Got yourself an HD 5870 or two? They're no longer supported

By Jon Martindale November 26, 2015

amd kills off support for pre gcn line amdgraphicscards — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The release of AMD’s Crimson drivers was an exciting event which saw a revamp and replacement of the Catalyst Control Center and a number of improvements. Consequently, this signals that pre Graphics Core Next GPUs will become orphans.

That means that all of the 5000 and 6000 series graphics cards, even the high-end ones, are no longer supported. It also means that any of the rebrands from later series, such as the 7000 to 7600 cards and the 8000 to 8400 cards, won’t be supported either, since they used retooled legacy hardware.

Since none of these cards are designed to work with the new Crimson driver release and won’t be supported by any future ones, the last driver they can officially use is the Catalyst 15.7.1 driver, released back in July. Thus, there is some Windows 10 support for older graphics cards, but future updates should not be expected.

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Those running Windows operating systems older than 7 (Vista, XP) will be limited to using the 13.12 driver.

As much as this is a sad day for those running older cards, it should not come as a surprise. The last new hardware release in the now defunct GPU lines came almost five years ago, and as TechSpot points out, they don’t support a lot of the newer features like DirectX 12 and Freesync.

Perhaps more importantly, older hardware doesn’t support AMD’s Liquid VR platform, which will be a big focus for the chipmaker over the next couple of years as it champions virtual reality on PCs and consoles.

AMD also said in its release that it had pushed these older GPUs to their peak performance and that by dropping support for them, it could focus on providing a higher end experience for newer and upcoming hardware releases.

Are any of you running older 5000 or 6000 series graphics cards? Will this cutoff make you consider an upgrade?

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