AMD Ceases Driver Support for Polaris and Vega Graphics Cards

Gamers relying on AMD RX Vega and RX 500 series GPUs find themselves in an uncertain landscape concerning AMD's driver support. In September, these cards were transitioned from the primary driver branch to a separate package in the Windows driver release. Despite subsequent updates to the main branch, drivers for Polaris and Vega remain stagnant.

The discontinuation of support for Vega and Polaris architectures in AMD's AMDVLK open source Linux driver has been officially confirmed by AMD's GPU Open team in their Q4 release changelog. This announcement indicates that GFX8 and GFX9 architectures, encompassing Vega and Polaris, will no longer receive official support. It's worth noting that enthusiasts may still discover community-maintained Mesa RADV drivers and AMDGPU kernels that cater to these architectures, as reported by Phoronix.

While AMD has yet to explicitly announce the end of Windows support for these GPUs, the absence of updates for over a month suggests an uncertain future. As a result, users of these GPUs may encounter challenges with game optimizations and compatibility with new software in upcoming driver releases.