Sad news for all owners of older-generation Radeon graphics cards.
As it does every month - and sometimes more often - AMD has released a new version of its Adrenalin Software graphics drivers for its Radeon RX cards. Of course, AMD is not the only one to do this, and its competitors Intel and NVIDIA do much the same, at the same pace. These graphics driver updates don't usually merit much publicity, even though they are important for the owners of the cards concerned: in general, such updates focus on support for the latest games and a few bug fixes.
Since Battlefield 6, AMD no longer bothers to optimize games for its Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series © Electronic Arts
This is exactly the program of the Adrenalin Software 25.10.2 recently launched by AMD, which affirms support for games such as Battlefield 6 and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, as well as correcting various bugs in older games and carrying out a few optimizations. However, one sentence piqued the curiosity of PC Games Hardware specialists: " The RDNA-1 and RDNA-2 graphics cards will continue to receive critical security updates and bug fixes. In order to focus on optimizing and delivering new technologies for the latest GPUs, the AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 drivers place the Radeon RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) in maintenance mode ".
What does " maintenance mode " mean? Basically, we're thinking of some kind of minimal support from AMD, which is unfortunately exactly what the following sentence means: " Future updates with game-specific optimizations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs ". In fact, the Radeon RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series will no longer receive any feature updates or specific support for the latest games. This doesn't mean that they won't be able to run on both generations of Radeon, but that AMD will no longer be making any special efforts in this direction. Sad news, then, all the more so given that while the Radeon RX 5000 series may not have been AMD's biggest hit, the Radeon RX 6000 series was far more successful... and was only released five years ago. Already struggling to cope with NVIDIA's GeForce, perhaps AMD didn't realize how unpopular such a measure would be?
