AMD ends support for video cards prior to RX 400 series

AMD will stop supporting a large number of video cards. These are cards that predate the RX 400 series and the Ryzen apus. These will no longer be supported by current and new AMD drivers.

AMD writes that with the current release of Radeon Software Adrenalin version 21.6.1, it is giving a number of graphics products a legacy status. It concerns GPUs and APUs based on the first, second and third generation of Graphics Core Next. This means that the last supported driver for these older products will be Radeon Software Adrenalin version 21.5.2.

No additional driver releases are planned, according to AMD. It is unknown whether this means that there will be no more solutions for these video cards in case security issues should occur in the software.

In practice, this means that graphics cards such as those from the Radeon Fury 200 and 300 series are no longer supported. Well-known video cards such as the HD7970, R9 290X and Fury X, for example. The HD 7000 series is from 2011 and the Radeon 200 series from 2013. The latest series now placed in the legacy model is the Fury series; it came out in 2015.

According to AMD, this move makes it possible to allocate “valuable engineering resources” to developing new features and improvements for graphics products based on the latest architectures.

In addition to this step, AMD is also adding Radeon Software support for Windows 7 64-bit systems to the legacy model. In addition, the company points out that the official end of support from Microsoft for Windows 7 already started on January 14 last year.