AMD will only release Ryzen APU graphics drivers every three months

By Jon Martindale Published June 18, 2018

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G & Ryzen 3 2200G Review fingers motherboard — Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

AMD has made its plans for Ryzen APU graphics driver releases a little more clear with a statement from an AMD representative. He suggested that updates to Ryzen APU graphics drivers would come every three months and will only come as WHQL certified releases, with no options for beta drivers in between.

One of the big changes AMD made in recent years to try and keep pace with its big graphics rival, Nvidia, is to release graphics drivers much more regularly. For the most part it’s stuck to that commitment and now AMD fans are treated to regular driver releases and feature improvements for its Radeon Software back end. But APU owners don’t get to enjoy quite as frequent updates.

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In fact, since the release of the Ryzen 2200G and 2400G APUs earlier this year, they’ve only received one update — not counting the motherboard firmware fix for non-boot issues. It debuted in May and it seems like owners may need to wait until August to receive another.

According to “AMDMatt,” an AMD representative on the Overclockers UK forum, the plan is to give AMD Ryzen APU owners a new driver update at a quarterly frequency. When asked by another forum member why there has been no support for the APUs under the most recent two driver releases, AMDMatt said that, “APU drivers are updated every 3 months as WHQL releases only.”

Other forum members weren’t greatly pleased by this news, and highlighted how important hot fixes or optimizations for new games could take months to arrive, leaving those running the APU in the lurch when it comes to new releases. Considering APUs are underpowered graphically compared to the dedicated graphics cards of even a few years ago, those running the Ryzen with Vega chips don’t have much graphical muscle to counteract a lack of optimization.

This news raises questions over how AMD and Intel plan to update their “Kaby Lake G” processors, which combine an Intel CPU with an AMD Vega graphics core on a single die. While a recent update gave owners hope that more frequent updates would be released for the hardware in the future, it may be that that chip is forced to languish with irregular updates as well.

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