AMD Polaris and Vega “GCN” GPUs are now limited to driver updates only. AMD has limited driver support for its Polaris and Vega GPUs to “critical” updates only, as both architectures approach their EOL (end-of-life) period.
AMD Polaris and Vega, the last of the GCN architectures, are reaching EOL status, but critical driver updates will continue to be deployed.
Recent Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition drivers did not support Polaris and Vega GPUs in the main branch. They received separate drivers that were limited to bug fixes only. Not only that, but AMD has also ended support for Polaris and Vega GPUs in its official AMDVLK Vulkan drivers, while MESA RADV “RADEON Vulkan” drivers continue to support them.
Confirming the reduced support for Polaris and Vega GPU architectures and their respective products, AMD says they will now only offer critical driver updates for both families. This will be done via a separate driver package that could include important security and feature updates. AMD is convinced that current drivers for Polaris and Vega are very mature and do not benefit from additional software tweaks. While this may be true, it means that future games and applications will not benefit from any optimization from AMD for the Vega and Polaris architectures.
The AMD Polaris GPU architecture made its first debut in the Radeon RX 480 in 2016, when the red team targeted the consumer segment
The following series, the RX 500, also targeted the same segment. That changed in 2017 with the arrival of AMD’s Vega architecture, which tried to compete in the high-end landscape but didn’t quite deliver the promised gaming performance. The Vega GPU architecture was mainly suited to the HPC and Workstation segment, where it delivered much better performance, which was highlighted with the release of the Radeon VII, a mainstream graphics card. Polaris and Vega were GCN’s latest offerings.
Even now, the AMD RADEON RX 580 and Radeon RX 570, both based on the Polaris GPU architecture, occupy a huge share of the Steam hardware survey.Many budget and beginner gamers still use these graphics cards for gaming. That said, AMD’s Vega GPU architecture also serves a very crucial and huge market in the form of theRyzen APU family with four generations of notebook/desktopAPUs featuring the Vega graphics architecture.
AMD Polaris “GCN 4” and Vega “GCN 5” products
AMD is also using Vega in the updated Ryzen 7030 “Rembrandt-R” family, so this will also be limited in terms of driver support. GCN has really had a long run, but it looks like it’s just about the end of the road for Polaris and Vega.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA continues to support GeForce 700, 900 and 10 GPUs based on the Maxwell and Pascal architectures, launched around the same time as AMD’s Vega and Polaris products.