AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series “Aged Like Milk”: No New Drivers in Two Months

Tsing

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AMD critics have sounded the alarm on what they believe is a diminishing level of support for the company's last-generation (RDNA 2) Radeon cards. Florin Musetoiu, a YouTuber who runs the Beards & Chips channel, took to Twitter today to point out that AMD hasn't released a new driver for Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards since AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 22.11.2—a package that launched nearly two months ago on December 2, 2022 (although some say it was actually available as early as November), featuring support for The Callisto Protocol, Need for Speed Unbound, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's next-gen update. The discovery has prompted Musetoiu to make the claim that Radeon has "aged like milk."

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AMD aknowledged they are working on a new driver (I think it was to j2c) which should be out soon which should be (I can remember the exact term) be mostly new, hence why they so far did not bother to fix the last one which is pretty buggy.

Let's see what happens.
 
It sounds like AMD is "on it," however, a very strong lesson I would have thought any GPU/PC hardware vendor (yes I am pointing the finger at you Creative Labs) should, by now, have understood how critically important new/updated drivers are for the life of the hardware.
 
Ok, so.. if the driver is broke / buggy - yeah, should complain a bit about that, even if the manufacturer has acknowledged the issue.

But... apart from that -- how often do you want to install new drivers on your machine? If they work, I'm happy to leave well enough alone. In fact, I get irritated when I see driver releases just a week or so apart, and all it is is "some new game".

I don't really understand why games, or rather it seems just the AAA-style releases, need specific driver releases... it's not like we have SLI profiles any more (thank god).
 
I actually hate new drivers all the time, it should just work and that's the end of story. New drivers every two months is already too often.

Brian_B said:
I don't really understand why games, or rather it seems just the AAA-style releases, need specific driver releases... it's not like we have SLI profiles any more (thank god).
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In my experience you can play 99% of games just fine with older drivers, it's just that they do tiny game specific optimizations to get that .1% performance to look better in benchmarks against the competition. It's extremely rare that you actually need a new driver to run a game.
 
I'm with the others who don't seem to care if there has been no new driver in two months. I'm sure if there's a driver issue that you need remedied it can be annoying but for myself I don't have any issues I could point to the driver being a problem. New doesn't always mean better and new drivers constantly is not always a good thing.

As it is I don't even need to worry about it since I rarely ever boot into Windows. It wasn't until I decided to go to Linux full time that I realized how nice it is not needing to even worry about driver updates. Things like this just don't bother me.
 
If you need constant driver updates on a platform that is mature then you are doing something wrong.
Its all about marketing......
 
I might update my drivers once every few months if I happen to see a new one is available. Otherwise I just play games with what's installed. I can't tell you the last time I ran in to an issue in game where a driver update fixed it. In game issues are usually fixed by game updates.

The only time I can see a driver update being relevant is when a new game is released using a new engine.
 
So, is he having problems, or is the basis of said complaint merely the time frame?
 
Uvilla said:
So, is he having problems, or is the basis of said complaint merely the time frame?
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AMD latest drivers seem to be rather buggy, but this can be fixed by rolling back to the previous version, I haven't updated mine yet on my AMD machine so I don't know from experience.

For a moment some people even tought the exploding chips were caused by the latest driver but this has been disproven if not by the fact that rhose issues were only in a certain part of Germany.
 
It's only been in the last year or two I've been forced to update NV drivers in order to play a game and it's always been in relation to RT. I say "forced" because there have been a couple that I can't remember right now that actually stopped during launch and told me to update before they would finish launching. There have been others that if I didn't update the driver certain features were greyed out, again usually RT or DLSS related. It obviously relates to which DLSS versions a particular driver/game has but still kind of annoying.

I'm always a bit nervous to install a new driver just because it's touted as GRD. We've all seen how some will go off the rails and make things worse and your only recourse is to backtrack until either a hotfix or a new one is released.

I'm a bit bummed to hear how AMD's GPU department is lagging still with drivers. I've heard things have gotten a bit better in recent years but it is something they really should put more focus on since the last thing they need is bad press that could diminish sales revenues that are badly needed to support them.
 
The RTX release of Portal made me upgrade my driver recently. Apart from that I usually will only do so if I see some news that it's fixed some bug or something - maybe two-three times a year?

Then again, I mostly play older games and almost never buy games at release.
 
How often to people expect new drivers?

2 months doesn't seem that long to go without a driver update to me, and it's probably not surprising that a new product is going to get priority from the driver team to address teething issues, especially since the 7000 series had some odd issues.

Heck, I'm lucky if I even update my drivers annually.

Only time I look for new drivers is if I upgrade my GPU, or if am about to play a new title that might require newer drivers, then I'll google to see when support was added, and if needed, upgrade.
 
Zarathustra said:
How often to people expect new drivers?

2 months doesn't seem that long to go without a driver update to me, and it's probably not surprising that a new product is going to get priority from the driver team to address teething issues, especially since the 7000 series had some odd issues.

Heck, I'm lucky if I even update my drivers annually.

Only time I look for new drivers is if I upgrade my GPU, or if am about to play a new title that might require newer drivers, then I'll google to see when support was added, and if needed, upgrade.
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I mentioned it before, but unless a game is using a new engine there really is no need to update the driver for it. The whole "Nvidia Game Optimized" driver is b.s. I ran the new CoD without updating and it played perfect. I updated and saw no difference in performance. What, exactly, was "optimized"? Nothing. The game is running on the same engine as the past 5 CoD's.
 
Riccochet said:
I mentioned it before, but unless a game is using a new engine there really is no need to update the driver for it. The whole "Nvidia Game Optimized" driver is b.s. I ran the new CoD without updating and it played perfect. I updated and saw no difference in performance. What, exactly, was "optimized"? Nothing. The game is running on the same engine as the past 5 CoD's.
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I believe that is the case most of the time.

There may times when an engine is used in atypical or somehow different ways that can cause problems despite being the same, but my examples are not recent as I have not run into this in a while.

When Red Orchestra 2 was new in 2011 my AMD drivers at the time really struggled with it (while Nvidia players reportedly didn't have issues)

It was far from the first UE3 title.

The fact that it has been a while could either point to that this is a very rare problem, or could suggest that very little changes under the hood of modern game sequels. It's the same title with different assets (maps, models, sounds)
 
Might have been said already, but it is clear AMD has shifted their focus, in the shorterm, to fixing the performance of the 7900 series. They believe they can, else why spend all their resources and man power on it, but that is clear, and that is OK IMO, they must think they can actually bring about more performance, or get it to where they intended. I'm sure, once they figure out the bottleneck, they will shift the team back to multi-projects, including 6000 series. I believe, it is a temporary, physical, people/man power allocation, at the moment. They only have so many people on the team, and the team is focused on fixing the 7900 performance, but once they do, I'm sure it'll shift back and split between both series.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Might have been said already, but it is clear AMD has shifted their focus, in the shorterm, to fixing the performance of the 7900 series. They believe they can, else why spend all their resources and man power on it, but that is clear, and that is OK IMO, they must think they can actually bring about more performance, or get it to where they intended. I'm sure, once they figure out the bottleneck, they will shift the team back to multi-projects, including 6000 series. I believe, it is a temporary, physical, people/man power allocation, at the moment. They only have so many people on the team, and the team is focused on fixing the 7900 performance, but once they do, I'm sure it'll shift back and split between both series.
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Either way I don't think there is an issue with my 6000 series card at all. No game has told me of an issue or had weird anomolies.
 
AMD's patented driver pasteurization, packaging and storage process should extend the shelf life of the drivers. And once they've been installed, it should be safe to continue using them unless they come in contact with a new game containing contaminants.
 
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