The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]

[rcf]

AMD drops support for non GCN based graphics cards

R5 230 and below are rebranded HD6450s and they are still being sold worldwide.
All Bulldozer APUs older than 18 months contain VLIW IGPs.
I know AMD lacks resources right now, but that's ridiculous.

 

[Malo]

They hardly need new driver updates though, that's the point.

 

[swaaye]

That's the party line but I don't buy that for a second. It just doesn't make any sense to expend the effort on optimization for hardware that isn't sold anymore. The APUs aren't going to run new games well regardless of how much driver level tweaking and shader replacement they do anyway. Cayman can run with 7850/265/370 sometimes but hey it's ancient and again not making them money.

 

[Malo]

Um, so you agree with me then? That was my point.

 

[Alexko]

They're not exactly dropping support though, just putting those products in the legacy category, where they will receive much less attention but should still get the occasional bug fix.

 

[HMBR]

That's the party line but I don't buy that for a second. It just doesn't make any sense to expend the effort on optimization for hardware that isn't sold anymore. The APUs aren't going to run new games well regardless of how much driver level tweaking and shader replacement they do anyway. Cayman can run with 7850/265/370 sometimes but hey it's ancient and again not making them money.

I think that's a bit pessimistic, not all new games are that demanding with lowered settings, Richland APUs are faster than even even Skylake GT2.
also, this is problematic for crossfire and laptops with dual graphics configuration, some had VLIW+GCN GPUs with just the VLIW IGP having the video output, and could run in some sort of crossfire (yes they had crossfire working with VLIW4 IGP and GCN dGPU at some point)
a 6970 or 6900 CF without a CF profile will not be doing much good.

AMD still have reasonably recent rebrands with VLIW architecture, and stores still have stocks of Richland APUs, supporting your customers from a few years ago well will help you making money, giving more reasons for them to stick with your products, I think that's what Nvidia is doing.

They're not exactly dropping support though, just putting those products in the legacy category, where they will receive much less attention but should still get the occasional bug fix.

they basically are, if you look at how they treated the previous legacy products (and also removing OpenCL with the first legacy release is a good indication), basically no new driver updates apart from some broken stuff that didn't fix much.

 

[Grall]

They barely have money to develop new stuff, you're seriously surprised they don't want to spend any on stuff that's friggin' ancient?

Time to get real here, I'd say.

 

[Kaarlisk]

New They barely have money to develop new stuff, you're seriously surprised they don't want to spend any on stuff that's friggin' ancient?

Richland is not ancient. And nobody expects features, we just want bugfixes. Support for Win10, for OpenCL in Photoshop, etc.
And this does add value. If I do not see that support, I'm buying an Intel APU/Nvidia GPU.

 

[Ryan Smith]

They're not exactly dropping support though, just putting those products in the legacy category, where they will receive much less attention but should still get the occasional bug fix.

For what it's worth, in their announcement AMD said that no further driver releases are planned. Which doesn't preclude them from issuing bug fixes, but at this time they're promising absolutely nothing.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

And this does add value. If I do not see that support, I'm buying an Intel APU/Nvidia GPU.

Seeing how Kepler cards are faring in these famous Gameworks titles we're seeing, buying nVidia for longevity seems a bit sadistic.

 

[Alexko]

For what it's worth, in their announcement AMD said that no further driver releases are planned. Which doesn't preclude them from issuing bug fixes, but at this time they're promising absolutely nothing.

They presumably feel that they've already solved all known major bugs. There's no reason to plan for anything more, but surely if VLIW5/4 cards crash in Call of Duty 2016, they'll fix it.

 

[swaaye]

Richland is not ancient. And nobody expects features, we just want bugfixes. Support for Win10, for OpenCL in Photoshop, etc.
And this does add value. If I do not see that support, I'm buying an Intel APU/Nvidia GPU.

I guess you'll be counting on their "legacy support". It hasn't been exactly what I would call good in the past. AMD (or ATI) is not new to dropping support rather early. Though dropping a 2013 product is....interesting.

 

[Grall]

Richland is not ancient.

Perhaps not, but VLIW4/5 sure is.

 

[HMBR]

Perhaps not, but VLIW4/5 sure is.

if VLIW4 is ancient GCN is almost there and Nvidia is doing charity with the Fermi support,

but if that's how the 6970 is performing now, then I guess it really is useless, 2 new games performing horribly (less than half the 260X), I wonder how it would perform with decent support? better, the same? I have no clue, but it kind of looks like a sudden drop

http://pclab.pl/art67250-4.html Just Cause 3

http://pclab.pl/art67232-6.html Rainbow Six Siege

 

[Grall]

if VLIW4 is ancient GCN is almost there and Nvidia is doing charity with the Fermi support,

GCN is not much older than VLIW4, sure, but it's a different generation of product. It's a big difference architecturally between VLIW-era and scalar-era GCN.

Nvidia is in the position they can afford to support older GPUs. That comes from owning like 80% (maybe more?) of the discrete GPU market and even more of the HPC market.

but if that's how the 6970 is performing now, then I guess it really is useless, 2 new games performing horribly (less than half the 260X), I wonder how it would perform with decent support? better, the same? I have no clue, but it kind of looks like a sudden drop

Newer games are likely coded in a way that suits scalar GPUs. You would therefore see a proportionally lower utilization on the more rigid, wonkier VLIW-era products, and thus lower performance as well.

 

[Razor1]

Yep, newer games tend to use more compute features and do scale better with scalar architectures and games coming out now and in the future will use even more compute, AMD really doesn't need to support 5 year old GPU's anymore, even nV has stopped supporting some of their older scalar architectures (g80 and derivatives). Although it kinda sucks that they aren't those 5 year old GPU's are pretty much low end now.

And it really doesn't matter if they are still supported, the performance drops are due to the architecture not being able to keep up with the shift of focus on the software side.

 

[swaaye]

It would be interesting to see more tests of the VLIW Radeons on modern games. But we really don't know if the slowdowns in some games are caused by VLIW utilization against modern code, or just driver neglect. Not that it matters - the end result is the same.

 

[Kaarlisk]

The issue is not with Call of Duty 2016 and Crysis 5.
The issue is with Candy Crush not crashing, Firefox not crashing, and hardware accelerated video decoding working in Browser 2017.

 

[no-X]

VLIW GPUs don't support new codecs like VP8, VP9, HEVC or high-FPS h.264, so it won't work irrespective of driver support.

 

[swaaye]

VLIW GPUs don't support new codecs like VP8, VP9, HEVC or high-FPS h.264, so it won't work irrespective of driver support.

Actually I'm pretty sure my 6970 has no problem with 1080p60 Youtube H.264. 4890 was ok with 720p60 believe it or not, but 1080p60 was no go. I had a 4890 in my Haswell work machine for awhile and played around with it there. Currently have the 6970 in it and 1080p60 H.264 works fine.