Any idea if this affects the ProFire V7900 as well, or "Pro" cards in general? I am still using one of those, primarily because I only have a single slot available. (It's a 6950 derivative.)
Well I did long time use legasy driver AMD at it did get upgrades but not so often than those in full support, so it is not so bad as you may think. But eventually I did get new gpu, but you should be fine with your gpu several years!
I have a 6850 1GB. Works even with Fallout 4 on medium-high settings.
What you are looking at here is planned obsolescence. If you don't buy a new product because the old one works just fine, they'll force you to buy a new one by no longer providing driver updates.
I don't think that's really the case. Depends on how many bugs you expect to encounter in new games when using the current drivers. I have no idea how many bugs AMD fixed for older cards, but I would guess not a lot.
That's a little dramatic, don't you think? I have a three year old 6870 and it's definitely showing it's age. Once something actually interesting comes out with Pascal/Arctic Islands, I'll be delighted to finally replace it.
Damn, I'm just realizing how old this card is. I got it in December of 2010, so why "three years old" is stuck in my head no one knows. Soooo... change the previous post to "five year old".
@aelfwyne That's a pretty cynical point of view. The drivers for GPUs are incredibly complex. They only have a finite resource in software engineers. With every new model of GPU that has to be supported, they have to drop off old ones to keep workload manageable. It's really that simple.
At least the GCNs generations are aging more gracefully, with the older Nvidia stuff showing huge gaps from when they were released. Kepler was neck to neck with GCN at release, now its avg 25% behind.
Hmm quite a bummer as I still use my 6970 in my oversized HTPC quite a lot for gaming but honestly there isn't much driver changes necessary on the 5k/6k series. It's not like you'll get Direct X12 or GNC through a software update and its (afaik) stable. I haven't seen any performance improvements after the first half year it was released.
Not everyone can afford a $400 GPU every 12 to 24 months. About a year ago a friend of mine bought a $400 AMD laptop to game on because he's on a fixed income and couldn't afford more. A desktop was out because his housing's not secure, and it'd take up too much space if he had to leave with only a backpack of stuff.
Meanwhile Nvidia is still supporting their Fermi GPUs from 2010, a future driver release is even going to provide WDDM2.0 and DX12 for Fermi/Kepler. It's obvious that AMD just doesn't care about their older products anymore.
AMD and nVidia both are supporting their current DX10+ optimized multigenerational meta-architecture. The difference is that nVidia switched to a new one a few years before ATI did. NVidia's pre-fermi architecture and AMDs VLI5/4 architectures were DX9 GPUs at their hearts that had DX10/11 shoehorned in. Neither are flexible enough to support the new DX12 capabilities.
At least a Crimson version is available, even though I would have preferred that they could take it out of beta and then stop.
Still, I'm going to test it on my E-350 laptop if only because AMD says that the new control panel takes 0.6 seconds to launch compared to 8 seconds for the old CCC.
Well, this was expected and the right thing to do for standalone Radeon card.
However, this is quite bad for APUs: Richland is a 2013 product, so it ended having only two years of driver support. Not bad in absolute sense, but way shorter that typical lifetime.
Everyone needs to take a step back and calm down. It's not the end of the world. I've been there in the past and thought to myself oh crap, I'm screwed they aren't making drivers for my Radeon XXXX card anymore. I think it was my Radeon 9700 Pro the first time around. I was really worried, I went and purchased a new card right away thinking the old card was not going to work with any new games etcetera. I ended up using that card in my wife's machine who at the time spent way more time playing games than I did. She had way less issues with the old drivers than I did with a new card cutting teeth on new drivers. It's been the same way every card I've owned since. Nvidia and ATI alike, by the time they pull the plug on new drivers the old drivers are so robust they just don't need anymore fixes. I think half the time the majority of the things that get broken in drivers are caused by performance fixes in the first place. So you might not get an extra 3 FPS in the new shooter that comes out, it's not the end of the world. I do however, feel bad for those people who spent $500+ on a video card thinking a PC is like a gaming console with a 5 to 10 year lifespan. They need to start looking at a PC as a 2-3 year investment and spend appropriately based on that . Me I try to plan on upgrading about 1/2 to 1/3 of the PC every year. That way nothing in my primary PC is ever really more than a few years old. Then, I pass the old parts on to other family members and occasionally friends or colleagues.
I disagree. Graphic drivers from AMD and Nvidia are the most unstable drivers you can find. They have a long list of bug they acknoledge with their latest stable release and admit they won't fix them. That suck.
Never saw that coming so soon for the APUs, even if it is logical and quite impossible to separate the GPU and CPU.
I can understand completely if AMD doesn't want to invest into continuing to *tune* pre-GCN graphics code for those APUs and it's pretty certain that won't help them perform much better.
But "lack of support" for an APU is somewhat bigger, as it puts invalidates the entire system, the FM2 motherboards, entire laptops which thus won't receive security updates nor the new generation Linux drivers.
Most of the systems I operate for my kids combine "ancient" Core2 type CPUs (3.4GHz quads, not slouches by any means) with a modern GPU, because any € invested into a GPU will return gaming performance while it's wasted on a CPU.
Likewise I didn't see any motive to retire Trinity and Richlands systems any time soon either, because their CPU performance is quite enough and the graphics part never really mattered beyond what they could offer in terms of performance.
But this policy for APUs means they may soon be unsafe to use on Windows, may never properly work with new releases of Wayland or X based Linux using the new open source drivers or with Android x86, while for example a Richland notebook or mini-ITX could still remain useful for another 5 years or more.
AMD must make a difference between continuing investments into the GPU code for performance tuning and maintaining OS compatibilty and security for the rest of the SoC and chipset.
Just tried updating my Richland based home server running Windows 2008R2 (and lots of VMs): Installed (rather too) quickly, and reports a full success, while in fact it won't install at all, but leaves everything unchanged. The only change is that CCC will now constantly remind me to upgrade to 15.30.
So they managed to completely break Windows Server compatibility with this release (on all earlier releases CCC just had a nasty memory leak on Windows 2008R2 and 2012), which really was most sensible use case still left for AMD APUs: The virtualization friendly home-server.
This wanton self destruction of any remaining niche (like eliminating ECC support before) make me very, very sad: Intel needs someone to snap at their heels.
Updated Kaveri A10-7850K based home-server to Crimson on Windows 2008R2.
This time around, 15.30 drivers got installed, but CCC remained the same (not the new Radeon Control). Also wanted a reboot. While the CCC remains installed, it won't open the GUI on the Kaveri while the context menu on the right lower icon bar works.
Updated Phenom2 X6 1090T (Thuban) next (2008 or so) with a Radon 290X (GCN 1.2) running Windows 7-64bit. Installed the new graphics, chipset, audio etc. drivers on a far older CPU than my APUs *and* changed the control panel to new Radeon Settings panel.
Three systems, three distinct behaviors: Not a very promising...
Crimson is designed for GCN. It might work on systems that have older non-GCN GPU's, but that was not their main focus. GCN was introduced in 2011. That as 4 years ago. The writing should have been visible that day that this day was coming.
Which is *exactly* why I also bought an A10-7800K APU, because it's also HSA, ...well it turns out not really, because ony Carrizo was HSA, ...well hopefully... because Carrizo was launched before HSA 1.0 came out ...but can't be bought as a plain old PC motherboard anyway.
This post is about the Crimson update on a GCN APU system creating a semi-disfunctional mess on a Windows server variant.
And it's about for modern AMD CPUs being left without support, simply they happen to be coupled to a VLIW4 GPU on the same APU die, while "ancient" (but IMHO still good enough) Phenoms with a modern dGPU don't have any support issues.
It highlights the risk (or stupidity) of combining two functions with rather diverse evolution speeds like GPUs and CPUs on a single SoC.
And they are still *selling* Trinity APUs in official retail today (even the A10-5800K I run in one system), as well as many Richland based APUs. Not eBay mind you, but brand retailers.
Those systems are out of support before they are even powered on!
Support must be based on when they stop delivering hardware to retailers not on when they introduced an architecture unless you want to kill a brand (I can literally hear the trolls howling "...but AMD already *is* a zombie brand!!").
My two cents here, you're the first I find talking about 2k8r2 issues, that I am experiencing too.
Have an HD 5670 paired with a Phenon II 955, and tried a clean install. Just the vga and hdmi-audio drivers installed, not the crimson software too. I tried to install manually the cnext from the unpacked folder, but I'm not too sure about which modules I was supposed to install to get it working. Besides that, I felt that without the software the adaptative performance take some hit.
So, I had to install the latest catalyst package, and I will update just the drivers, since the software refuse to even be available in the installer; yup, not an error on the installing, it is a no-go, even editing the .msi files.
I remember that the initial W2K8R2 installs for my APU based virtualization test server where quite a bit of trouble, because apart from strage GPU driver behavior, the USB3 drivers for the A88X chipset utterly failed to install (and there were two distinct USB3 controllers on that mainboard just to make it interesting).
I had to resort to editing *.inf files to make them go in.
"Obviously" nobody was going to use an APU on a OS costing more, but AMD forgot/ignored that develops with an MSN subscription might prefer to have a quiet desktop system to work on.
Actually AMD must just have fanatical cost cutters in their staff and not supporting the server editions with their drivers just saved them a couple of bucks overall.
Why would you be running a server OS and have an HD 5450 installed? Use the integrated video chipset since all youre going to be doing is rendering the windows basic desktop. Please dont tell me you are trying to game on 2k8r2?
Wait, what? I've tried installing AMD drivers on the Server versions of Windows, and they've just flat out refused to install, claiming that Server editions aren't supported.
Haven't tried a fresh install of Crimson drivers on Windows server yet, older drivers would install GPU, IOMMU, SATA, USB 2 and HDMI audio without problems, but had issues with USB 3 (required fiddling with *.inf files).
But CCC had memory leaks on the server editions, which had it eat all 32GB of RAM on my Trinity and Richland APUs (Kaveri will kill DRAM speed when you use 4 modules).
Same hardware with Windows 7 doesn't show that behavior: Installs perfect and no leaks, but won't run Citrix.
this is pretty poor for things like Richland, considering you can still buy them new everywhere and it was launched in 2013, cards like the 6900s 2GB are also still adequate for DX11 gaming, I suppose it makes sense due to their lack of resources to just focus on GCN, but it still looks bad if you think about it, until the 7970 went on sale (January 2012) the fastest card you could buy was more or less the 6990 which is out of support now (Legacy support from AMD is minimal considering what happened to the 4800 series after 2012), while Nvidia is still supporting Fermi and it's adding WDDM 2.0/DX12 support for all their DX11 cards, including the 480/460/450 from early 2010, also their old DX10 cards (late 2006 and higher) all got a driver release and control panel for windows 10, while the AMD DX10 cards didn't get even for windows 8.1
anyway, the Crimson beta worked on my 5800, but it's just a new interface (which loads a lot faster) for the same old settings, features that don't require GCN hardware and could be added (like frame rate target) were not.
This is stupid. I have Three Radeon 6950's unlocked into 6970's in Crossfire X. I am STILL out-benching the vast majority of single GCN systems and running all the latest games (That support crossfire) with max graphics at 1080P.
I was actually waiting to upgrade when I could no longer handle the latest and greatest games.
Converesly... AMD is still selling the Radeon 5450 in most channels. The Radeon 210, 220, 230, 235, 235X based on VLIW were released only last year.
Lastly... Has AMD ever thought that people may not care for performance improvements? That maybe bug fixes is more of a priority? Such a graphcis corruption in "such and such" game?
Everything comes to an end in computers. Your cards will still work. You just will not be getting updated drivers anymore. That is to be expected. AMD is not alone in EOL (End of Life) dates for multi-year old products. 3 years is a very long time in the computer industry. Enjoy them until you find something that they cannot do. That might be the time for you to upgrade. Maybe.
BTW, bug fixes was a major reason for creating Crimson. And they seem to have done a fantastic job fixing the bugs that could not be fixed in Catalyst.
+1 for prime retail channels, not refurnishers or eBay, of course.
even more so for APUs and notebook hardware containing APUs.
And there must be a distinction between adding features and maintaining stability and security, just like there is with brand software like RedHat or Oracle.
Thing is I bet none of the 5XXX series have had ANY fixes/tweaks in the AMD drivers for 18 months and the 6XXX series, probably just a few. They get dropped out of support far earlier then you think. This is just making it official. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I'm in the same boat - guess it's time to look up some vid card articles. Those don't seem to be around as much as they used to be here though. Don't even see any buyer guides for the season other than laptops.
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Vandam500 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I still have a 6950 2GB. What exactly does this mean for me, no more future driver updates?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Correct.nathanddrews - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Not from AMD, anyway.barleyguy - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Any idea if this affects the ProFire V7900 as well, or "Pro" cards in general? I am still using one of those, primarily because I only have a single slot available. (It's a 6950 derivative.)extide - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Yes it will effect them the same. That is a pre GCN GPU so it is retired also.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
FirePro parts are on their own extended support schedule. As of right now they're still supported.ffleader1 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
No.You just don't get driver optimization.
yYou get the driver but no specific optimization for the architecture of the GPU.
haukionkannel - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Well I did long time use legasy driver AMD at it did get upgrades but not so often than those in full support, so it is not so bad as you may think. But eventually I did get new gpu, but you should be fine with your gpu several years!Mark_gb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Do not expect that this time. Those cards are not what AMD will be working on in the future.aelfwyne - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I have a 6850 1GB. Works even with Fallout 4 on medium-high settings.What you are looking at here is planned obsolescence. If you don't buy a new product because the old one works just fine, they'll force you to buy a new one by no longer providing driver updates.
ET - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I don't think that's really the case. Depends on how many bugs you expect to encounter in new games when using the current drivers. I have no idea how many bugs AMD fixed for older cards, but I would guess not a lot.Mr Perfect - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
That's a little dramatic, don't you think? I have a three year old 6870 and it's definitely showing it's age. Once something actually interesting comes out with Pascal/Arctic Islands, I'll be delighted to finally replace it.Mr Perfect - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Damn, I'm just realizing how old this card is. I got it in December of 2010, so why "three years old" is stuck in my head no one knows. Soooo... change the previous post to "five year old".eek2121 - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
If it weren't for the fact I bought an r9 290 for $249 I'd be in the same boat as you...but for the price/performance I couldn't resist...anandreader106 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
@aelfwyne That's a pretty cynical point of view. The drivers for GPUs are incredibly complex. They only have a finite resource in software engineers. With every new model of GPU that has to be supported, they have to drop off old ones to keep workload manageable. It's really that simple.Byte - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
At least the GCNs generations are aging more gracefully, with the older Nvidia stuff showing huge gaps from when they were released. Kepler was neck to neck with GCN at release, now its avg 25% behind.shaftshanker - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Hmm quite a bummer as I still use my 6970 in my oversized HTPC quite a lot for gaming but honestly there isn't much driver changes necessary on the 5k/6k series. It's not like you'll get Direct X12 or GNC through a software update and its (afaik) stable. I haven't seen any performance improvements after the first half year it was released.asimov1979 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
What about APUs? several people bought Richland/Trinity APUs in the 2012-2014 timeframe.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
The APUs are also retired as far as their integrated GPUs are concerned.80-watt Hamster - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
It'll be interesting to see what replaces the 5450 in the bottom tier of the market.Cryio - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Wasn't the R5 240 already doing that ?nightbringer57 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
(I accidentally posted on the other thread)What about the R5 230 and R5 2XX OEM models? Are they retired as well?
Sighyanide - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
@nightbringer57 Technically, yes, because of their Caicos GPU, which was used in the 6400 series cards.MrTeal - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I understand the sentiment, but you can still buy VLIW5 GPUs. They just launched the R5 230 a year and a half ago, and it's based on Caicos (HD6450)http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...
Cryio - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I don't think anyone buying a 50-60 dollar GPU cares about driver updates, lol.DanNeely - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Not everyone can afford a $400 GPU every 12 to 24 months. About a year ago a friend of mine bought a $400 AMD laptop to game on because he's on a fixed income and couldn't afford more. A desktop was out because his housing's not secure, and it'd take up too much space if he had to leave with only a backpack of stuff.Jumangi - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
He uses $~50 GPU's as an example and you come back with $400 cards every year...exaggerate much?Pssst there are many cards in between those prices bro.
djboxbaba - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
Also lol @ 12-24 months. I'm still happy with my 5870 which i bought in October 2009...danbob999 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
The 15.7.1 driver is buggy. They should at least make a stable release before discontinuation.extide - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
They did, the crimson driver still supports the old cards but this is the last driver.Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
The crimson driver is a beta release, not a stable release. The stable version won't support those cards.zeeBomb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Well that SUCKS.dragosmp - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Nooooo/end sarcasm
I use daily a 5850, I was wondering how long it may last... time to upgrade
ET - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
You card isn't dead just because AMD will not release new drivers for it. But hey, any excuse to get a new graphics card. :)djboxbaba - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
Been on my 5870 since October 2009 :DSchiwing - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
ATI 5870 here too!1GB is getting to be too small though.
yowanvista - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Meanwhile Nvidia is still supporting their Fermi GPUs from 2010, a future driver release is even going to provide WDDM2.0 and DX12 for Fermi/Kepler. It's obvious that AMD just doesn't care about their older products anymore.DanNeely - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
AMD and nVidia both are supporting their current DX10+ optimized multigenerational meta-architecture. The difference is that nVidia switched to a new one a few years before ATI did. NVidia's pre-fermi architecture and AMDs VLI5/4 architectures were DX9 GPUs at their hearts that had DX10/11 shoehorned in. Neither are flexible enough to support the new DX12 capabilities.ET - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
At least a Crimson version is available, even though I would have preferred that they could take it out of beta and then stop.Still, I'm going to test it on my E-350 laptop if only because AMD says that the new control panel takes 0.6 seconds to launch compared to 8 seconds for the old CCC.
eddieobscurant - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Don't. Everything after 14.12 disables hardware acceleration for my e-450, so no more full hd decoding and the cpu isn't fast enoughshodanshok - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Well, this was expected and the right thing to do for standalone Radeon card.However, this is quite bad for APUs: Richland is a 2013 product, so it ended having only two years of driver support. Not bad in absolute sense, but way shorter that typical lifetime.
yannigr2 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
R5 230 is an HD 6450 rebrand, so yes they still sell those cards.Einy0 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Everyone needs to take a step back and calm down. It's not the end of the world. I've been there in the past and thought to myself oh crap, I'm screwed they aren't making drivers for my Radeon XXXX card anymore. I think it was my Radeon 9700 Pro the first time around. I was really worried, I went and purchased a new card right away thinking the old card was not going to work with any new games etcetera. I ended up using that card in my wife's machine who at the time spent way more time playing games than I did. She had way less issues with the old drivers than I did with a new card cutting teeth on new drivers. It's been the same way every card I've owned since. Nvidia and ATI alike, by the time they pull the plug on new drivers the old drivers are so robust they just don't need anymore fixes. I think half the time the majority of the things that get broken in drivers are caused by performance fixes in the first place. So you might not get an extra 3 FPS in the new shooter that comes out, it's not the end of the world. I do however, feel bad for those people who spent $500+ on a video card thinking a PC is like a gaming console with a 5 to 10 year lifespan. They need to start looking at a PC as a 2-3 year investment and spend appropriately based on that . Me I try to plan on upgrading about 1/2 to 1/3 of the PC every year. That way nothing in my primary PC is ever really more than a few years old. Then, I pass the old parts on to other family members and occasionally friends or colleagues.abufrejoval - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I agree, mostly.But when it comes to APUs you're talking about security patches, chipset drivers etc. which are *all* included into that one package today.
It's no longer just about graphics performance but a lot more vital.
danbob999 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
I disagree. Graphic drivers from AMD and Nvidia are the most unstable drivers you can find.They have a long list of bug they acknoledge with their latest stable release and admit they won't fix them. That suck.
djboxbaba - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
I've had my PC since ocotober 2009, only thing that I upgraded was an SSD. Everything else has been completely fineabufrejoval - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Never saw that coming so soon for the APUs, even if it is logical and quite impossible to separate the GPU and CPU.I can understand completely if AMD doesn't want to invest into continuing to *tune* pre-GCN graphics code for those APUs and it's pretty certain that won't help them perform much better.
But "lack of support" for an APU is somewhat bigger, as it puts invalidates the entire system, the FM2 motherboards, entire laptops which thus won't receive security updates nor the new generation Linux drivers.
Most of the systems I operate for my kids combine "ancient" Core2 type CPUs (3.4GHz quads, not slouches by any means) with a modern GPU, because any € invested into a GPU will return gaming performance while it's wasted on a CPU.
Likewise I didn't see any motive to retire Trinity and Richlands systems any time soon either, because their CPU performance is quite enough and the graphics part never really mattered beyond what they could offer in terms of performance.
But this policy for APUs means they may soon be unsafe to use on Windows, may never properly work with new releases of Wayland or X based Linux using the new open source drivers or with Android x86, while for example a Richland notebook or mini-ITX could still remain useful for another 5 years or more.
AMD must make a difference between continuing investments into the GPU code for performance tuning and maintaining OS compatibilty and security for the rest of the SoC and chipset.
Otherwise Zen won't help (either?)
abufrejoval - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Just tried updating my Richland based home server running Windows 2008R2 (and lots of VMs):Installed (rather too) quickly, and reports a full success, while in fact it won't install at all, but leaves everything unchanged. The only change is that CCC will now constantly remind me to upgrade to 15.30.
So they managed to completely break Windows Server compatibility with this release (on all earlier releases CCC just had a nasty memory leak on Windows 2008R2 and 2012), which really was most sensible use case still left for AMD APUs: The virtualization friendly home-server.
This wanton self destruction of any remaining niche (like eliminating ECC support before) make me very, very sad: Intel needs someone to snap at their heels.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Updated Kaveri A10-7850K based home-server to Crimson on Windows 2008R2.This time around, 15.30 drivers got installed, but CCC remained the same (not the new Radeon Control). Also wanted a reboot. While the CCC remains installed, it won't open the GUI on the Kaveri while the context menu on the right lower icon bar works.
Updated Phenom2 X6 1090T (Thuban) next (2008 or so) with a Radon 290X (GCN 1.2) running Windows 7-64bit. Installed the new graphics, chipset, audio etc. drivers on a far older CPU than my APUs *and* changed the control panel to new Radeon Settings panel.
Three systems, three distinct behaviors: Not a very promising...
Mark_gb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Crimson is designed for GCN. It might work on systems that have older non-GCN GPU's, but that was not their main focus. GCN was introduced in 2011. That as 4 years ago. The writing should have been visible that day that this day was coming.Gigaplex - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
Kaveri *is* GCN.abufrejoval - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
Which is *exactly* why I also bought an A10-7800K APU, because it's also HSA, ...well it turns out not really, because ony Carrizo was HSA, ...well hopefully... because Carrizo was launched before HSA 1.0 came out ...but can't be bought as a plain old PC motherboard anyway.This post is about the Crimson update on a GCN APU system creating a semi-disfunctional mess on a Windows server variant.
And it's about for modern AMD CPUs being left without support, simply they happen to be coupled to a VLIW4 GPU on the same APU die, while "ancient" (but IMHO still good enough) Phenoms with a modern dGPU don't have any support issues.
It highlights the risk (or stupidity) of combining two functions with rather diverse evolution speeds like GPUs and CPUs on a single SoC.
abufrejoval - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
This is about APUs not dGPUs.And they are still *selling* Trinity APUs in official retail today (even the A10-5800K I run in one system), as well as many Richland based APUs. Not eBay mind you, but brand retailers.
Those systems are out of support before they are even powered on!
Support must be based on when they stop delivering hardware to retailers not on when they introduced an architecture unless you want to kill a brand (I can literally hear the trolls howling "...but AMD already *is* a zombie brand!!").
rent-a-hero - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
My two cents here, you're the first I find talking about 2k8r2 issues, that I am experiencing too.Have an HD 5670 paired with a Phenon II 955, and tried a clean install. Just the vga and hdmi-audio drivers installed, not the crimson software too. I tried to install manually the cnext from the unpacked folder, but I'm not too sure about which modules I was supposed to install to get it working. Besides that, I felt that without the software the adaptative performance take some hit.
So, I had to install the latest catalyst package, and I will update just the drivers, since the software refuse to even be available in the installer; yup, not an error on the installing, it is a no-go, even editing the .msi files.
abufrejoval - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
I remember that the initial W2K8R2 installs for my APU based virtualization test server where quite a bit of trouble, because apart from strage GPU driver behavior, the USB3 drivers for the A88X chipset utterly failed to install (and there were two distinct USB3 controllers on that mainboard just to make it interesting).I had to resort to editing *.inf files to make them go in.
"Obviously" nobody was going to use an APU on a OS costing more, but AMD forgot/ignored that develops with an MSN subscription might prefer to have a quiet desktop system to work on.
Actually AMD must just have fanatical cost cutters in their staff and not supporting the server editions with their drivers just saved them a couple of bucks overall.
Lumenix - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
Why would you be running a server OS and have an HD 5450 installed? Use the integrated video chipset since all youre going to be doing is rendering the windows basic desktop. Please dont tell me you are trying to game on 2k8r2?Gigaplex - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
Wait, what? I've tried installing AMD drivers on the Server versions of Windows, and they've just flat out refused to install, claiming that Server editions aren't supported.abufrejoval - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
Haven't tried a fresh install of Crimson drivers on Windows server yet, older drivers would install GPU, IOMMU, SATA, USB 2 and HDMI audio without problems, but had issues with USB 3 (required fiddling with *.inf files).But CCC had memory leaks on the server editions, which had it eat all 32GB of RAM on my Trinity and Richland APUs (Kaveri will kill DRAM speed when you use 4 modules).
Same hardware with Windows 7 doesn't show that behavior: Installs perfect and no leaks, but won't run Citrix.
SPBHM - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
this is pretty poor for things like Richland, considering you can still buy them new everywhere and it was launched in 2013, cards like the 6900s 2GB are also still adequate for DX11 gaming, I suppose it makes sense due to their lack of resources to just focus on GCN, but it still looks bad if you think about it, until the 7970 went on sale (January 2012) the fastest card you could buy was more or less the 6990 which is out of support now (Legacy support from AMD is minimal considering what happened to the 4800 series after 2012), while Nvidia is still supporting Fermi and it's adding WDDM 2.0/DX12 support for all their DX11 cards, including the 480/460/450 from early 2010, also their old DX10 cards (late 2006 and higher) all got a driver release and control panel for windows 10, while the AMD DX10 cards didn't get even for windows 8.1anyway, the Crimson beta worked on my 5800, but it's just a new interface (which loads a lot faster) for the same old settings, features that don't require GCN hardware and could be added (like frame rate target) were not.
StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
This is stupid.I have Three Radeon 6950's unlocked into 6970's in Crossfire X. I am STILL out-benching the vast majority of single GCN systems and running all the latest games (That support crossfire) with max graphics at 1080P.
I was actually waiting to upgrade when I could no longer handle the latest and greatest games.
Converesly... AMD is still selling the Radeon 5450 in most channels.
The Radeon 210, 220, 230, 235, 235X based on VLIW were released only last year.
Lastly... Has AMD ever thought that people may not care for performance improvements? That maybe bug fixes is more of a priority? Such a graphcis corruption in "such and such" game?
Mark_gb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
Everything comes to an end in computers. Your cards will still work. You just will not be getting updated drivers anymore. That is to be expected. AMD is not alone in EOL (End of Life) dates for multi-year old products. 3 years is a very long time in the computer industry. Enjoy them until you find something that they cannot do. That might be the time for you to upgrade. Maybe.Mark_gb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link
BTW, bug fixes was a major reason for creating Crimson. And they seem to have done a fantastic job fixing the bugs that could not be fixed in Catalyst.StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
Card's still being sold today, should not be considered EOL from a support perspective.abufrejoval - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link
+1 for prime retail channels, not refurnishers or eBay, of course.even more so for APUs and notebook hardware containing APUs.
And there must be a distinction between adding features and maintaining stability and security, just like there is with brand software like RedHat or Oracle.
jabber - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
Thing is I bet none of the 5XXX series have had ANY fixes/tweaks in the AMD drivers for 18 months and the 6XXX series, probably just a few. They get dropped out of support far earlier then you think. This is just making it official. Nothing out of the ordinary.djboxbaba - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
Exactly.nefar - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
I'm in the same boat - guess it's time to look up some vid card articles. Those don't seem to be around as much as they used to be here though. Don't even see any buyer guides for the season other than laptops.Blitzvogel - Tuesday, December 8, 2015 - link
Funny, my Radeon HD 5850 1 GB is still an impressive performer:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKd-XKvh0AE...