AMD has not released a new graphics driver for its Radeon RX 6000 “RDNA 2” GPUs in the past two months.
AMD’s RDNA 2 “Radeon RX 6000” GPUs Left Out As Red Team Focuese Its Driver Work On New RDNA 3 “Radeon RX 7000” GPUs
Since the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, the red team has released four drivers & all four of these drivers have been entirely exclusive to the new cards.
The last @amdradeon RDNA2, and older, driver was out in November 2022 even though they claim to be a December release
22.11.2 ( for who doesn’t know, it’s year-month-version)
January is over, that means @AMD hasn’t put out a driver for 2 months now
Radeon aged like milk ~ pic.twitter.com/6lSqnL71rb
— Florin Musetoiu (@FlorinMusetoiu) January 30, 2023
To name them, the last graphics driver that was actually released for the RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards was the 22.11.12 which was made for a November release. Then, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 graphics cards launched in December, and guess what? All four graphics drivers, 2 in December and two in January (2023) have been exclusive to the RDNA 3 architecture. These are the driver releases over the past two months:
- AMD Radeon Software 23.1.2 (RX 7900 Only) – 24th January
- AMD Radeon Software 23.1.1 (RX 7900 Only) – 12th January
- AMD Radeon Software 22.12.2 (RX 7900 Only) – 21st December
- AMD Radeon Software 22.12.1 (RX 7900 Only) – 13th December
- AMD Radeon Software 22.11.2 (RX 6000) – 1st December
One can understand why AMD has decided to cut off its driver efforts for the RDNA 2 GPU-based Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards since their Radeon RX 7000 series based on the new RDNA 3 graphics core requires more attention and the recent drivers show that their are several known issues that still need to be addressed for the new cards. But that also means that for each driver release, AMD will have to work twice as much to get the same support added for older Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2) graphics cards. This doesn’t sound like the FineWine that AMD is known for.
Forspoken is just one title and if this continues to be the trend, there will be many other titles that the RDNA 2 GPUs will miss out on. AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 & 7000 GPUs have only received 4 game support since December which includes:
- The Callisto Protocol
- Need for Speed Unbound
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Next-Gen Update
- Forspoken
Meanwhile, NVIDIA has included the following game-ready titles to its list of WHQL GeForce drivers since December:
- Marvel’s Midnight Suns (DLSS 3)
- Hitman III (DLSS 3)
- Deliver Us Marks (DLSS 3)
- Dead Space
- Forspoken
- Conqueror’s Blade
- Dakar Desert Rally
- Portal with RTX
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Next-gen Update
- Jurrasic World Evolution 2
- Need For Speed Unbound
- The Callisto Protocol
NVIDIA not only has 3 times more games supported on their driver suite since December but the company hasn’t left out its older GPUs either. The drivers are compatible with both RTX 30 & RTX 20 series graphics cards and many older GPUs too. There’s not just the thing about having game-ready support for new titles but there are also various issues still affecting the Radeon RX 6000 GPUs that need to be resolved as was indicated by AMD themselves during the November GPU driver release. We hope that AMD delivers its next driver with both RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 support.