forum, for example), because it always feels as if they're beta-testing their cards with raw clunky drivers on real customers and only then begin to fix the issues (and they're not even very successful at that, mind you).

[hitbm47]

@ScornfulWizard 

I 100% agree with you and I am glad someone else can see the point.

This is what I have been trying to explain to everyone else, but no one seems to get the gist of what one is describing, or holding themselves dumb.

And exactly as you say, if people keep accepting bugs they will continue getting bugs even on their new expensive hardeware, they don't realize we also made that investment at some point and have been treeted poorly.

In addition, yes my RX 480 definitely felt like a protoype these whole 5 years.

@Skrybe no I did not say anywhere that Far Cry 5 was Unreal Engine 3, the gist of what I was saying is an example that not getting driver updates will cause issues like that pop-up in Far Cry 5, even if that drivers are playing the game properly.

Since some people argued that you'll still be able to play games fine with the last available drivers.

[Skrybe]

@ScornfulWizard 

If AMD were literally making their old cards impossible to use then I'd agree with you. But they're not. They're just saying "we're not doing any new drivers for them". I personally have an AMD card that's no longer supported in my Laptop, but it still works. It'll keep working until the hardware literally dies (no TPM so no Windows 11). Similarly, I had a hD7970 and that still works. It sucks in current games but that's because I'm playing on a UHD display and that card was NEVER meant for that role. But it still plays the games it WAS designed for just fine at 1080p.

At least @hitbm47 had a valid point about AMD breaking the quality of their drivers in older games. If you want to complain about issues like that, then more power to you. But to my mind that's not a dropping support issue. Sadly, its a fight that needed to be fought (and won) when they actually broke the driver.

If you really expect a card to have lifetime support you're going to be paying double or triple for it. Or as @trek suggested you'll be paying for new drivers either as a fee or a subscription. And I read a post about cars as an example, it's a bad comparison for a couple reasons. The biggest being cars require paid servicing and failure to do so will negate your warranty. Between the massive markup in sale price and the markup on servicing costs (and parts) you're paying a lot for that 5 or 10 year warranty.

Imagine translating that to PCs - you'd have to send it to an approved repairer who uses approved parts every 6 months or X hours used. Every 6 months they replace heatsink paste. Every 12 months they replace a cooling fan. Every 2 years they throw away the heatsink and put on a new one. And so on...

I'd also say (and I'm sure you'll accuse me of defending AMD but so be it) that it's a horrendous job since you're dealing with hundreds of games by heaps of developers writing god knows what spaghetti code, plus windows code, plus vulkan/OGL plus god knows how many hardware combos from god knows how many different manufacturers. Tracking down some of the problems is not just tracking down a needle in a haystack, it's tracking down a needle in a field of different haystacks in a country with a heap of different fields.

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 

Just a thought with your UT3 problem, have you tried using Clockblocker?

https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/clockblocker-download.html

It's thought that possibly the UT3 slowdown may be the result of the AMD cards going into a lower power state. So your card might be throttling up and down causing the performance problem. ClockBlocker should keep your card in the highest performance state without noticeable performance impact. So *hopefully* reducing the performance spikes.

Obviously turn it off when not gaming.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

That was not the example I was making of cars, I do not mean it disrespectfully but do people here read comments word for word before forming a reply? What I said about Ford for example, is that in our country at least they give a three year free service plan. Meaning you take your car in once every year or 10,000km and they service certain parts of your cars for free. I was making this point to trek to show that other industries does something similar to graphics card vendors since it is called Quality Assurance of a product when he was suggesting that drivers should be a paid for service.

Furthermore, I was in no way suggesting cards should move in the direction of car/vehicle dealers, I was simply pointing out similarities.

I think people should go read that comment again as I gave good reasons why paying for drivers will worsen things. I agree with some of what you are saying @Skrybe and no one argued lifetime support, do not understand from where that keeps popping up.

I am not arguing that it is not a horrendous job, believe me I know it is. The point is that there is clearly something wrong in management, since if they keep track of different builds that have to being forked together properly, they will not lose previous improvements they have made. In contradiction, they are actually losing previous fixes with new driver releases and it is very apparent going on the forum to currently see that the "game compatibility helper in radeon settings is showing all hardware as unsupported". Now how to you ignore a fact like that and not realize that they are not working neatly with forking their builds together?

Edit:

@Skrybe 

Thank you for providing this link to me, I have read of clockblocker recently and I might try it.

But I think the problem comes down to that the GPU down-clocks in UE3 games in certain scenes, because the CPU is bottlenecked with "occlusion calls" from the game engine which AMD used- to and Nvidia still has a hack/optimization for by reducing it to an acceptable amount, which seems to have been lost in 17.7.2.

Did you read some people having success with it?

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 

I assumed you weren't suggesting we move towards the car model as a scheme and that it was an analogy. Just pointing out the problems with it. Like even if the "servicing" were free for video cards same as (some) cars realistically it'd require some sort of service visit. Meaning you'd be handing your video card (maybe whole PC) over to some techie to do an examination and potentially repair on a regular basis. That's also kinda unacceptable in my view.

A better analogy is more like a Smart TV  or Blu-ray player where the seller often does updates to the firmware but there is no guarantee that they'll even do it, let alone do it regularly.

I think lifetime support pops up because lifetime support isn't what a lot of people think. It's not "your life" or even 20 years. It's an arbitrary value that varies based on the product in question. Like cars have a lifetime of somewhere between 10-20 years, whitegoods (fridge/freezer) something similar. But then you get other products like TVs and Blu-ray Players where it's more like 5 years. Moving down to Phones where it's more like 2 years, 3 tops. And I would say PCs (and by extension PC components) have a lifetime somewhere around 4-5 years. So, the cards that are in question are mostly over their "lifetime".

Side note: That previous post wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at Trek. I mentioned your complaints because they're legitimate.

As for the Clockblocker app. Yes I saw some discussions in a couple other places (Guru3d for one) that suggested that one of the problems with stuttering and framerate drops related to the power saving introduced by Radeon Chill - in 17.7.2. Clockblocker effectively stops the power saving thus improving performance in some of the games. There may also be a problem with something else but it sounds like it's worth a try.

There is also a possible fix related to shader caching that might be worth looking into as well. From 17.7.2 it enabled shader caching in DX9. Which as the article below states should improve performance - emphasis on the "Should". Key point being if you ever enable shader cache for a game the game keeps using the cached shaders even if you turn it off. To truly reset it you need to clear the shader cache.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-crimson-relive-edition-driver-v17-7-2-overview,3.ht...

https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/64nobw/amd_shader_cache_issue_causing_stuttering/

Neither change is guaranteed, but they sound like they're worth trying.

[hitbm47]

Hi @Skrybe 

Thank you for your response, that is not what I meant.

I was referring to "graphics card driver updates" as the "service plan" which they are already providing (and have been for years) similar to how car dealers also give a free service plan for a few years.

In no way did I say graphics card vendors should physically replace parts on your graphics cards like panel beaters do for cars, I simply showed to trek the similarities between different industries how they are already doing things similarly to improve Quality Assurance of a product, instead of expecting an extra expense on the customers side with a monthly subscription and how this improves reputation. That is the gist of what I described.

Thank you I get what you mean by lifetime support now, and yes 4-5years is a good amount of years and is how it always have been, but the concern here is more about how that consistency have been over the last few years and how the OP only got 3 years out of his new in-store laptop. Thank you for thinking the complaints I raised are legitimate.

I understood some of it was for trek.

I quickly read through that post you mention of clockblocker on GURU3D and the person said unfortunately it did not solve his issue, I remember reading through that a few years ago, but thank you I might still try it later on. Currently, it seems like the driver team might be trying to investigate the issue, so I am giving them more information on my system specs, because I found it to be persistant on my Ryzen 5 1600 & i7 870 as well when using newer drivers than 17.7.1.

The shader cache option has unfortunately been removed from the newest drivers if I am not mistaken, but it was already enabled by default on 17.7.1 as I just checked now in my driver.

Kind regards

[Skrybe]

@hitbm47 

I know that Clockblocker didn't help that particular person but it has helped others. So it's gotta be worth a try. 5 minutes to download, install, tweak settings and test has gotta be worthwhile hasn't it?

The shader cache prior to 17.7.2 didn't include DX9 games from what I understand, only DX11/12.

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-17-7-2

Interestingly they also say it includes gaming responsiveness improvements for DX9 games. But I remember reading something else that said it was less about improving framerates and more about improving smoothness. I don't remember where I saw that though.

As for the car servicing analogy, I know all the "free servicing" here comes with a little * and when you check the small print it's only the labour that's free. Oil, fan belts and so on still cost money. And they overcharge on those. So it's not really free anyway

The OP's 3 year laptop is problematic, but potentially for a different reason. I hate that a lot of stores continue to sell "new" PCs that are actually already getting close to end of life, or at the very least are "old" tech. Not so much that they sell it, but they don't sell it as outdated equipment, so the casual customer thinks they're getting something new when it may have a CPU that's already superseded and has been sitting on a shelf do 12 months.

[End_of_life_user]

---

The OP's 3 year laptop is problematic, but potentially for a different reason. I hate that a lot of stores continue to sell "new" PCs that are actually already getting close to end of life, or at the very least are "old" tech. Not so much that they sell it, but they don't sell it as outdated equipment, so the casual customer thinks they're getting something new when it may have a CPU that's already superseded and has been sitting on a shelf do 12 months.

---

That's the issue for me, I did some checking on the AMD site, and the specific chip in this machine, while part of the A9 family that was released originally in 2016, the 9425 that is in this machine was released by AMD in "Mid 2018", so effectively, they have removed it from ongoing support when it was still in theory possibly under AMD warranty, as someone mentioned earlier in the thread that they give 3 years on CPU's. To terminate support for the currently active Microsoft product that soon is not exactly nice, the machine was effectively using a chip that had only been announced a few months earlier, so it wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a "remaindered" machine that had been hanging around for 12 months in a warehouse, it was effectively a new release, albeit possibly on a motherboard that might have been around for a while.

That's what has upset me, I fully understand the issues of board level support for graphics boards for a desktop, I've been there with those sorts of issues for close on 30 years, back to the days of the ATI Mach32 that ran on 386 and 486 chip sets,  but killing off a laptop is not quite as nice, and I do know that the retailer that I got this from was still selling a similar configuration at the beginning of 2020, I'd be considerably more upset if I'd bought that recently to now find that I can't be sure that I can continue to stay safe with ongoing Windows 10 updates as a result of a supplier decision.

[cablenexus]

They actually broke the latest driver.

I have a few indie games made with passion over many years that worked with all drivers until 20 series drivers and in the latest 21 drivers the games won't start anymore. It's a bit shocking to get a support e-mail with sorry we do not support the videocard you are using anymore, while they introduced a bug themselves in their last driver before the product become legacy.

[hitbm47]

Hi @cablenexus 

That is exactly the point some of us were trying to make, the fact that they broke stuff many years in the past which has never been fixed and then AMD decides it's okay to drop support for these cards anyway, and I know my RX 480 is still supported but I also know that I have been experiencing issues for years which has not been fixed which is why I am raising these concerns, since soon I am going to be in the same boat.

Furthermore, new cards are not affordable and it is unacceptable to buy a new card from them when there is a great possibility one is going to be treated in the same why. Like some of has said it is not as much the issue of how long these cards are supported, but rather the bugs that still remain at the time they have dropped support.

As far as I am concerned, it is very fair for them to drop support after 5years (heck maybe even 3 or 4 years), BUT only with the condition that the driver is in a very good state of quality with a few years more of compatibility (which is not necessarily the case if you notice extensions still being developed or which have been forgotten to be developed; OpenGL ID Tech 5 adaptive VSync is a good example).

Kind regards

[LivingTheDream]

For all my fellow AMD customers stuck on R9 cards without drivers... I present a solution https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/driver-mod-nimez-radeon-software-21-10-1-whql-gcn-legacy-pack-rele... 

These drivers are modified with the latest business through windows update, I successfully played the Halo Infinite beta on this with good performance.

Nimez does what AMDon't!

[kingfish]

The chip was introduced in 2017...the requirement changes in Windows 10 outstripped the capabilities of this APU.

[End_of_life_user]

replied with a post that gave specific detail, but it's been marked as spam, (now reported to moderation) hopefully it will get unmarked, as it has all the details that are online on AMD site. The chip is an A9-9425, less than 3 years old, and only released Mid 2018. When I try to post a cut down version, it accuses me of post flooding. Why am I bothering? Quicker to just forget that AMD exists!

[hitbm47]

@kingfish, here is the answer to your original question:

https://community.amd.com/t5/blogs/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/...

It shows a whole table of cards which is going to fall under legacy status. Yes the cards are old, and like I said in this or some other post this means my RX 480/RX 580 will fall under the same roof just around the corner; this is a major concern because the driver performance CPU side has worsened just after 16.6.2 in some games (UT3, HOMM7, Crysis 3, etc.) and has never improved since then, and if AMD is willing to drop support with never attending that issue it tells they will do the same to all the rest of the cards.

In addition, compatibility is an absolute necessity in PC gaming, one can't keep a different PC around for each generation of gaming.

Basically, AMD is pulling an Apple in terms of performance (think it was the iPhone 4 to 5 OS Upgrade, not that I ever used iPhone) where they expect/force you to buy the latest hardware to get acceptable performance in their latest drivers for your GPU.

Radeon Chill has not worked properly from the start, in certain games if you are in areas with too little polygons or such the Chill algorithm disables causing the FPS to sky rocket, thus disrupting the emersion and causing Coil Wine. To think that this will be a permanent case on pre- RX 400 cards. Still no VSync override other than for OpenGL, except if you are lucky to have Enhanced Sync support.

Furthermore, one cannot specifically use an older driver such as 16.6.2 on Windows 10 deletes it and replaces it with a new-ish driver, and of course one wants some of the new available features such as RIS.

In addition, it is easy to say get a new CPU when the FX 8350 was sold as the top of the line AMD CPU in one's country in the year 2016; at that stage jumping from Intel, clockspeed was still a relevant factor and seeing 4.0Ghz on FX 8350 was very delusional.

Kind regards

[kingfish]

It will be interesting to see the fallout when Microsoft releases Windows 11....which is scheduled for release shortly. Compatibility is one of its main themes.

There are many people who have, as a example, laptops with Intel/AMD switchable graphics who cannot update their drivers because the Intel graphics (HD3000 and earlier) is not supported under Windows 10. The AMD graphics do...but that doesn't matter. Some people disable the integrated graphics and operate with the discrete graphics only. These are not choices made by AMD. But I feel your pain.

Also....why haven't you set your update preference to stop/delay Microsoft from automatically installing graphics driver updates??

[kingfish]

https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-11-system-requirements

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications

[End_of_life_user]

About what I expected, there's an option to download and run a system health check, which now offers an option to see if the machine is Windows 11 compatible.

On running it, the answer is (not surprisingly) Not compatible, but and this is the sort of things that hacks me off, there's NO information whatsover about why it's not compatible. Not really an issue any more, I doubt I will be using Windows by the time this raises it's head, Win 10 still supposedly has 4 years of support left, it's bad enough watching the updating circles go round and round for too long each month, if (as rumoured) they are going to a repeat payment scheme, there is NO WAY I am going to pay Microsoft every month to then still be watching the circles go round and round, given how often they mess it up.

[timaobimundial]

So let me see. I use a fullHD monitor with my (at the time) very expensive, R9 390x.
It's a 8gb card, more powerfull than a lot of newest models. Pretty enough to my need and capable of running any game at high/ultra quality settings in fullHD.
But I'm being forced to buy even a weaker GPU just because AMD is making it forced obsolete via software?
I'm pretty sure there's jurisprudence in cases like that and don't use to go very well for companies that abuses this practice.
I'm starting to miss the AMD that was the nice under dog...
Still time to make better choices.  

[hitbm47]

Hi @kingfish 

Thank you for the Windows 10 link, I quickly scanned through it but did not see a mention of better compatibility. Furthermore, I do believe the older cards stay compatible with newer updates of Windows, for those who are worried about compatibility @timaobimundial , it will simply not be able to use some newer features.

What I meant by compatibility is for the performance of older DX 9/DX 11 games to stay at least close to on PAR with what it was, and not as is with the case of Unreal Tournament 3 where my minimum FPS dropped from 70FPS (in 16.6.2) to 24FPS (17.7.2 - 21.6.1).

Thank you for the screenshot, I think I was struggling with it before the pause feature came out and to be honest completely forgot I saw that recently, but I see it says pause updates for 7 days only? I might try it at some point, but to be honest it will be a bit tedious to manage everything that then has to stay up to date and pause Windows each 7 days, also the shame is 16.6.2 had this very dark colour filtering of the whole desktop and screen which they fixed in drivers after 16.6.2.

I just wonder if they could implement a wrapper from DX 9/ DX 11 to DirectX12, I know of DXVK for Linux but it does not work properly for everything on Windows yet and sometimes causes crashes or artefacts.

@VantharasI do not expect them to continue adding new features for older cards,

"Focusing on hardware that is underperforming and not competitive would do them harm in the long run" ( @Vantharas , 2021), I see you have a Nvidia RTX 3090 so obviously you are concerned with AMD bringing the competition, but the actual problem I am referring to is that their graphics cards are massively underutilized in some games with very bad FPS which is in a lot of cases due to bad driver scaling as compared to Nvidia and in these cases you need a much stronger CPU than you would with a Nvidia and this is in contradiction of the news Hardware Unboxed is spreading where they are only referring to DirectX12 performance. The point is, this is an issue that was present since I owned my first R9 280 and if AMD is willing to drag this issue through R9 200 - R9 300 then through to RX 400 - RX Vega 54/64 through to RX 500 and even now through to Navi, they will continue not caring since they are not the UNDERDOG anymore with all the Ryzen money.

Yes AMD are making themselves look like they care with FSR which is really impressive, but that mostly caters to when you have a GPU bottleneck and since the launch of Ryzen, AMD does not have any care in the world for their loyal fans that kept them in the business pre-Ryzen and they just left their DX11/OpenGL performance to Brute Force CPUs to sort out, which means AMD FX was a cash crab so that they could make real money out of Ryzen. In the end they made it seem like they cared but they were/are only really after money and using us as stepping stones.

Kind regards

[kingfish]

If you have Win10 Pro...you can extend the time period up to 3 months (vs 7 days). Click 'advanced options'. I don't see this as a issue...much less a big issue. Once a month I check which updates are available.

[kingfish]

"Windows each 7 days, also the shame is 16.6.2 had this very dark colour filtering of the whole desktop and screen which they fixed in drivers after 16.6.2."

 I am not saying this will work for you...I am saying that we have done this in the past with good results. Try to install the 'DRIVERS ONLY' from a newer driver (after 16.6.2). Download it and unpack it but stop at "install".  From Device manager graphics/AMD choose update driver...have disk/go to the unpacked (new) update, select graphics/drivers/64 and install them. Reboot...see if it works. You will have the older control panel with the newer drivers. Worth a shot.

[hitbm47]

Hi @kingfish thank you for the information, I understand the steps you described, but I do not understand the end goal?

Because, you say I will have the older control panel with the new drivers, does this mean you want me to first install 16.6.2 for the control panel, then afterwards unpack 21.6.1 and thereafter install the unpacked files through device manager which will result in new drivers with old control panel?

But this means I will likely still lose the performance due to new drivers or do you think it will keep the old optimizations?

Kind regards

[kingfish]

Yes...that is what I am suggesting...except I would try the next driver which fixes the issues you are having with the 16.6.2. If you go to the current AMD driver download page for your drivers...scroll down to 'Previous drivers' and select one. I would start with the next 'newest' and go from there. If it works...try the next 'newest'. You will get the fixes and optimizations from the 'new' drivers..that's the goal.

[hitbm47]

Thank you for the clarification @kingfish and I appreciate it, the problem is 16.6.2 was the last good DirectX 9 Unreal Engine 3 driver performance wise so I would need to start from that one, but yes as I have described that is the one which also had the dark filter.

But no worries I think I still have the 16.6.2 driver so I might try it at some point, problem is from what I remember as soon as I updated over the existing driver the performance went haywire in a few games, but I should try your suggestion at some point.

Kind regards

[hitbm47]

Hi @kingfish 

I just tested 16.12.2 with Unreal tournament 3 and it still ran flawless, I would now like to try your method to install the new drivers with the older interface, I would just please like to ask to which folder specifically I should redirect my my "Choose driver from device manager" so that it does not install the new GUI?

I don't have that layout you described, mine is AMD/Bin64 or I could try AMD/Packages/Drivers/Display/WT6A_INF ?

Edit:

Installing it like the latter held the old GUI, but could not function and the Frame Rate of UT3 was the same horrible fest it has been for the last 4 years.

But I can confirm even Heroes of Might and Magic 7 (2015) gets double the minimum frame-rate (80FPS instead of 40FPS) than what it gets on current drivers, which was also a DirectX 9 implementation of Unreal Engine 3. This might strongly suggest that Borderlands 2 will also run better on 16.12.2 drivers than on current drivers.

Edit #2:

The removal of Radeon Additional Settings in 17.7.2 caused a major decrease in performance for a lot of older games up until 21.6.1, I mean up to a x4 decrease in minimum framerates (80FPS down to 29FPS in a lot of cases).

Way too much games are affected by this, but ones I can definitely point out are Unreal Tournament 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 7.

Games that most likely will also be greatly affected by it are Borderlands 2, most Batman games, Bioshock 1 (probably 2 and maybe 3).

Can we please, very please get this to AMD's attention!

Kind regards

[kingfish]

AMD/Packages/Drivers/Display/WT6A_INF ?