Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers.
AMD is reportedly moving the Radeon RX 5000 / RX 6000 series more to a “maintenance mode” with their Radeon Software Windows driver and will stop focusing on game optimization updates for those RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs. It’s a bit surprising considering the RDNA 2 graphics cards are only a few years old and typically AMD has maintained their Windows driver support in good standing for a longer period of time, but alas that’s the news this week. The Windows support is staying there for those RX 5000/6000 series GPUs but without a focus on game optimizations and features.
For Linux users, this doesn’t mean much if anything, just as similar deprecation notices and end-of-life announcements for their Windows driver haven’t really impacted Linux users over the years. The AMDGPU kernel driver continues with hardware support back to GCN 1.2 by default (plus the recent GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 improvements too in hoping to move that to the default), the Radeon kernel driver continues supporting older pre-GCN graphics cards that have long since been removed from the Radeon Software Windows driver, RadeonSI Gallium3D continues providing support to all available GCN and newer graphics cards, and even the R600 Gallium3D still sees community activity from time to time for the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 series. Thanks to the nature of open-source and community contributions, even the very old R300 Gallium3D driver even sees occasional improvements for R300 through R500 class GPUs (the Radeon X1000 series). The RADV Vulkan driver led by Valve continues also supporting all GCN and newer GPUs in good standing too.
Thanks to the upstream open-source driver support for AMD Radeon graphics on Linux, AMD de-emphasizing Windows gaming driver updates for the Radeon RX 5000/6000 series doesn’t mean much for those not touching Microsoft’s operating system. Yet surprisingly over the past day several readers have written in and somehow thinking AMD will remove RDNA 1/2 support from their Linux driver stack or similar when that’s not the case at all and their open-source driver support continues to exist for much older hardware. If AMD focuses less on features and testing for those GPUs, at least the drivers are open-source and upstream with Valve, the community, and others able to address any gaps unlike with the closed-source Radeon Software Windows driver. These support changes to the Radeon Software Windows driver have traditionally had virtually no impact to Linux gamers and enthusiasts.
