AMD has released new drivers for GPUs it no longer supports

AMD moved a good chunk of its graphics cards to a "legacy support model" just over a year ago. You can pretty much read "legacy support model" as stopped supporting them, in fact AMD literally said: "No additional driver releases are planned to support these graphics products." But out of nowhere, it has released a new driver for its legacy cards. You can grab it from its site if you have an older graphics card that has found its way onto the legacy GPU list.

It's worth noting that the Adrenaline Edition 22.6.1 drivers are all over the place when it comes to operating system support. When it first dropped it was only available for Windows 10 64-bit, but now that's been extended to Windows 7 64-bit, too. 32-bit operating systems are right out, and seemingly so is Windows 8 on all counts.

Seems no-one likes Windows 8. If you still running that pig's ear of an OS then your drivers could still be the ones from 2014, I'm afraid.

It's also not clear what this updated driver actually does as sadly we no longer have access to such historical GPUs in the kit cupboard. There are a couple of known issues to be aware of, but beyond that, the benefits aren't exactly clear:

Enhanced Sync may cause a black screen to occur when enabled on some games and system configurations. Any users who may be experiencing issues with Enhanced Sync enabled should disable it as a temporary workaround.
Radeon performance metrics and logging features may intermittently report extremely high and incorrect memory clock values.

If you're running an older graphics card, i.e. one that AMD now considers a legacy model, let us know if these drivers have any notable impact on performance. We'd be surprised if there were any performance improvements on offer, but some tricky support issues may have been ironed out.

We're waiting to hear from AMD exactly what the update might offer owners of a legacy GPU. In other news, though, at least the price of graphics cards is starting to return to normal and it shouldn't be too long until we see new RDNA 3 graphics cards either.

TOPICS

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.