AMD Is Retiring Driver Support for R9 Fury and Older Cards Including Pre-Ryzen APUs

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We knew this day was coming

Radeon R9 Fury X, hailing from 2015, a bit worse for wear. Sorry about the dust!
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

AMD announced in a blog post that its Radeon Adrenalin driver 21.5.2 will be the final graphics driver to support all GPUs predating the RX 400 series and APUs predating the Ryzen 2200G and 2400G. All of these SKUs are now considered legacy models and have long since fallen off our list of the best graphics cards. The same will also apply with Windows 7, as AMD also cut support for the older OS with 21.5.2

This announcement comes hot on the heels of AMD's latest Adrenalin driver, 21.6.1 that was just released yesterday and is the first official Radeon driver to not support these legacy devices and Windows 7.

For the remnant of users still clinging onto HD 7970s, R9 290's, R9 390X's, and R9 Fury's, it's a sad day to see driver support ending for these GPUs. But the move was bound to happen, just like Nvidia cutting the cord on Windows 7 support and all Kepler GPUs later this year.

If you're still using these older GPUs, especially during a time where the GPU shortage is still a big problem, you don't have to worry about upgrading immediately simply because AMD cut support. Your card should still function properly and game fine, unless you want to play a brand new title that happens to have a bug with older drivers.

Once GPU prices return to normal, it would be best to consider purchasing a newer graphics card. The lack of driver updates can potentially leave you open to security vulnerabilities that won't be patched on legacy cards, plus Windows 11 should arrive in the not too distant future, and may only have limited driver support on older GPUs.

Sayonara, old GCN cards. It's been a healthy run, but now it's time to retire to the dust heap of graphics card history. Our R9 Fury X cleary got a head start on the dusty part.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • plateLunch
    Nooooooooooooo.

    Still using my HD 6850, HD 6570. Just picked up an R7 250 on eBay.
    What I really need is a driver update for my HD750 ATI TV Tuner though. MS changed something with Win10 and the old drivers don't initialize the card properly any more. But if I do a "Restart", everything works fine. sigh
    Reply
  • w_o_t_q
    Switch back to win 7 and use https://0patch.com/ free tier. And forget about windows 10 and 11. No point with such old specific hardware.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    I feel bad for my fellow Windows users stuck on closed binaries. But I'll be using my AMD products in that series for years to come because AMD makes their drivers open source on the Linux side and these drivers still receive support/updates from time to time. Heck even the i915 driver (Intel) just recently got an update.

    Forced obsolescence has been, to some extent, made obsolete and just isn't necessary anymore. You just have to upgrade away from Windows and closed-source vendors to realize it.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    ezst036 said:
    Forced obsolescence has been, to some extent, made obsolete and just isn't necessary anymore. You just have to upgrade away from Windows and closed-source vendors to realize it.
    You don't need to be running the latest graphics drivers for a card run perfectly fine in the vast majority of games. All this really means is that the older cards won't see game-specific driver optimizations (which generally won't focus on older hardware anyway), or new driver features, so it likely won't matter all that much. There's no real "forced obsolescence". We're talking about hardware that is already over 6 years old at this point, and with relatively few exceptions, isn't going to provide an ideal level of performance in the latest games anyway.

    And in terms of game-specific optimizations and advanced driver features, the drivers on open-source platforms tend to fare worse to begin with, and game support in general won't be as good, so it would hardly be an upgrade to move to them as a solution.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    I'm surprised earlier GCN is being killed because RX400/500 and even the Vega56/64/ 7 are still based on it and the compiler differences are minimal in terms of optimization.

    I mean my 7970 died after 8 years last year. But it was still highly playable for a number of games.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    ezst036 said:
    I feel bad for my fellow Windows users stuck on closed binaries. But I'll be using my AMD products in that series for years to come because AMD makes their drivers open source on the Linux side and these drivers still receive support/updates from time to time. Heck even the i915 driver (Intel) just recently got an update.

    Forced obsolescence has been, to some extent, made obsolete and just isn't necessary anymore. You just have to upgrade away from Windows and closed-source vendors to realize it.
    And we could also 'feel bad' for our Linux buddies, with little game support.
    So there's that.

    "End of support" does not mean that the thing simply up and dies.
    It will continue to run, just like it ran last week.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    ezst036 said:
    I feel bad for my fellow Windows users stuck on closed binaries. But I'll be using my AMD products in that series for years to come because AMD makes their drivers open source on the Linux side and these drivers still receive support/updates from time to time.
    And I'll be using said AMD product in a Windows machine for years because it'll still work.
    Reply
  • MarioAndLuigiPlumbing
    They need to open source these drivers so the community can keep them alive.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    MarioAndLuigiPlumbing said:
    They need to open source these drivers so the community can keep them alive.
    I don't see why the team that maintains the Linux drivers can see about getting them to work on Windows. Granted I know that there's going to be a lot of changes to work with the Windows HAL, but it's certainly better than starting from scratch.
    Reply