I would have liked to have seen all GCN graphics cards retired... Because although I run a RX 580 GPU.. And Crypto is still gobbling Polaris up... And a Ryzen+Vega Notebook... I would like to jump over to RDNA when they are available at sensible prices with a driver suite that is fully focused on that architecture and it's feature sets.
That makes no sense - you don't want the hardware you currently use to be supported, just so the hardware you might be able to get one day when it's both in stock and not too expensive has slightly better driver support. Surely right now with RDNA being unavailable now is the worst time to stop support of the hardware people actually own.
Well, they wont with win 11, and you wont get game fixes.Its specially bad in this market. This move is to force more people to change gpus , because many people dont, and not because they dont want to, but because of very luckluster performance gains per dollar. I mean right now somebody with 390x would have to "upgrade" to a 5500XT at the same price with almost the same performance with teh same vram capacity.
There doesn't appear to be any driver model changes in Windows 11 so far. I expect the existing Windows 10 drivers should continue to work fine. Indeed, most of the people testing Windows 11 leaked builds on current hardware are doing it with Windows 10 drivers.
The card is 9 years old. You'll still be able to play your old games. Your card is 1/4 as fast as a new video card. Do you really expect a company to support your old equipment that long?
The 7970 playing games in 2016 was between 1/3 & 1/5 as fast as a 1080Ti. A 1080Ti has the performance between a 3060 & 3060Ti. The fastest cards are another 50% faster than the 1080Ti which means a 7970 is at best 1/5 as fast as the fastest cards now. Even the once mighty 390X is 2-3x slower than a 1080Ti so upwards of 4-5x slower than the fastest cards now as well. I get it people want to have their GPUs supported forever. I'm still running an RX 285 from 2015 but I know that it is on its last legs for new games. Borderland 3 runs at 30fps at the bare minimum settings for me. Going to a 5500XT would easily double my FPS at the same settings. But the fact of the matter is that doesn't make sense to keep supporting this old hardware.
Comparing these old cards just to teh fastest available and proclaiming them to be useless is kinda dumb. There are also MUCH MUCH slower new and supported cards which often are slower than the now unsupported ones. I mean come on, 290-390-Fury are just fine performance wise.Moreover they are so similar architecture wise, its really not that costly to support all gcn ones.This is just a move to get more money not that its huge cost development wise. AMD just seems to look at nv and copy all the wrong (for consumers) moves.Its duopoly in action. They didnt even release any sub 480$ rdna 2 models! and those cost ~1000$.
I'm not just comparing them to the fastest available. As of now a 1080Ti is a middle of the road card in terms of performance. Even a lowly 1660 Super is over twice as fast as a 7970 in more modern games. Based on "newer" cards, the 7970 is only about that of an RX 460 4GB. I'm not saying that you cannot reduce settings to get playable frame rates on older cards, I do that myself with an RX 285. But the fact remains the same that development & support for an architecture that was released in 2012 doesn't make any sense. Microsoft gives you 10 years of support for an OS. Ubuntu only gives you 5 years for LTS versions. Would you really still want MS to still support Windows XP?
Again you are nitpicking. Even if the argument about 7970 held true (it really doesnt, gt 1030 and rx 450 are still supported, and even 750Ti,7970 is pretty much 1050Ti performance) .But lets think it does. Fury X is faster than all the polaris cards. 390X is basically the same performance as 480. 290X is basically the same performance as 470. The performance argument just isnt there. The pretty arbitrary "age" argument maybe stands for gcn1, but gcn 2 not that much, and certainly not for gcn 3.And they are damn similar , including gcn4.
The 7970 was given as an example. That was their fastest card available at it's release. I compared it to the fastest available today. That's an apples to apples comparison. If you want to choose another model then by all means find it's relative available today and compare. It will run a lot slower. It's not about finding a card that matches the performance of your old card. Find the corresponding model in the range and then compare them.
Agreed. I feel like AMD is pulling the rug out from under quite a few cards here that are still decently useful. I have a 380X that I was planning on keeping around for bit, and playing D2R with. It should be able to handle the game fine and I'm guessing will be supported for the most part by Blizzard but games after that with similar graphical requriments that would otherwise run fine could be problems.
Cards like the 380 have like a gen or two playing modern games a medium-low settings, that really shouldn't be "legacy".
"legacy" doesnt mean old or non-performant, it means there are architecture complexities and limitations, additional testing requirements, a loss of available developer allocation
I already did by buying muliple amd products. And ist not like amd is bleeding money right now. They literally dont know what to do with it so they are buying back stocks. When in doubt i always bought amd, because they had better pro consumer track record. But that seems to changed lately.And customer loyalty is worth something too.And they wont get much of it from actions like this. Anyhow, i am always amazed at people cheering on anti consumer practices. "yay we got less functionality for more!" I just dont get it.
Or you can look at it the other way around. A 7970 is only 2x as powerful as the Vega 8 iGPU in Renoir. In fact, anything below a 7870 is slower. The 5500 XT is slightly faster than the 7970. It's an old card and supplying a decade of support for it is pretty good in my book.
I have a 1080 Ti, I'm just saying, a 7970 can still play modern games with lower settings in a playable manner. After all, it's newer and much faster than the GPUs in PS4 and Xbox One.
yeah but the R9 nano is only 5 yrs old, this is fuuukking bulshit AMD, FIUCK YOU IM DONE WITH UR BULSHIT SELLING OFF ALL MY AMD SYSTEMS F.U.C.K Y)OU AMD
bigboxes - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link The card is 9 years old. You'll still be able to play your old games. Your card is 1/4 as fast as a new video card. Do you really expect a company to support your old equipment that long?
considering a HD 7970 & a R9 280/280X is basicly the same core with just a few twaeks to the silicon and the 7970 ghz edition was a 399usd GPU 9 years ago. the fury X and R9 Nano were $650usd so yeah maybe not a 9 year old GPU but the R9 series especally the OG $650 Fury X and R9 Nanos are only 5 years old and with FSR has a few more years left, but NOT NOW, fuck AMD,, full blown INTEL MOVE here
They are dated graphics cards that multitudes less powerful than today's cards and the games made to run on those cards.
And AMD still need to make money. They are a company. And you don't make them money using such an old card.
I'm sure if you could band together enough people and commit to pay for support AMD would oblige. I very much doubt you're going to find many people even wanting such support, let alone pay for it though.
GCN 1 and 2 is understandable, but didn't think 3 would be dropped too, considering that it's a maxwell era architecture, which will be supported for a while still.
I think dropping GCN 3 seems premature as well though I fortunately do not have any. I wonder what they'll do for GCN 4 long term. Technically they were still selling them just a few months ago. So they've been out for years now but the people who just bought one should reasonably expect years of driver support.
Probably M$ pushed these both corporations to abandon Win7, they might have revoked the contracts for Win7 driver WHQL program. Shameless pig M$.
Even to date the OS works superb and stable on Intel platforms esp. And both AMD / Nvidia GPUs too unless DX12 is used.
M$ could release a Service Pack 2 with WDDM including DX12 and all the GFX pipeline updates, nobody would touch that pile of Junk which craps on itself every day or week (patch Tuesday) on its perpetual beta state of OS which uses to test their updates as gunea pigs and on top the EOL policy being 6 months resulting in always resetting your changes to the OS.
AMD processors can also run Win7 on X570 and B550 but only issue would be lack of some Win10 Scheduler update which improves the ramping up the CPU cores which was in May 2019 SAC update. Long Term Servicing Channel on AMD would be similar to Win7 since both do not have those updates. Still one can run the OS.
With Win11 coming up, the abomination which has 10X touch friendly massive information density loss UI, Windows experience for desktop machines is even bad now. Win10 is until 2025 at-least thankfully, but the perpetual UI changes and lack of direction bleeding into the desktop RTM environment is really a damn chore that shouldn't exist in 2021 of all. 10 and 11 will never be a stable RTM OS anymore with this move. A massive fk up from M$ in copying Apple greedy walled garden and their touch friendly, kiddo friendly mimic.
Win 7 should be gone and support for drivers from AMD/Nvidia, Intel, etc... should have stopped the moment Win 7 went EOL. Why do you want to run modern hardware on a 12 year old OS?
Because it works and it doesn't have the problem of constant bloatware/spyware/nagware infestation through updates breaking everything and the UI is made for a Desktop system not a portable garbage.
EOL officially but the updates are even delivered to date for Win7, it got Samsung NVMe driver too. DX12 can also be done but the libraries have to be shipped by the developer, COD MW 2019 and COD Black Ops Cold War, Cyberjunk all of them did this.
And it looks way better and even better than Win11.
Windows 7 was a good OS, in 2009. Compared to 10 is it less stable, less useful UI for troubleshooting, has more security holes, and not designed for 2018+ hardware.
You do realize that EOL means that MS isn't sending security updates. Without those updates new security holes that are found are never fixed and are just an easy way for your system to be hacked.
"You do realize that EOL means that MS isn't sending security updates." stop perpetuating that lie, MS is sending security updates with another 1.5 years to go
"Why do you want to run modern hardware on a 12 year old OS?" the driver supports gpus released in 2016! a cpu is irrelevant, a few enhanced power saving or turbo features is what a newer OS provides for modern hardware
not every system is playing online multiplayer games, not every system is directly connected to the internet, but occasionally a new driver is useful for singleplayer games or content creation software
"stop perpetuating that lie, MS is sending security updates with another 1.5 years to go" That is a 1/2 false statement. Support ended for Win 7 on January 14, 2020. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-... That said you could PURCHASE Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Win 7 Pro & Enterprise Editions. However, that was only available to business customers through the Volume Licensing Center and from Cloud Solution Providers. If you have not purchased ESU then you cannot get updates for Win 7. Even then ESU is a fringe set of users and specifically for business customers. ESU ends up just helping business migrate to Win 10 at a slower pace that's it.
There is more than just power saving and turbo features in the modern OS. From a tech support stand point I much prefer Win 8/10 to Win 7. The GUI is easier to navigate, the information that you get is easier to decipher, etc... On top of that the schedulers are better in Win 8/10 than in 7 and in 7 you don't get support for newer CPUs. If you install a Ryzen 5600X in a Win 7 computer and it doesn't work, AMD will NOT give you support. They will tell you to install Win 10 and see if it works then.
Newer software is abandoning Win 7 support as well. Adobe Premier Pro going back at least to Oct 2018 has Win 10 as an OS requirement. While it might be able to be installed on Win 7/8, if you run into problems on the OS you again will not get support from Adobe.
I feel like a broken record saying this but there is not a good reason to support a 12 year old OS anymore for modern hardware. Look at the major Linux distrabutions, Ubuntu gives you 5 years of updates for LTS versions and Red Hat gives you 10 years support. Only SUSE gives more than 10 years with 13 years of support. I can tell you from personal experience that supporting SLES 11 is a PITA. General support ended in 2019 and LTSS ends March 31, 2022. I cannot wait until that happens because SLES 11 is garbage compared to 12 & 15. Note I am a VMware Administrator and Systems Administrator. I have to give support for OS' ranging from Server 2003 R2 > Server 2019, SLES 11 > SLES 15, Ubuntu 14.04LTS > Ubuntu 20.04LTS, etc...Working with these things on a daily basis I have grown to have a disdain for the older OS'. They just are not as nice as the newer ones.
Considering virtualization is built into the majority of CPUs the issue of running the socially approved OS is kind of moot. Pick one. Pick several. Somewhere in all that is happiness.
The so-called "GCN4" is basically equal to "GCN3" (both are gfx8). I really see no reason they are abandoning RX295/390 and Fury but leaving Polaris...
Though none of that matters on Linux, which is nice.
display/video engines are not the same, GCN4 also dropped hardware trueaudio, there's a chance power switching might also be different, so they are not identical
I remember AMD stopping HD7000/8000 support when Richland APUs were still being sold as new.
One might argue that gaming GPUs won't need 10 years of support, but when it comes to APUs or SoCs, 10 years are minimum.
And I just fired up a Phenom II x6 system the other day, with an R290X GPU using a 512 bit bus for its 4GB of VRAM: Still a reasonable gaming rig at 1920x1080, much better than a Tiger Lake or Cezanne iGPU (albeit at 30x the Wattage...). My kids keep it as backup or for a chance visitor.
I remember it being sold as "4k ready"... 3 or 4 generations since, that still hasn't happened.
I don't have the device IDs to fully confirm this, but looking at AMD's driver INF, it would seem the pre-GCN 4 members of the 600 series have also been dropped.
Fury X has identical IPC versus Vega so if Vega is supported and Fury X isn’t there seems to be minimal tech-based justification. (The identical IPC means they’re the same design with the difference being a die shrink.)
The few features Vega added don’t seem to be enough of a justification. The 4 GB of RAM limit also isn’t enough since Polaris shipped even the 480 with a 4 GB option.
Windows has been around for much longer than a decade, including the NT kernel. So, it’s baffling why anyone expects Windows to be supported in 2021.
I realized that the steering wheel in my car has been around for ... gadzooks... how long now? And the wheels...
Someone must save us from useless steering wheels and wheels. It’s 2021.
(Also, arguing about GPU support based on performance without taking APU performance into full account is unwise. The only justification is that the chip/chipset is too different, requiring too much extra work. The reality is that companies do this to force people to replace products that work adequately for them. Apple is the king of this practice. The first Mac was unveiled to the tech press with 512K of RAM — so Jobs could wow the crowd with speech synthesis via 3rd-party software. The actual Mac Apple was about to start selling had 128K of RAM, was not expandable to 512K, and did not include a disk with the speech synthesis software and a corresponding license. That egregious fraud has been transformed into the open consumer-degrading tactic of withholding security patches from operating systems while simultaneously preventing later operating systems to run on the machines. I know plenty of people with perfectly-functional Macs who are being forced to dump them and buy again. These are multicore machines with 512-1TB SSDs and 16 GB of RAM — better specs than the 8 GB unexpandable machines the company is deigning to peddle.)
It won't do anything. It's not a political decision, it's an economic one. Not having FSR is a smaller deal than you think unless you mainly play the games it's implement in.
To people complaining about GCN1/2/3 drivers getting EOLed: the only thing you're losing right now is FSR in under 30 games. You don't have to update. New games will likely work with the drivers that were current when they were in development -> they'll work with most games anyway. You are losing possible (and unlikely) improvements.
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StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I would have liked to have seen all GCN graphics cards retired... Because although I run a RX 580 GPU.. And Crypto is still gobbling Polaris up... And a Ryzen+Vega Notebook... I would like to jump over to RDNA when they are available at sensible prices with a driver suite that is fully focused on that architecture and it's feature sets.Dribble - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
That makes no sense - you don't want the hardware you currently use to be supported, just so the hardware you might be able to get one day when it's both in stock and not too expensive has slightly better driver support. Surely right now with RDNA being unavailable now is the worst time to stop support of the hardware people actually own.dotjaz - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
You are insane. Why on earth would AMD stop supporting products they JUST LAUNCHED?3ogdy - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Not that much of a fair game. HD7970 getting 10 years of support, while other, newer GPUs only get 5.Samuel Vimes - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
They’ll still work.RaV[666] - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Well, they wont with win 11, and you wont get game fixes.Its specially bad in this market.This move is to force more people to change gpus , because many people dont, and not because they dont want to, but because of very luckluster performance gains per dollar.
I mean right now somebody with 390x would have to "upgrade" to a 5500XT at the same price with almost the same performance with teh same vram capacity.
kepstin - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
There doesn't appear to be any driver model changes in Windows 11 so far. I expect the existing Windows 10 drivers should continue to work fine. Indeed, most of the people testing Windows 11 leaked builds on current hardware are doing it with Windows 10 drivers.flashmozzg - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Win 11 is just Win 10 update rebrand/haukionkannel - Saturday, June 26, 2021 - link
Gpu drivers will work just fine. The main point of win11 is support to Big.little cpu configuration!yetanotherhuman - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
They're not old enough, in my opinion, all high end GCN cards are still viable, 7970 included. Bad move.bigboxes - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
The card is 9 years old. You'll still be able to play your old games. Your card is 1/4 as fast as a new video card. Do you really expect a company to support your old equipment that long?schujj07 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
The 7970 playing games in 2016 was between 1/3 & 1/5 as fast as a 1080Ti. A 1080Ti has the performance between a 3060 & 3060Ti. The fastest cards are another 50% faster than the 1080Ti which means a 7970 is at best 1/5 as fast as the fastest cards now. Even the once mighty 390X is 2-3x slower than a 1080Ti so upwards of 4-5x slower than the fastest cards now as well. I get it people want to have their GPUs supported forever. I'm still running an RX 285 from 2015 but I know that it is on its last legs for new games. Borderland 3 runs at 30fps at the bare minimum settings for me. Going to a 5500XT would easily double my FPS at the same settings. But the fact of the matter is that doesn't make sense to keep supporting this old hardware.RaV[666] - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Comparing these old cards just to teh fastest available and proclaiming them to be useless is kinda dumb.There are also MUCH MUCH slower new and supported cards which often are slower than the now unsupported ones.
I mean come on, 290-390-Fury are just fine performance wise.Moreover they are so similar architecture wise, its really not that costly to support all gcn ones.This is just a move to get more money not that its huge cost development wise.
AMD just seems to look at nv and copy all the wrong (for consumers) moves.Its duopoly in action.
They didnt even release any sub 480$ rdna 2 models! and those cost ~1000$.
schujj07 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I'm not just comparing them to the fastest available. As of now a 1080Ti is a middle of the road card in terms of performance. Even a lowly 1660 Super is over twice as fast as a 7970 in more modern games. Based on "newer" cards, the 7970 is only about that of an RX 460 4GB. I'm not saying that you cannot reduce settings to get playable frame rates on older cards, I do that myself with an RX 285. But the fact remains the same that development & support for an architecture that was released in 2012 doesn't make any sense. Microsoft gives you 10 years of support for an OS. Ubuntu only gives you 5 years for LTS versions. Would you really still want MS to still support Windows XP?RaV[666] - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Again you are nitpicking.Even if the argument about 7970 held true (it really doesnt, gt 1030 and rx 450 are still supported, and even 750Ti,7970 is pretty much 1050Ti performance) .But lets think it does.
Fury X is faster than all the polaris cards.
390X is basically the same performance as 480.
290X is basically the same performance as 470.
The performance argument just isnt there.
The pretty arbitrary "age" argument maybe stands for gcn1, but gcn 2 not that much, and certainly not for gcn 3.And they are damn similar , including gcn4.
bigboxes - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
The 7970 was given as an example. That was their fastest card available at it's release. I compared it to the fastest available today. That's an apples to apples comparison. If you want to choose another model then by all means find it's relative available today and compare. It will run a lot slower. It's not about finding a card that matches the performance of your old card. Find the corresponding model in the range and then compare them.Operandi - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Agreed. I feel like AMD is pulling the rug out from under quite a few cards here that are still decently useful. I have a 380X that I was planning on keeping around for bit, and playing D2R with. It should be able to handle the game fine and I'm guessing will be supported for the most part by Blizzard but games after that with similar graphical requriments that would otherwise run fine could be problems.Cards like the 380 have like a gen or two playing modern games a medium-low settings, that really shouldn't be "legacy".
kn00tcn - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link
"legacy" doesnt mean old or non-performant, it means there are architecture complexities and limitations, additional testing requirements, a loss of available developer allocationdotjaz - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
>not that costlySo you would foot the bill then?
RaV[666] - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I already did by buying muliple amd products.And ist not like amd is bleeding money right now.
They literally dont know what to do with it so they are buying back stocks.
When in doubt i always bought amd, because they had better pro consumer track record.
But that seems to changed lately.And customer loyalty is worth something too.And they wont get much of it from actions like this.
Anyhow, i am always amazed at people cheering on anti consumer practices.
"yay we got less functionality for more!"
I just dont get it.
e36Jeff - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Or you can look at it the other way around. A 7970 is only 2x as powerful as the Vega 8 iGPU in Renoir. In fact, anything below a 7870 is slower. The 5500 XT is slightly faster than the 7970. It's an old card and supplying a decade of support for it is pretty good in my book.yetanotherhuman - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I have a 1080 Ti, I'm just saying, a 7970 can still play modern games with lower settings in a playable manner. After all, it's newer and much faster than the GPUs in PS4 and Xbox One.yetanotherhuman - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Sorry, I don't know why I said newer, it's the first in that family - but it is faster.Makaveli - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Faster yes but not newer. The GPU in the PS4 and Xbox one are polaris based. GCN is older.schujj07 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Depends on the version of PS4 or Xbox One. The original versions are more or less HD 7850's whereas PS4 Pro and Xbox One X is RX 470/480ish.AMDisFuKKKingKrazy - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link
yeah but the R9 nano is only 5 yrs old, this is fuuukking bulshit AMD, FIUCK YOU IM DONE WITH UR BULSHIT SELLING OFF ALL MY AMD SYSTEMS F.U.C.K Y)OU AMDAMDisFuKKKingKrazy - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link
bigboxes - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - linkThe card is 9 years old. You'll still be able to play your old games. Your card is 1/4 as fast as a new video card. Do you really expect a company to support your old equipment that long?
considering a HD 7970 & a R9 280/280X is basicly the same core with just a few twaeks to the silicon and the 7970 ghz edition was a 399usd GPU 9 years ago. the fury X and R9 Nano were $650usd so yeah maybe not a 9 year old GPU but the R9 series especally the OG $650 Fury X and R9 Nanos are only 5 years old and with FSR has a few more years left, but NOT NOW, fuck AMD,, full blown INTEL MOVE here
Tams80 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
To keep supporting them would be a bad move.They are dated graphics cards that multitudes less powerful than today's cards and the games made to run on those cards.
And AMD still need to make money. They are a company. And you don't make them money using such an old card.
I'm sure if you could band together enough people and commit to pay for support AMD would oblige. I very much doubt you're going to find many people even wanting such support, let alone pay for it though.
Anyway, your old card still works, does it not?
trenzterra - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Even the iPhone 6s has longer driver supportscineram - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Great move! They must focus on the important things.eddman - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
GCN 1 and 2 is understandable, but didn't think 3 would be dropped too, considering that it's a maxwell era architecture, which will be supported for a while still.andrewaggb - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I think dropping GCN 3 seems premature as well though I fortunately do not have any. I wonder what they'll do for GCN 4 long term. Technically they were still selling them just a few months ago. So they've been out for years now but the people who just bought one should reasonably expect years of driver support.Silver5urfer - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Probably M$ pushed these both corporations to abandon Win7, they might have revoked the contracts for Win7 driver WHQL program. Shameless pig M$.Even to date the OS works superb and stable on Intel platforms esp. And both AMD / Nvidia GPUs too unless DX12 is used.
M$ could release a Service Pack 2 with WDDM including DX12 and all the GFX pipeline updates, nobody would touch that pile of Junk which craps on itself every day or week (patch Tuesday) on its perpetual beta state of OS which uses to test their updates as gunea pigs and on top the EOL policy being 6 months resulting in always resetting your changes to the OS.
AMD processors can also run Win7 on X570 and B550 but only issue would be lack of some Win10 Scheduler update which improves the ramping up the CPU cores which was in May 2019 SAC update. Long Term Servicing Channel on AMD would be similar to Win7 since both do not have those updates. Still one can run the OS.
With Win11 coming up, the abomination which has 10X touch friendly massive information density loss UI, Windows experience for desktop machines is even bad now. Win10 is until 2025 at-least thankfully, but the perpetual UI changes and lack of direction bleeding into the desktop RTM environment is really a damn chore that shouldn't exist in 2021 of all. 10 and 11 will never be a stable RTM OS anymore with this move. A massive fk up from M$ in copying Apple greedy walled garden and their touch friendly, kiddo friendly mimic.
schujj07 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Win 7 should be gone and support for drivers from AMD/Nvidia, Intel, etc... should have stopped the moment Win 7 went EOL. Why do you want to run modern hardware on a 12 year old OS?Silver5urfer - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Because it works and it doesn't have the problem of constant bloatware/spyware/nagware infestation through updates breaking everything and the UI is made for a Desktop system not a portable garbage.EOL officially but the updates are even delivered to date for Win7, it got Samsung NVMe driver too. DX12 can also be done but the libraries have to be shipped by the developer, COD MW 2019 and COD Black Ops Cold War, Cyberjunk all of them did this.
And it looks way better and even better than Win11.
schujj07 - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Windows 7 was a good OS, in 2009. Compared to 10 is it less stable, less useful UI for troubleshooting, has more security holes, and not designed for 2018+ hardware.You do realize that EOL means that MS isn't sending security updates. Without those updates new security holes that are found are never fixed and are just an easy way for your system to be hacked.
kn00tcn - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link
"You do realize that EOL means that MS isn't sending security updates." stop perpetuating that lie, MS is sending security updates with another 1.5 years to go"Why do you want to run modern hardware on a 12 year old OS?" the driver supports gpus released in 2016! a cpu is irrelevant, a few enhanced power saving or turbo features is what a newer OS provides for modern hardware
not every system is playing online multiplayer games, not every system is directly connected to the internet, but occasionally a new driver is useful for singleplayer games or content creation software
schujj07 - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link
"stop perpetuating that lie, MS is sending security updates with another 1.5 years to go" That is a 1/2 false statement. Support ended for Win 7 on January 14, 2020. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-7-... That said you could PURCHASE Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Win 7 Pro & Enterprise Editions. However, that was only available to business customers through the Volume Licensing Center and from Cloud Solution Providers. If you have not purchased ESU then you cannot get updates for Win 7. Even then ESU is a fringe set of users and specifically for business customers. ESU ends up just helping business migrate to Win 10 at a slower pace that's it.There is more than just power saving and turbo features in the modern OS. From a tech support stand point I much prefer Win 8/10 to Win 7. The GUI is easier to navigate, the information that you get is easier to decipher, etc... On top of that the schedulers are better in Win 8/10 than in 7 and in 7 you don't get support for newer CPUs. If you install a Ryzen 5600X in a Win 7 computer and it doesn't work, AMD will NOT give you support. They will tell you to install Win 10 and see if it works then.
Newer software is abandoning Win 7 support as well. Adobe Premier Pro going back at least to Oct 2018 has Win 10 as an OS requirement. While it might be able to be installed on Win 7/8, if you run into problems on the OS you again will not get support from Adobe.
I feel like a broken record saying this but there is not a good reason to support a 12 year old OS anymore for modern hardware. Look at the major Linux distrabutions, Ubuntu gives you 5 years of updates for LTS versions and Red Hat gives you 10 years support. Only SUSE gives more than 10 years with 13 years of support. I can tell you from personal experience that supporting SLES 11 is a PITA. General support ended in 2019 and LTSS ends March 31, 2022. I cannot wait until that happens because SLES 11 is garbage compared to 12 & 15. Note I am a VMware Administrator and Systems Administrator. I have to give support for OS' ranging from Server 2003 R2 > Server 2019, SLES 11 > SLES 15, Ubuntu 14.04LTS > Ubuntu 20.04LTS, etc...Working with these things on a daily basis I have grown to have a disdain for the older OS'. They just are not as nice as the newer ones.
brucethemoose - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Among other things, I think you give Windows 7 too much credit, and have an outdated impression of 10.Anyway, all sorts of old OSes work, but you can't expect to get modern features on them. This is not unique to MS, or even commercial OSes.
Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Seriously. Why hang your hat on Windows 7 when you could get a REAL OS like Windows 98 instead!Threska - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link
Considering virtualization is built into the majority of CPUs the issue of running the socially approved OS is kind of moot. Pick one. Pick several. Somewhere in all that is happiness.Cooe - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Not getting FSR support on my R9 Fury X (which has MORE than enough spare compute shaders to run the upscaling algorithm) = ... -_- ... FML lol.brucethemoose - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
You drew the short straw here. If Fury X definitely has enough muscle to squeak by these days... but not the driver support.kn00tcn - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link
FSR is implemented by the game, it also was officially demoed on nvidia, so it makes no sense that driver support is requiredmake sure to try the games or utilize the upcoming code to confirm your luck
Bigos - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
The so-called "GCN4" is basically equal to "GCN3" (both are gfx8). I really see no reason they are abandoning RX295/390 and Fury but leaving Polaris...Though none of that matters on Linux, which is nice.
kn00tcn - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link
display/video engines are not the same, GCN4 also dropped hardware trueaudio, there's a chance power switching might also be different, so they are not identicalabufrejoval - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I remember AMD stopping HD7000/8000 support when Richland APUs were still being sold as new.One might argue that gaming GPUs won't need 10 years of support, but when it comes to APUs or SoCs, 10 years are minimum.
And I just fired up a Phenom II x6 system the other day, with an R290X GPU using a 512 bit bus for its 4GB of VRAM: Still a reasonable gaming rig at 1920x1080, much better than a Tiger Lake or Cezanne iGPU (albeit at 30x the Wattage...). My kids keep it as backup or for a chance visitor.
I remember it being sold as "4k ready"... 3 or 4 generations since, that still hasn't happened.
ballsystemlord - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
@Ryan what about these GPUs? https://www.anandtech.com/show/14735/amd-quietly-r... They are also based on GCN, but AMD incremented the naming scheme.RaV[666] - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Lol i didnt even know they did this. Yea, its gonna be a problem for them.But i guess they scrapped them also.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I don't have the device IDs to fully confirm this, but looking at AMD's driver INF, it would seem the pre-GCN 4 members of the 600 series have also been dropped.ballsystemlord - Wednesday, July 7, 2021 - link
Thanks for telling us.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Fury X has identical IPC versus Vega so if Vega is supported and Fury X isn’t there seems to be minimal tech-based justification. (The identical IPC means they’re the same design with the difference being a die shrink.)The few features Vega added don’t seem to be enough of a justification. The 4 GB of RAM limit also isn’t enough since Polaris shipped even the 480 with a 4 GB option.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Windows has been around for much longer than a decade, including the NT kernel. So, it’s baffling why anyone expects Windows to be supported in 2021.I realized that the steering wheel in my car has been around for ... gadzooks... how long now? And the wheels...
Someone must save us from useless steering wheels and wheels. It’s 2021.
(Also, arguing about GPU support based on performance without taking APU performance into full account is unwise. The only justification is that the chip/chipset is too different, requiring too much extra work. The reality is that companies do this to force people to replace products that work adequately for them. Apple is the king of this practice. The first Mac was unveiled to the tech press with 512K of RAM — so Jobs could wow the crowd with speech synthesis via 3rd-party software. The actual Mac Apple was about to start selling had 128K of RAM, was not expandable to 512K, and did not include a disk with the speech synthesis software and a corresponding license. That egregious fraud has been transformed into the open consumer-degrading tactic of withholding security patches from operating systems while simultaneously preventing later operating systems to run on the machines. I know plenty of people with perfectly-functional Macs who are being forced to dump them and buy again. These are multicore machines with 512-1TB SSDs and 16 GB of RAM — better specs than the 8 GB unexpandable machines the company is deigning to peddle.)
boozed - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
I guess it's lucky my R9 shat itself last year then!jpvalverde85 - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link
If anyone else consider it worthy or are still users of Fury/Tonga/Hawaii GPUs, i created this petition:http://chng.it/cfmwDSd6Lj
bananaforscale - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link
It won't do anything. It's not a political decision, it's an economic one. Not having FSR is a smaller deal than you think unless you mainly play the games it's implement in.bananaforscale - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link
To people complaining about GCN1/2/3 drivers getting EOLed: the only thing you're losing right now is FSR in under 30 games. You don't have to update. New games will likely work with the drivers that were current when they were in development -> they'll work with most games anyway. You are losing possible (and unlikely) improvements.kn00tcn - Thursday, June 24, 2021 - link
FSR most likely will work, how else did the nvidia demo work? the game implements itthe concern should never be about improvements, but about bug fixes such as artifacts or crashes
wrkingclass_hero - Wednesday, June 23, 2021 - link
Dang, I just sold my 7950s on ebay a week ago.