previous legacy switches were unacceptably without warning and often had no real updates since
it would be wise to do better this time especially since vega is still in stores
interestingly, on polaris i've run ai upscaling over vulkan on windows 7, and unreal engine 5 lumen also works on win7 (screenspace GI and reflections), even fortnite ran last year upon its ue5 switch during the first week of chapter 4
@Ryan Alan Wake II that you mentioned in the article, is running at 2 FPS on average using Polaris cards (but without rendering issues) while it's completely broken on Vega, although it achieves decent framerates close or better to RDNA1 performance (Navi series 5000)
This situation could clearly be the case of Primitive Shaders support of Vega in hardware (like Navi cards) that need to be leveraged via drivers for Mesh Shaders support.
Is AMD going to fix Alan Wake II on Vega hardware ? It's not a matter of performance. The game is completely broken. Take a look of these videos.
In my head, I still think of my RX480 8GB as that "new" card I got fairly recently. "Fairly recently" being 2016. I had specifically upgraded to it so my PC would be "VR Ready", and I could use the Rift CV.
That same Rift CV has been sitting in its box for years now, together with its four cameras, ever since I got the Quest 2 (Which now also has its own successor).
The psychological perception of the passage of time for humans is a very weird subject, especially for those who don't spend much time thinking about it too deeply:
When you were a child, events from one year ago felt more distant than events that happened a decade ago do now. That is because of a combination of factors, but the two big ones are a) The longer you live, the smaller each additional unit of time becomes in relation to the overall time you've lived. When you were 5 years old, one year represented one fifth of your entire life, and functionally, even less than that, as your first year or two you are two busy acclimating to existing to really retain any compatible memories of that time, afterwards. Even in your twenties, that same year already represents less than 5% of your total existence. So, every new year you experience becomes perceptually shorter than the last, until they just seem to fly right by. If we were immortal, eventually even decades and centuries would feel pretty short. This is also directly related to b) Your brain is a finite, continuously self-optimizing neural network. As you get older, certain processes are made more efficient, but less complex and flexible, in order to optimize resources, making it harder to learn new things and adapt to new concepts and ways of thinking. The same thing happens with memory - to use computing terminology, your brain continuously refines the lossy compression algorithm it uses to store experiences, keeping only the data judged as most relevant, and culling the rest, much of it before it even has a chance to be stored in the first place. The end result is that the more memories you have, the less detailed they are likely to be. To make up for the missing information when you actively try to recall it, your brain uses heuristic processes to generate approximations on the fly based on related data to fill in the gaps - these approximations are basically no more than informed guesses, and, if they are accurate, that is pretty much just a coincidence. So, you literally remember less details of new events experienced and information learned with every passing year, and older memories are passively optimized as the specific neuronal connections that form them are less frequently innervated, making the links between the individual neurons weaker, and those memories harder to access,
I could go on for literal days on the subject, as it has always fascinated me, and I've been studying it on and off since I started back in college, but no one wants to actually read that, so
TL;DR: The more years you live, the shorter each additional year feels, and, as far as memories are concerned, actually is, as you store less and less nonessential details to optimize the use of the fundamentally limited resources your brain has.
For example, I know what I had for breakfast today and yesterday, but if you asked me what exactly I ate for each meal this past week, I truthfully wouldn't be able to tell you. It gets worse, too: if you asked me what I did over the last month, I could tell you the general activities and a few keys points, but actual specific details would be extremely limited. And I'm only just shy of 39.
It's no wonder time feels like it flies by when 90% of it has been compressed down to a vague outline with some bullet points.
...and with that, my ramblings over the perception of time and its neural correlates that no one was remotely interested in is officially over. For now.
I enjoyed the rambling, and it's a subject that fascinates me too!
Taking this one step further, science has yet to explain the passage of time properly, and some, like Carlo Rovelli, have suggested it has got to do with the mind.
I'm on Linux so Vega and Polaris driver support comes from the MESA drivers and that's supported a lot longer for older hardware on Linux than on Windows. But I have a Laptop with Vega 8CU integrated graphics and that laptop also has a Polaris dGPU and really AMD dropping support for Polaris GPUs for it's ROCm/HIP translation layer(longer ago) has put Blender 3.0/Later editions out of reach there for that Polaris RX560X GPU in the laptop.
And that Laptop was from the 2019 Model Year and AMD featured that at CES 2019. But for dGPUs and Laptops in 2019 any Vega Discrete Mobile GPUs had to come with expensive HBM memory and Apple was the only laptop maker using Vega Discrete Mobile so AMD had to use Polaris dGPUs in laptops as late as 2019/2020 until the first RDNA1 discrete mobile GPUs became available.
The Blender Foundation deciding to only support CUDA natively for Blender 3.0 later editions for any non Apple hardware means that Polaris GPUs do not have any current ROCm/HIP support to take that CUDA and convert that to a form that can be run on the Polaris Hardware. And only the Older Blender 2.93/earlier editions support OpenCL as the GPU compute language for Blender's GPU Accelerated Cycles rendering as Blender 3.0/Later have to utilize ROCm/HIP to translate CUDA to a form that can be run on the AMD hardware.
Blender 3D will Default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores if Blender can not detect any Software/API support for GPU compute on the GPU hardware but that's slower to render the Ray Traced scene and ties all the CPU cores/threads up at 100% until the render is completed so GPUs are much faster for that than CPUs.
maybe i didnt test a serious scene a couple years ago, but my cycles opencl 580 didnt have any useful gain over cycles 2600x
HIP says it supports radeon7 on linux, that is vega, and if it's open source then there may still be a chance the same way mesa can enable compute based raytracing on polaris
but if you're rendering on a laptop, isnt that concerning? higher temps, harder if not impossible to replace components
Ya my amd advantage edition laptop released in early 2022 will no longer have mainline driver support because the 5900hx cpu has integrated vega. If I try to install it, it says I have unsupported hardware. Worked my butt off and chose to support AMD and I just got burned. I'm so upset right now tbh. I left a comment describing how CS2 wouldn't let me open the game last week because I needed the newest drivers. Soon every new game will tell me I have unsupported drivers. Half of em will probably refuse to run at all because of it. All these articles are so blase and matter of fact with this. My 1,600$ laptop had a 2 year lifespan... AMD should be dragged for this.
and say they're for "systems pairing RDNA series graphics products with Polaris or Vega series graphics products" - your exact scenario.
I don't know why you need to hunt these down in the release notes; if you search for the drivers for either card separately you get packages that support Polaris/Vega or RDNA+ but not both simultaneously, and you can't install them both separately. The linked package does support both, with different driver versions for each.
"The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning. "
Considering to this day my card still occasionally locks up (constant tone) and black screens, then reboots after playing YT videos. I'd say they need to work on the "stable" part.
This is a problem because of how long AMD keeps recycling products. The Ryzen 7030 series launched THIS YEAR uses these "retired" drivers. We're back to the bad old days of people having to use third-party graphics drivers for hardware acceleration in Adobe apps to work.
This is so messed up. What about my AMD "Advantage" laptop? I worked 2 70hr work weeks just so I could afford it not lose my apartment. The APU is VEGA but the dedicated gpu is a RX6800m. AMD won't allow me to install the new drivers, says "unsupported hardware". I have to install the "definitely not legacy" drivers. If I'm being honest, I didnt spend 1,600$ to play GTA5 indefinitely. I purchased this laptop to play modern games. Just last week Counterstrike 2 blocked me from running the game and said I needed to update to the newest AMD drivers. Soon, every new game is going to do this to me. How is AMD dropping mainline driver support for a laptop from 2022 with a 5900hx cpu and RDNA2 acceptable? Why isnt nobody mentioning this? This really, genuinely sucks. It's so anticonsumer and you and other websites are just so blase about it. I'm not rick, 1,600$ was a lot of money. Can you please talk about that.
I'd make sure your laptop is actually using its dedicated GPU when it tries to run games, rather than the Vega-based iGPU. Laptops are often configured for power efficiency by default, which means they will often decide to use the iGPU most of the time, even when there is a perfectly good dedicated GPU available.
I was just reading about this issue on Reddit, when I was trying to play Starfield on my laptop. I forget the exact procedure, but you can force it to use the dedicated GPU, which should resolve the issue.
Your dedicated GPU is still very much supported, and should continue to be for many years - Windows is just likely defaulting to the Vega iGPU, leading to errors like this.
I just took a look around, couldn't find the discussion I was looking for, but here are instructions to force your laptop to use your dedicated GPU - they are from Intel, but since the issue is with Windows settings, the same process should work for you, too: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/ar...
Unfortunately you've landed in the worst corner case possible for video driver support: multiple GPUs from the same vendor that are multiple generations apart.
If the system has a hardware MUX, you can disable the Vega iGPU and rely solely on the 6800M. Otherwise if the iGPU is active at all times, there is currently no path forward for you: you can only have one AMD driver set installed. Sorry, man.
I have a system with a 5700 XT in it. I went ahead and installed my old RX 460 into another PCIe slot to test this out. Once I had installed the referenced driver package, I ended up with drivers installed for both cards simultaneously. They're different versions. Radeon Settings recognizes both cards.
I heard somewhere that Polaris cards are missing hardware functionality and CANNOT implement DirectX 12.1. So any game that requires DirectX 12.1, will never run on Polaris cards (except possibly in a software-simulation of that feature, a terrible frame rates maybe 20x slower than similar modern cards). It used to be that just 1 or 2 games were requiring DirectX 12.1 but I believe Alan Wake and many others are going to require that functionality very, very soon. So it's game-over, Polaris, sorry to see you go, you were obsoleted way before your time ...
This is a really sleazy thing to do. My 5700g was purchased new just 18 months ago. If you told me that the CPU would only get 18 months of driver support, I would never have bought the CPU! Shame on you AMD!
Also, since the 22.7x Adrenalin package last year, where OpenGL was drastically improved on RDNA, OpenGL got a lot slower on Raven Ridge, though Vulkan was still fast.
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kn00tcn - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
and the AFMF (FSR3) preview branch is 23.30.x.xprevious legacy switches were unacceptably without warning and often had no real updates since
it would be wise to do better this time especially since vega is still in stores
interestingly, on polaris i've run ai upscaling over vulkan on windows 7, and unreal engine 5 lumen also works on win7 (screenspace GI and reflections), even fortnite ran last year upon its ue5 switch during the first week of chapter 4
NikosD - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
@RyanAlan Wake II that you mentioned in the article, is running at 2 FPS on average using Polaris cards (but without rendering issues) while it's completely broken on Vega, although it achieves decent framerates close or better to RDNA1 performance (Navi series 5000)
This situation could clearly be the case of Primitive Shaders support of Vega in hardware (like Navi cards) that need to be leveraged via drivers for Mesh Shaders support.
Is AMD going to fix Alan Wake II on Vega hardware ?
It's not a matter of performance. The game is completely broken.
Take a look of these videos.
https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/due-...
scineram - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
What is there to fix??? Game uses unsupported technologies, RDNA2 minimum listed.NikosD - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
No, of course not.As I wrote above, RDNA1 RX 5000 series Navi cards play the game just fine with Primitive Shaders.
Polaris renders the game perfectly and extremely slowly.
Only for Vega is utterly broken.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
Feels like last year that Vega card was released. Who knows where the time goes...Threska - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
It's still a capable card for those without an extreme setup.PurposelyCryptic - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
In my head, I still think of my RX480 8GB as that "new" card I got fairly recently. "Fairly recently" being 2016. I had specifically upgraded to it so my PC would be "VR Ready", and I could use the Rift CV.That same Rift CV has been sitting in its box for years now, together with its four cameras, ever since I got the Quest 2 (Which now also has its own successor).
The psychological perception of the passage of time for humans is a very weird subject, especially for those who don't spend much time thinking about it too deeply:
When you were a child, events from one year ago felt more distant than events that happened a decade ago do now. That is because of a combination of factors, but the two big ones are
a) The longer you live, the smaller each additional unit of time becomes in relation to the overall time you've lived. When you were 5 years old, one year represented one fifth of your entire life, and functionally, even less than that, as your first year or two you are two busy acclimating to existing to really retain any compatible memories of that time, afterwards. Even in your twenties, that same year already represents less than 5% of your total existence. So, every new year you experience becomes perceptually shorter than the last, until they just seem to fly right by. If we were immortal, eventually even decades and centuries would feel pretty short. This is also directly related to
b) Your brain is a finite, continuously self-optimizing neural network. As you get older, certain processes are made more efficient, but less complex and flexible, in order to optimize resources, making it harder to learn new things and adapt to new concepts and ways of thinking. The same thing happens with memory - to use computing terminology, your brain continuously refines the lossy compression algorithm it uses to store experiences, keeping only the data judged as most relevant, and culling the rest, much of it before it even has a chance to be stored in the first place. The end result is that the more memories you have, the less detailed they are likely to be. To make up for the missing information when you actively try to recall it, your brain uses heuristic processes to generate approximations on the fly based on related data to fill in the gaps - these approximations are basically no more than informed guesses, and, if they are accurate, that is pretty much just a coincidence. So, you literally remember less details of new events experienced and information learned with every passing year, and older memories are passively optimized as the specific neuronal connections that form them are less frequently innervated, making the links between the individual neurons weaker, and those memories harder to access,
I could go on for literal days on the subject, as it has always fascinated me, and I've been studying it on and off since I started back in college, but no one wants to actually read that, so
TL;DR:
The more years you live, the shorter each additional year feels, and, as far as memories are concerned, actually is, as you store less and less nonessential details to optimize the use of the fundamentally limited resources your brain has.
For example, I know what I had for breakfast today and yesterday, but if you asked me what exactly I ate for each meal this past week, I truthfully wouldn't be able to tell you. It gets worse, too: if you asked me what I did over the last month, I could tell you the general activities and a few keys points, but actual specific details would be extremely limited. And I'm only just shy of 39.
It's no wonder time feels like it flies by when 90% of it has been compressed down to a vague outline with some bullet points.
...and with that, my ramblings over the perception of time and its neural correlates that no one was remotely interested in is officially over. For now.
GeoffreyA - Friday, November 17, 2023 - link
I enjoyed the rambling, and it's a subject that fascinates me too!Taking this one step further, science has yet to explain the passage of time properly, and some, like Carlo Rovelli, have suggested it has got to do with the mind.
FWhitTrampoline - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
I'm on Linux so Vega and Polaris driver support comes from the MESA drivers and that's supported a lot longer for older hardware on Linux than on Windows. But I have a Laptop with Vega 8CU integrated graphics and that laptop also has a Polaris dGPU and really AMD dropping support for Polaris GPUs for it's ROCm/HIP translation layer(longer ago) has put Blender 3.0/Later editions out of reach there for that Polaris RX560X GPU in the laptop.And that Laptop was from the 2019 Model Year and AMD featured that at CES 2019. But for dGPUs and Laptops in 2019 any Vega Discrete Mobile GPUs had to come with expensive HBM memory and Apple was the only laptop maker using Vega Discrete Mobile so AMD had to use Polaris dGPUs in laptops as late as 2019/2020 until the first RDNA1 discrete mobile GPUs became available.
The Blender Foundation deciding to only support CUDA natively for Blender 3.0 later editions for any non Apple hardware means that Polaris GPUs do not have any current ROCm/HIP support to take that CUDA and convert that to a form that can be run on the Polaris Hardware. And only the Older Blender 2.93/earlier editions support OpenCL as the GPU compute language for Blender's GPU Accelerated Cycles rendering as Blender 3.0/Later have to utilize ROCm/HIP to translate CUDA to a form that can be run on the AMD hardware.
Blender 3D will Default to Cycles rendering on the CPU cores if Blender can not detect any Software/API support for GPU compute on the GPU hardware but that's slower to render the Ray Traced scene and ties all the CPU cores/threads up at 100% until the render is completed so GPUs are much faster for that than CPUs.
kn00tcn - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
maybe i didnt test a serious scene a couple years ago, but my cycles opencl 580 didnt have any useful gain over cycles 2600xHIP says it supports radeon7 on linux, that is vega, and if it's open source then there may still be a chance the same way mesa can enable compute based raytracing on polaris
but if you're rendering on a laptop, isnt that concerning? higher temps, harder if not impossible to replace components
bernstein - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
> the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLKwait, what? wtf? they are still selling vega apu‘s!!
kn00tcn - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
pretty much nobody uses AMDVLK and many say it performs worse than mesa's RADV which will continue its real (great) community supportare 'they' selling the apus or do stores have old stock? (though i did see a leak of low end vega apus continuing through 2024)
bernstein - Monday, November 13, 2023 - link
Notably all 7030 APUs released in 2023 feature Vega iGPUs.Sure, these are older designs, but to consumers these are marketed as new 2023 products!
Superkoopatrooper - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
Ya my amd advantage edition laptop released in early 2022 will no longer have mainline driver support because the 5900hx cpu has integrated vega. If I try to install it, it says I have unsupported hardware. Worked my butt off and chose to support AMD and I just got burned. I'm so upset right now tbh. I left a comment describing how CS2 wouldn't let me open the game last week because I needed the newest drivers. Soon every new game will tell me I have unsupported drivers. Half of em will probably refuse to run at all because of it. All these articles are so blase and matter of fact with this. My 1,600$ laptop had a 2 year lifespan... AMD should be dragged for this.barich - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
Try these drivers: https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/whql-amd-software-...They're linked from AMD's release notes here: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn...
and say they're for "systems pairing RDNA series graphics products with Polaris or Vega series graphics products" - your exact scenario.
I don't know why you need to hunt these down in the release notes; if you search for the drivers for either card separately you get packages that support Polaris/Vega or RDNA+ but not both simultaneously, and you can't install them both separately. The linked package does support both, with different driver versions for each.
Threska - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
"The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning. "Considering to this day my card still occasionally locks up (constant tone) and black screens, then reboots after playing YT videos. I'd say they need to work on the "stable" part.
LtGoonRush - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
This is a problem because of how long AMD keeps recycling products. The Ryzen 7030 series launched THIS YEAR uses these "retired" drivers. We're back to the bad old days of people having to use third-party graphics drivers for hardware acceleration in Adobe apps to work.Superkoopatrooper - Wednesday, November 8, 2023 - link
This is so messed up. What about my AMD "Advantage" laptop? I worked 2 70hr work weeks just so I could afford it not lose my apartment. The APU is VEGA but the dedicated gpu is a RX6800m. AMD won't allow me to install the new drivers, says "unsupported hardware". I have to install the "definitely not legacy" drivers. If I'm being honest, I didnt spend 1,600$ to play GTA5 indefinitely. I purchased this laptop to play modern games. Just last week Counterstrike 2 blocked me from running the game and said I needed to update to the newest AMD drivers. Soon, every new game is going to do this to me. How is AMD dropping mainline driver support for a laptop from 2022 with a 5900hx cpu and RDNA2 acceptable? Why isnt nobody mentioning this? This really, genuinely sucks. It's so anticonsumer and you and other websites are just so blase about it. I'm not rick, 1,600$ was a lot of money. Can you please talk about that.PurposelyCryptic - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
I'd make sure your laptop is actually using its dedicated GPU when it tries to run games, rather than the Vega-based iGPU. Laptops are often configured for power efficiency by default, which means they will often decide to use the iGPU most of the time, even when there is a perfectly good dedicated GPU available.I was just reading about this issue on Reddit, when I was trying to play Starfield on my laptop. I forget the exact procedure, but you can force it to use the dedicated GPU, which should resolve the issue.
Your dedicated GPU is still very much supported, and should continue to be for many years - Windows is just likely defaulting to the Vega iGPU, leading to errors like this.
I just took a look around, couldn't find the discussion I was looking for, but here are instructions to force your laptop to use your dedicated GPU - they are from Intel, but since the issue is with Windows settings, the same process should work for you, too:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/ar...
Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
Yikes, that's rough.Unfortunately you've landed in the worst corner case possible for video driver support: multiple GPUs from the same vendor that are multiple generations apart.
If the system has a hardware MUX, you can disable the Vega iGPU and rely solely on the 6800M. Otherwise if the iGPU is active at all times, there is currently no path forward for you: you can only have one AMD driver set installed. Sorry, man.
barich - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
Ryan, are you sure about that? AMD has a driver set linked in the release notes here:https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn...
that says its for "Systems pairing RDNA series graphics products with Polaris or Vega series graphics products."
The download link: https://drivers.amd.com/drivers/whql-amd-software-...
I have a system with a 5700 XT in it. I went ahead and installed my old RX 460 into another PCIe slot to test this out. Once I had installed the referenced driver package, I ended up with drivers installed for both cards simultaneously. They're different versions. Radeon Settings recognizes both cards.
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 13, 2023 - link
Interesting. I swear that wasn't there when I first looked through AMD's release notes. But it's entirely possible I missed it.That's a good find! When I get some free time, I'll have to dig in a bit and see how AMD is doing that.
charlesg - Thursday, November 9, 2023 - link
I think there's a problem in AMD's driver package.The full package refuses to install, saying my RX 6700 XT isn't supported.
The minimalist-download-as-you-go worked just fine.
systemBuilder33 - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
I heard somewhere that Polaris cards are missing hardware functionality and CANNOT implement DirectX 12.1. So any game that requires DirectX 12.1, will never run on Polaris cards (except possibly in a software-simulation of that feature, a terrible frame rates maybe 20x slower than similar modern cards). It used to be that just 1 or 2 games were requiring DirectX 12.1 but I believe Alan Wake and many others are going to require that functionality very, very soon. So it's game-over, Polaris, sorry to see you go, you were obsoleted way before your time ...systemBuilder33 - Friday, November 10, 2023 - link
My 5700g is only 18 months old. I deserve a refund.systemBuilder33 - Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - link
This is a really sleazy thing to do. My 5700g was purchased new just 18 months ago. If you told me that the CPU would only get 18 months of driver support, I would never have bought the CPU! Shame on you AMD!GeoffreyA - Friday, November 17, 2023 - link
And I want to buy either a 4600G or 5600G to upgrade my Raven Ridge.ballsystemlord - Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - link
I waited years for GPU pricing to come down to buy a vega card*, now support is being dropped. Ugh.* Why would I want Vega? For OpenCL/OpenMP compute support. RDNA has only very recently gotten any preliminary support for compute applications.
ballsystemlord - Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - link
@Ryan , is Vega support being dropped for the pro lineup of Vega cards as well? Like Vega Frontier edition? It's not listed.GeoffreyA - Friday, November 17, 2023 - link
Also, since the 22.7x Adrenalin package last year, where OpenGL was drastically improved on RDNA, OpenGL got a lot slower on Raven Ridge, though Vulkan was still fast.GeoffreyA - Friday, November 17, 2023 - link
In short, for anyone who's battling with OpenGL on a Vega-based APU, try the 22.6x Adrenalin package, or switch to Vulkan.Oxford Guy - Friday, December 1, 2023 - link
It's quite pathetic that AMD stopped providing drivers for Fiji as quickly as it did.