Update on AMD drivers

 So, as it turns out, AMD has partially walked back their statement on drivers for RDNA1/2 cards. So, what does this mean? Time will tell, but this is my understanding of the situation. 

There are multiple levels of driver support. You got general support for cards to ensure they work properly, and then you got more specific driver optimizations aimed for new games. Historically, driver optimizations for specific games are only supported on the newer architectures, and then for older ones, whatever the performance is. 

Now, this, is why AMD users typicially make "fine wine" arguments. While Nvidia provides general support for longer, supporting cards as long as 8-10 years these days at times, and AMD supporting theirs for say, 6-8, game optimizations are different. Nvidia only seems to support architectures specifically for the newest ones. And AMD, at least relatively recently, would support game optimizations for longer. In the GCN architecture days, AMD would keep building on the same architecture leading to more unified game drivers for longer. So you'd have 8 year old GPUs like the HD 7000 series getting game optimizations well past their expiration date. Meanwhile, nvidia stopped supporting their kepler architecture (600/700) in this way when maxwell came out. Maxwell and pascal (900/1000) would get the same axe when the 2000 series dropped, and idk what nvidia is doing with their 2000 series onward with game specific optimizations but as we can see, nvidia tends to prioritize their newest 1-2 generations of cards while their older ones start to perform worse. Meanwhile, AMD cards would often age better because AMD would be providing game specific optimizations even on older cards, as long as the card was supported, it was supported. This is where the idea of "AMD finewine" came from. While pre HD 7000 series, AMD cards truly did age like milk since AMD likes to drop driver support on like 3-5 year old cards half the time, after that, AMD improved significantly, not just supporting older cards but giving them game specific optimizations, which caused them to outperform equivalent nvidia cards that they often competed against.

So when AMD is dropping specific optimizations targetted at specific older architectures, they're NOT abandoning the cards, and they'll probably run. We just aren't getting "finewine" any more. I can accept this compromise, as I primarily care about running games, and nvidia doesnt give "finewine" to their cards like AT ALL. Even if you got driver support spanning a decade, past the first 2 years, youre not getting the full optimized experience. It's just industry practice. Finewine is a bonus for AMD cards, but it's not really "expected", it's kind of a plus. And honestly, I can understand that RNDA isnt like GCN in that they arent iterating on the same thing 5 times here. Rather, RDNA versions diverge significantly from each other. RDNA1 is so old it cant even run modern games as it has no mesh shaders, DX12 ultimate support, or RT capabilities. RDNA2 is more modern, but I know there's a lot of AI stuff built into RDNA3 and onward where they're trying to catch up to Nvidia, and need AI acceleration to do that. So RDNA2 doesnt necessarily have the capabilities that RDNA3 and 4 have, and require different driver branches as a result. Different driver branches mean that they're not gonna give specific game optimizations to older cards. It's too much work and takes too much effort to do that. THat's why nvidia never did it. Every generation they're revolutionizing their GPU designs, whereas AMD was merely iterating on 2012 era designs until around 2019. And now RDNA1 is radically different than RDNA2, which is radically different than RDNA3, which is a whole different beast from RDNA4. 

As it stands, looking at modern benchmarks for RX 6000 series (RDNA2) cards, I could honestly see that RDNA2 performance was lagging behind RDNA3/4 cards and even nvidia cards like the 3060/4060. So honestly, Im not surprised theyre dropping it. It is older now by PC standards. And honestly, the new tech AMD is working on probably wont work with RDNA2. I know there was talk of a version of FSR4 for example which was tested on RDNA2 and leaked out, and it kinda sucked. Like it barely provided a performance uplift and was scratched as a result. So..old tech is old, old tech doesnt have ALL of the modern tech that AMD is working on. So they split the driver branches and older tech isnt getting the fine wine stuff but should still run games.

How do I feel about this? Well, Im ambivalent. The internet is still freaking out and acting like AMD is abandoning the 6000 series, despite them being sold along side 7000 series for most of their lifespans. I dont think thats the case, and I think my technical explanation for what happened sums up what's actually happened. I'm just glad to continue getting general driver support, which does ensure games WORK on modern games. Like, 6000 series isnt being abandoned. It's not gonna be like the old days where my last HD 5850 driver was the windows 10 driver and then any game past 2015 was a crapshoot and sometimes wouldnt work because there wasnt a driver for them. You'll get drivers to ensure games work. THey just arent gonna optimize for an older architecture incapable of supporting the modern features they're working on and they wanna focus on FSR4 and crap. Ideally, I would like to get game optimizations too, but I'm not really gonna expect it at this point if its impractical for AMD to provide it, as long as the games RUN acceptably, ya know? Still, I would've ideally liked to have seen support until 2027. Either way, no GPU ive owned has had extended finewine like people are expecting. I know AMD did provide it for a while for those GCN series cards, but RDNA has always been a different beast and I can see why they'd separate stuff into different branches similar to nvidia.