AMD Polaris & Vega “GCN” GPUs Now Limited To Critical Driver Updates Only As EOL Imminent

wccftech.com:

AMD has limited the driver support for its Polaris & Vega GPUs to "Critical" updates only as both architectures near their EOL (End-of-Life) period.

AMD's recent Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition drivers lacked support for the Polaris and Vega GPUs in the main driver branch and received separate drivers which was only limited to bug fixes. Not only that but AMD also ended support for Polaris and Vega GPUs in its official AMDVLK Vulkan drivers while the MESA RADV "Radeon Vulkan" drivers continue to support them.

Confirming the reduced support for Polaris & Vega GPU architectures and the respective products, AMD says that they will only offer critical driver updates for both families going forward through a separate driver package which could include important security and functionality updates. AMD is also confident that the current drivers for Polaris and Vega are very mature and don't benefit from additional software tuning. While this may be true, it does mean that future games and apps won't see any optimizations from AMD for Vega and Polaris architectures.

The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning. Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available. The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products.

AMD Rep (via Anandtech)

The AMD Polaris GPU architecture made its first debut in the Radeon RX 480 back in 2016 when the red team aimed at the mainstream segment.

The follow-up, the RX 500