AMD confirms its Radeon RX 5000, 6000 series cards are not receiving new features — latest patch puts cards in 'maintenance mode,' also disables USB-C functionality on RX 7900 series

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

AMD has confirmed that its latest driver update involves sunsetting its Radeon RX 5000 Series and 6000 Series graphics cards, placing them in maintenance mode to allow delivery of new tech for its more recent offerings. "In order to focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 places Radeon RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) in maintenance mode," the company confirmed to Tom's Hardware in a statement. While the company says that its RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive critical security updates and bug fixes, new features, like the latest Battlefield 6 update, are reserved for the Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series in the latest AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2.

It's not even all good news for Radeon RX 7000 series owners. Folks who have a Radeon RX 7900 series card—that's the XT or XTX—that includes a USB Type-C port on the back may be dismayed to know that the new driver disables that port's ability to power external devices. It also disables the port's ability to act as a USB port at all. Instead, it is simply an oddly-shaped DisplayPort connection now.

Why is AMD making these changes? It could certainly be down to the fact that AMD's graphics driver package is now too large to fit on two CD-ROMs. In the era of ubiquitous broadband internet, a 1.6GB driver package is arguably no big deal, but many people around the world still labor under the limitation of metered internet connections with limited transfer allowances. For reference, NVIDIA's graphics driver package is less than 900 megabytes, although some of that is no doubt because NVIDIA includes neither the Control Panel nor its new NVIDIA App in that download. For AMD's part, the company hints at focusing on its more recent product offerings as the recent for the change, as per the above statement.

Beyond those changes, the 25.10.2 driver release brings support for DirectX 12 Work Graphs to the Radeon RX 9000 series. Work Graphs are a little-used feature that essentially allows the GPU to act fully independently of the CPU by dispatching its own work. It's currently supported by Radeon RX 7000, GeForce RTX 30 series, and newer non-Intel GPUs; it's surprising to learn that Work Graphs were not supported on Radeon RX 9000 series parts until now.

A screenshot of the game FBC Firebreak depicting containment officers fighting a monster made of sticky notes. — Remedy's FBC Firebreak has seen significant updates since its launch. (Image credit: Remedy Entertainment)

Of course, as with any new driver release, AMD has packed in some bug fixes for the new bundle. Crashes in The Last of Us Part II, Remedy's co-op Control follow-up FBC Firebreak, and NBA 2K25's MyCareer mode should be resolved, while stuttering in Baldur's Gate 3, corruption in Serious Sam 4, and VR issues in VTOL VR should be all sewn up. Also, AMD seems to have resolved a problem where running VR headsets at 80 or 90 Hz could cause stuttering. Finally, no less than ten separate security issues have apparently been resolved in this driver.

Remaining known issues include a long-standing bug where Cyberpunk 2077 crashes when trying to play in RT Overdrive mode, intermittent crashes or driver timeouts in Battlefield 6 on certain integrated graphics, similar behavior in Roblox on RX 7000 GPUs, texture flickering in BF6 when using AMD Record and Stream, and missing Radeon Anti-Lag 2 in Counter-Strike 2 on Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs. AMD says to try switching to Vulkan (by adding -vulkan to your Steam launch options) if you must have Anti-Lag 2 support in CS2.

Now, AMD has confirmed the reason for the change. In AMD's defense, Battlefield 6 already runs pretty well on Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, so there's not exactly a pressing need for that update on those cards. Still, it would be awfully early for AMD to be dropping non-security driver update support for RDNA 2.

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Zak is a freelance contributor to Tom's Hardware with decades of PC benchmarking experience who has also written for HotHardware and The Tech Report. A modern-day Renaissance man, he may not be an expert on anything, but he knows just a little about nearly everything.

4 Comments Comment from the forums

-Fran-

The USB thing is reather stupid and really strange... I'll class that as a "oops" moment from the AMD side... Or I hope it is... My laptop has the USB-C port in the back fed by the dGPU (6800M ~ 67000XT at 150W), so losing that port makes me NOT happy.

In any case... I've noticed the increases in size for the drivers. It's rather annoying for sure. They're trying to shove so much garbage now as "software" with the drivers that it's just blown up in size. They need to put them on a diet, for sure.

I'll stick to 25.9.1 as they've been very reliable for me and I don't see a need to upgrade just yet. Waifu games are not that demanding, lel.

EDIT: Right, the "legacy" thing. The devil is always in the details: AMD moves the cards into that category for performance improvements, but keeps the software for those cards working until they are completely dropped from support. It's important to make the distinction here.

Regards.
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helper800

-Fran- said:
Waifu games are not that demanding, lel.
A cultured person indeed. :smirk:
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DS426

Why is AMD making these changes? We don't know, and the company wasn't immediately available for comment. It could certainly be down to the fact that AMD's graphics driver package is now too large to fit on two CD-ROMs. In the era of ubiquitous broadband internet, a 1.6GB driver package is arguably no big deal, but many people around the world still labor under the limitation of metered internet connections with limited transfer allowances. For reference, NVIDIA's graphics driver package is less than 900 megabytes, although some of that is no doubt because NVIDIA includes neither the Control Panel nor its new NVIDIA App in that download. - this article
Strange paragraph there. We can talk about how 1.6 GB won't fit on obsolete technologies all day. 1.44 MB floppies, anyone!? Even when graphics drivers were on CD's, I was downloading the latest drivers over the internet as best practice has always been to get the latest graphics drivers, chipset drivers, etc online. That was even with 56K dial-up up home, BTW.

Not saying AMD's graphics drivers don't have some excess bloat. This is an offline installer, so everything is included, which is fine in some cases. Nowadays, most software installers are online when filesizes are larger, e.g. check the box for individual components and then some of that software is downloaded at the time of install. BTW, I think AMD is even including chipset drivers now, something those with Intel mobos should be able to uncheck before downloading, not after.

EDIT: actually, I just took a look and I'm seeing the download at about 900 MB when downloading just the graphics driver package. The link provider in this article points to the "combined" package which includes the AMD NPU driver. Plain graphics driver package: https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/whql-amd-software-adrenalin-edition-25.10.2-win10-win11-oct-rdna3.exe
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usertests

So I guess this means FSR4 is not officially coming to RDNA2?
Reply