AMD Hasn't Forgotten Radeon RX 6000 GPUs: New Drivers Incoming

AMD
(Image credit: AMD)

AMD promises to release new drivers for its Radeon RX 6000 series and prior generations of graphics processors within a couple of weeks. The statement comes after the company did not release drivers for its previous GPUs over the past two months as it focused on the new Radeon RX 7000 series.  

"We are working on new AMD Radeon drivers for [Radeon RX] 6000-series and prior generation cards," said Frank Azor, AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions & Marketing, in a Twitter post. "Aiming to release them within the next two weeks. Will provide another update if we run into any delays and as we get closer to posting them. Thank you for your patience."

AMD launched its Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards in mid-December but had to fix bugs that inevitably emerged with the release of new hardware for existing games. As a result, AMD assigned as many software engineers as possible to support the hardware launch and drivers for its new RDNA 3-based products.  

Unfortunately, such a shift affected the company's ability to release new drivers for its existing Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards. As a result, drivers for these products have not been updated since November, which has outraged many graphics card owners. The good news is that updated drivers are incoming. The bad news is that those cards will sit without new drivers for about three months by the time the new drivers emerge.

AMD's Radeon RX 6000-series boards are still among the best graphics cards money can buy today. While they may not be outright performance champions in ray tracing games, they are inexpensive and widely available. Furthermore, since AMD's Radeon RX 7900-series offerings only target the $899 to $999+ segment, people who are not willing to spend that much but want to stick to an AMD graphics board now have to buy something from the Radeon RX 6000 series. Therefore, timely driver releases for these products are essential to retaining customers reliant on robust customer support to play the latest games.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    Even without this crunch, it speaks volumes the robustness of their drivers in that various patches for Windows have been released and major games as well, without much issues.

    I hope AMD can keep their driver stack as clean as it is right now, but then again, I don't use much on my 580 outside of some basic functions.
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed said:
    Even without this crunch, it speaks volumes the robustness of their drivers in that various patches for Windows have been released and major games as well, without much issues.

    I hope AMD can keep their driver stack as clean as it is right now, but then again, I don't use much on my 580 outside of some basic functions.
    I own RX570 l, driver updates don't mean much to me anymore either. The one that mattered was OpenGL optimizations.
    I have 22.11.1 installed. Once I allowed Win10 to install drivers through Win Update. I thought, what the heck, those should be the most stable, let's try. The games I play saw decreased performance and I reverted to latest from AMD. Shouldn't matter for such an old card, right? Turns out sometimes it does.

    Edit:
    Tbh, I don't even know how to assess Adrenaline driver stability, which I guess is a good thing... ?
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    tommo1982 said:
    I own RX570 l, driver updates don't mean much to me anymore either. The one that mattered was OpenGL optimizations.
    I have 22.11.1 installed. Once I allowed Win10 to install drivers through Win Update. I thought, what the heck, those should be the most stable, let's try. The games I play saw decreased performance and I reverted to latest from AMD. Shouldn't matter for such an old card, right? Turns out sometimes it does.

    Edit:
    Tbh, I don't even know how to assess Adrenaline driver stability, which I guess is a good thing... ?

    That's exactly what I mean, it's a good thing, they're rock solid.

    I also have an nvidia 1080 and while it's now legacy on the drivers side, when I bought it it was brand spanking new, and every time a new game came out, you needed a driver update for stability/prevent glitches, and it was so, so annoying.

    I don't use it as my main anymore (I don't game that much anymore), but I'd be surprised if that was not still the case.
    Reply