Alongside today’s release of the new Radeon Software Crimson Edition driver set, AMD has published a new page on their driver site announcing that video cards based on the company’s pre-Graphics Core Next architectures have been moved to legacy status. This means that GPUs based on the company’s VLIW5 and VLIW4 architectures – the Evergreen and Northern Islands families – have been retired and will no longer be supported. All of AMD’s remaining supported GPUs are now based on various iterations of the Graphics Core Next architecture.

Overall this means that the entire Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series have been retired. So have the Radeon HD 7000 to 7600 parts, and the Radeon HD 8000 to 8400 parts. AMD and their partners largely ceased selling pre-GCN video cards in 2012 as they were replaced with GCN-based 7000 series cards, so pre-GCN parts are now about 3 years removed from the market. However some lower-end OEM machines with the OEM-only 8000 series may only be 2 years old at this point.

In their announcement, AMD notes that their pre-GCN GPUs have “reached peak performance optimization” and that the retirement “enables us to dedicate valuable engineering resources to developing new features and enhancements for graphics products based on the GCN Architecture.” Furthermore AMD is not planning on any further driver releases for these cards – the announcement makes no mention of a security update support period – so today’s driver release is the final driver release for these cards.

To that end, AMD is offering two drivers for the now-legacy products. The last WHQL driver for these products is Catalyst 15.7.1, which was released in July for the launch of Windows 10 and brought with them official support for Windows 10 for all supported GPUs. Meanwhile AMD has also released what will be the first and only Crimson driver release for these products; a beta build of Crimson 15.11 is being provided “as is” for their pre-GCN products. So at the very least the last of AMD’s pre-GCN parts get to go out on a high-note with most of the feature improvements rolled out as part of today’s Crimson driver release.

Ultimately the retirement of AMD’s pre-GCN cards has been a long time coming; it was clear that their VLIW architectures were at a dead-end as soon as GCN was announced in 2011, the only question had been when this would happen. With pre-GCN GPUs unable to support DirectX 12 and coming up on several generations old, it would seem that AMD has picked the Crimson driver release as the natural point to retire these cards.

Update: As a couple of you have now asked, it should also be noted that this retirement includes all APUs using the legacy GPU architectures. So all pre-Kavari APUs: Llano, Trinity, and Richland, are now also legacy APUs

Source: AMD Legacy Driver Page

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  • Mark_gb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    Everything comes to an end in computers. Your cards will still work. You just will not be getting updated drivers anymore. That is to be expected. AMD is not alone in EOL (End of Life) dates for multi-year old products. 3 years is a very long time in the computer industry. Enjoy them until you find something that they cannot do. That might be the time for you to upgrade. Maybe.
  • Mark_gb - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    BTW, bug fixes was a major reason for creating Crimson. And they seem to have done a fantastic job fixing the bugs that could not be fixed in Catalyst.
  • StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link

    Card's still being sold today, should not be considered EOL from a support perspective.
  • abufrejoval - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link

    +1 for prime retail channels, not refurnishers or eBay, of course.

    even more so for APUs and notebook hardware containing APUs.

    And there must be a distinction between adding features and maintaining stability and security, just like there is with brand software like RedHat or Oracle.
  • jabber - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link

    Thing is I bet none of the 5XXX series have had ANY fixes/tweaks in the AMD drivers for 18 months and the 6XXX series, probably just a few. They get dropped out of support far earlier then you think. This is just making it official. Nothing out of the ordinary.
  • djboxbaba - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link

    Exactly.
  • nefar - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link

    I'm in the same boat - guess it's time to look up some vid card articles. Those don't seem to be around as much as they used to be here though. Don't even see any buyer guides for the season other than laptops.
  • Blitzvogel - Tuesday, December 8, 2015 - link

    Funny, my Radeon HD 5850 1 GB is still an impressive performer:

    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKd-XKvh0AE...

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