In a rather surprising move, AMD has ended support for the AMD Radeon R9 Fury and X all preceding GCN-based graphics cards. This isn’t being taken well by the community at all as the Fiji-based Fury X was launched in 2015 alongside the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. NVIDIA is still supporting the Maxwell-based offerings, and only recently announced the discontinuation notice for the Kepler lineup six months in advance.
Alongside the experimental HBM card, AMD is also discontinuing support for the 200 and 300 series lineup, in addition to the HD 7000 and 8000 series. The latter comes as no surprise, but the former should have gotten at least another 6-12 months of driver support. Usually, vendors offer driver support for graphics cards for up to 10 years, and this definitely comes as a bit of a shock. Furthermore, the fact that the company didn’t notify users in advance is another stab in the back.
AMD isn’t really known for its day 0 driver support, and this decision certainly doesn’t make it look any better. The fact that NVIDIA is expected to support the Maxwell series for another 3-5 years is just going to make it worse for Radeon. More interestingly, this discontinuation comes on the same day as the launch of the much-anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution upsampling technique. Although the older parts should technically still support FSR, the performance will be a notch below.
