With the recent release of the Radeon Software Crimson Edition, AMD has an announcement that may surprise some of its customers. AMD states that all graphics cards that were released before the Graphics Core Next micro-architecture has reached full optimization and is at their peak performance. Therefore, they will be considered as legacy cards and AMD will no longer provide additional driver releases.
To put it in simpler terms, almost all AMD graphics cards that were released before 2013 are now considered as legacy cards. This would definitely affect a large amount of AMD users that are still using older AMD cards – at least, according to Steam Hardware & Software Survey: October 2015. Pre-GCN cards include the likes of the entire Radeon HD 6000 and HD 5000 series as well as cards that are older than the HD 8400 and HD 7600 series.
Despite this, AMD said that it has released two final drivers for the now-legacy cards and one of it includes the new Crimson Edition Driver. This means that those who have older cards would at least be able to try out Crimson Edition albeit for a one-time update. Users that are still currently running pre-GCN graphics cards should note that the last two drivers that AMD has released to support those hardware are Catalyst 15.7.1 and Radeon Software Crimson Edition Beta.
On a side note, most of the legacy hardware won’t be able to support DirectX 12 which is the direction that all GPU manufacturers are heading. AMD users who are still using the company’s legacy hardware should probably upgrade now.
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