AMD has earned quite a bit of goodwill this year with the popular launches of the rather great RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT. AMD's wins were Nvidia's losses in consumer goodwill with the RTX 5070, in particular, having a pretty weak showing in our tests. As is ever the case, that pendulum has swung once more, with outrage in response to AMD moving RDNA 1 and 2 cards to legacy support.
The original AMD Adrenaline notice states, "New Game Support and Expanded Vulkan Extensions Support is available to Radeon RX 7000 and 9000 series graphics products." When quizzed on this by PC Games Hardware (machine translated), AMD said:
"RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes. To focus on optimising and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 is placing Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode. Future driver updates with targeted game optimisations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs."
The first RDNA cards popped up in 2019, with RX 6000 series GPUs featuring RDNA 2 architecture. RX 6000 GPUs launched in 2020, and could still be bought new this year, so this seems like a particularly short shelf life for cards to lose game-specific optimisations, especially considering Nvidia's ongoing support for older cards.
The Sony PS5 is RDNA 2-based, as is the ROG Xbox Ally, which launched this month. The ROG Xbox Ally X has avoided this fate, thanks to the swanky Z2 Extreme chip and its RDNA 3.5-powered iGPU. No word has been stated on gaming handheld support thus far, but game-specific optimisations are important there.
As they are working off more limited hardware than a PC, handhelds perform as they do, in part, due to specific optimisations made. Losing that support could mean they age quicker going forward.
Potential buyers have taken to Reddit to vent their frustrations with this change. A thread helpfully titled "AMD what the f**k u are doing?" has seen 600 comments in just under a day, with many expressing confusion with RDNA 2, specifically, losing support. "I can maybe understand not focusing on the RDNA1, but the 6000 series? The 6700XT, 6800XT, and 6900XT are still super relevant GPUs."
RDNA 2 cards are still performing well to this day, and make for a solid build, especially if you can buy them second-hand or at a lower price. Without further support, RDNA 2 cards are a worse investment in a rig from here on out. This is especially weird when the likes of the GRE version of the Radeon RX 6750 launched less than two years ago, and we saw RX 6750 XTs and 6950 XTs launching just three years ago.
Nvidia's RTX 20-series cards (which launched at a similar time to RDNA 1) are still receiving game-ready drivers from the Nvidia app, and it was only announced early this year that Nvidia would be winding down developer support for 9 and 10 series cards. AMD GPUs may be known for ageing like fine wine, but for game-specific support, RDNA 1 and 2 could be set to age like that bag of spinach in the back of your fridge.
