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AMD drops support for legacy GPUs, will only support GCN from now on

By Koh Wanzi - on 25 Nov 2015, 9:55am

AMD drops support for legacy GPUs, will only support GCN from now on

AMD’s new Radeon Software Crimson Edition may have dropped last night, but AMD also made another quieter, but no less important, announcement. From this point on, the company will discontinue support for non-Graphics Core Next (GCN) legacy GPUs, which includes cards from the Radeon HD 8000 (HD 8400 and below), 7000 (HD 7600 and below), 6000, and 5000 series product lines.

These cards have officially been shifted to a legacy support model, which means that no additional driver releases will be planned, including the new Crimson driver. According to AMD, these legacy cards have reached the peak performance that could be achieved with driver optimizations as of 24 November 2015, and the company will be dropping support in order to focus resources on enhancing its GCN-based GPUs.

But a quick look at the Steam Hardware & Software Survey results for October still shows cards from the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series, and these users will probably benefit from a beta version of the new Crimson drivers that is being released “As Is” – no further updates are coming – to allow owners of legacy GPUs to take advantage of the revamped user interface and certain new features.

The most updated WHQL driver version for non-GCN cards that users can download is the AMD Catalyst 15.7.1 driver that was released in July.

Owners of GCN GPUs can grab the latest version of the Crimson drivers here, while Radeon HD 5000, 6000, 7000 (HD 7600 and below), and 8000 (HD 8400 and below) users can download the beta version from here.

Source: AMD

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