AMD adds FSR driver support, discontinues support on older GPUs/OSes

[porina]

Quotes

Quote

Alongside today’s release of their new Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.6.1 driver – the first to bring support for FidelityFX Super Resolution tech – AMD is also using this opportunity to clean house on supported graphics products. As announced in a new blog post and effective immediately, AMD is moving all of its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) based GPUs and APUs to legacy status. As a result, pre-RX 400 series video cards and pre-Ryzen APUs are no longer supported by AMD’s current drivers, and AMD’s previous 21.5.2 driver set will be the final release for those products. 21.5.2 will also be the final driver that supports Windows 7, as AMD is also using this opportunity to drop support for that already-retired OS.

Sources

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16775/amd-moves-gcn-1-2-3based-gpus-and-apus-to-legacy-also-drops-win7-support

 

Review with comparison samples:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-fsr-fidelityfx-super-resolution-quality-performance-benchmark/

 

Summary

AMD have enabled FSR support in their drivers. There are a handful of games initially supported, and we can look forward to the performance and quality testing that will follow. At the same time, support for Windows 7 is being dropped. GPUs older than Polaris (RX 400 series) and APUs older than Ryzen are also dropped to legacy status and wont receive updates going forwards.

 

My thoughts

FSR support will certainly be interesting to see now that it is in the wild. It is also a good time to drop support for older GPUs given FSR support aligns with this. Polaris was launched 5 years ago and Ryzen 4 years ago (although APUs were a bit later), so this may only affect those who have not upgraded in many years or otherwise choose to run older hardware.

 

Dropping support for Windows 7 should not be a big deal as Win7 shouldn't be used for anything serious today.

 

Earlier this month nvidia did similar dropping support for Win7 and Kepler, which was replaced by Pascal 4 years ago.

 

 

Update following review with comparison samples, linked above:

I'm focusing on comparing native 4k with the quality preset, which upscales from 1440p. I've already had experience of running games in 1440p on a 4k display to get more performance. Upscaling is provided by the display. As a generalisation, the more photorealistic a game is, the less you notice upscaling. In some games it can be painfully obvious, but in others you hardly notice unless you're looking for it. I'm looking at the samples full screen on a 4k display like you would while gaming, and not zooming in to criticise individual pixels. Performance wise I'm looking at it as an owner of a 2080 Ti/3070. This is what I'd consider entry level 4k60 performance class, so a bit more fps would be welcome.

 

Anno 1800: FSR is visibly softer, but not to a degree I'd consider objectionable. The claimed boost in frame rate is from a low but usable level to somewhere in the sweet spot. I think the fine details are too much for FSR to cope with well, so this is not the best case. I don't know if I'd take the image quality tradeoff for fps as this is a game I do own and have played. It isn't a game that needs high fps.

Godfall: In my eyes, no practical difference between native and quality setting. This is not the type of game I'd play, but if I did, I think I'd use FSR on it for a smoother experience.

Kingshunt: I think quality actually looks better than native. Textures stand out more presumably from applied sharpening. This opens up a new question, what should a game look like? Should we consider native rendering as how the developer intended it to look? This isn't the first time AMD have implemented texture sharpening in driver with their first from about 2 years ago. Tools like ReShade have also offered image customisation capabilities. I'd certainly consider using FSR for the performance if I were to play this.

Riftbreaker: this is obviously softer with FSR. However the game runs at pretty high fps even without it, so personally in this case I'd stick with native rendering.

Terminator: this is an interesting one with both what I'd consider improvements and degradations in the same image. Like Kingshunt it looks like textures are sharpened, but there are also fine details that are softer. It's not a clear win here.

 

Overall, I feel this is better than expectations set during the technology reveal, which seemed to show more softening. Based on these limited static samples it is not worse than dumb upscaling from a 1440p source to 4k. It is clearly game dependant what the visual quality is, so its use may best be decided on a case by case basis. If you already have enough performance you can stick with native. If you need performance, you need performance, and there is some space in between. Ideally we need to see this in motion, since games are (mostly) not static images, and that might show more differences between them. For example, temporal stability especially on fine details may be different. Also I'm a bit cautious on the texture sharpening that makes it look better than native, as it could be a step towards a processing war trying to enhance beyond native rendering. I think the real test of the technology will be a head to head against DLSS where titles support both. Still, it is nice to have an option for those owing AMD cards or pre-RTX nvidia cards, which make up a large number of gamers.

[Vishera]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

Dropping support for Windows 7 should not be a big deal as Win7 shouldn't be used for anything serious today.

Overclocking and benchmarks.

[porina]

1 minute ago, Vishera said:

Overclocking and benchmarks.

Doing OC/benching competitively to try and get better scores is a use case, but I don't consider it serious uses. Maybe serious is not the best word. Those are very specialised use cases where the person doing it knows the risks and benefits of doing so. It is not a general purpose use case.

 

Let me put it another way, it would not be best practice to do your online banking on Win7 today.

[Morgan MLGman]

17 minutes ago, porina said:

and Ryzen APUs are also dropped to legacy status and wont receive updates going forwards.

I don't think that's true. It's APUs, yes, but not Ryzen APUs as those use the Vega iGPU cores, which should still be supported.

17 minutes ago, porina said:

AMD is moving all of its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) based GPUs and APUs to legacy status

3rd gen GCN is Tonga and Fiji, not Vega so I would assume this only applies to older AMD APUs.

[porina]

2 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I don't think that's true. It's APUs, yes, but not Ryzen APUs as those use the Vega iGPU cores, which should still be supported.

3rd gen GCN is Tonga and Fiji, not Vega so I would assume this only applies to older AMD APUs.

I said BEFORE Polaris/Ryzen APUs. I'll have a look at rewording to make it clearer.

 

Edit: Updated slightly. I originally wrote it intending "older than (A and B)" but it it could be read as "(older than A) and B". Now it is "(older than A) and (older than B)". I probably should use OR, or and I over thinking this now...

[Master Disaster]

Hmm. I'll update for my 5700XT later and see if it makes a real difference or not (TBH I'm not expecting it to, Gen 1 DLSS was also pretty terrible).

[Morgan MLGman]

36 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Hmm. I'll update for my 5700XT later and see if it makes a real difference or not (TBH I'm not expecting it to, Gen 1 DLSS was also pretty terrible).

No games actually support it yet, from what I've read all of the games "listed" as supported should receive game updates today or tomorrow to add the feature.

The support list itself is terrible though at this moment.

39 minutes ago, porina said:

I said BEFORE Polaris/Ryzen APUs. I'll have a look at rewording to make it clearer.

I apologize, I'm not a native English speaker so I may have misunderstood

[RejZoR]

Waiting for Necromunda Hired Gun to get it since it's the only FSR supported game I have, but I also have RTX card so it's gonna be a weird mix

[porina]

7 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I apologize, I'm not a native English speaker so I may have misunderstood

The English language is full of cases where things may be interpreted in ways other than intended. It is good for me to improve on reducing those cases in my writing.

 

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

Waiting for Necromunda Hired Gun to get it since it's the only FSR supported game I have, but I also have RTX card so it's gonna be a weird mix

Anno 1800 is the only supported game I care at all about. Likewise I only have modern nvidia cards so it remains to be seen if the games will enable that on nvidia at the same time, or will nvidia need to also release some support update? It might be a case of it works, but nvidia can optimise things over time.

 

The only modern AMD GPU I have is the 5800H APU. Not sure I'll bother with that.

[Levent]

GCN1.0 received almost 10 years of driver support (9 years and 7 months), a lot longer than I expected. Which is also probably the longest for any graphics card (HD7970/HD7950).

[cj09beira]

didn't you just upgrade ? @leadeater are you a psychic ?

[jaslion]

20 minutes ago, Levent said:

GCN1.0 received almost 10 years of driver support (9 years and 7 months), a lot longer than I expected. Which is also probably the longest for any graphics card (HD7970/HD7950).

I see people being mad about their card not also getting almost 10 years of driver support but this was a huge exception as amd could basically backport their driver without much hassle to those cards it seems.

 

Pretty shitty to do this now just like nvidia since nobody can upgrade but then again they are companies and all that matter to them is money.

[Levent]

4 minutes ago, jaslion said:

I see people being mad about their card not also getting almost 10 years of driver support but this was a huge exception as amd could basically backport their driver without much hassle to those cards it seems.

 

Pretty shitty to do this now just like nvidia since nobody can upgrade but then again they are companies and all that matter to them is money.

To be completely honest, I dont think GCN1.0 cards got any noticeable driver/feature set upgrade after 2014.

[jaslion]

Just now, Levent said:

To be completely honest, I dont think GCN1.0 cards got a noticeable driver/feature set upgrade after 2014.

Pretty much this. Anything they got was support, optimizations and whatever else could trickle down. It is what made them perform better in almost all cases than their nvidia counterparts of the time over the years. Still impressive that it lasted this long.

[Morgan MLGman]

For AMD users, with this driver update something that's not mentioned in the update notes - a toggle to enable or disable Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) appeared:

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Morgan MLGman said:

I apologize, I'm not a native English speaker so I may have misunderstood

As long as there aren't any eels in your hovercraft you should be fine

 

Spoiler

Google it if you don't know lol

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 hour ago, Levent said:

GCN1.0 received almost 10 years of driver support (9 years and 7 months), a lot longer than I expected. Which is also probably the longest for any graphics card (HD7970/HD7950).

Sandy Bridge HD3XXX is still supported by Intel afaik.

[Doobeedoo]

A fairly long support though. Reasonable to see legacy axed by now.

[xAcid9]

Written review for FSR. 
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-fsr-fidelityfx-super-resolution-quality-performance-benchmark/
 

 

Fiji went down 1st before Maxwell. Oh man... *pat his 980 Ti*

1 hour ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Sandy Bridge HD3XXX is still supported by Intel afaik.

Last driver was from 2015 iirc. 

[Morgan MLGman]

29 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Written review for FSR. 
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-fsr-fidelityfx-super-resolution-quality-performance-benchmark/

Looking at this review, I gotta say I'm impressed - probably because I didn't expect much, nice! Especially for owners of older cards like the RX 580 during the shortage. Can't say this feature is going to be very useful for someone with an RX 6900 XT or even a 6800 XT since those are high performing cards anyway, unless there was also RT implemented in the game.

@porinaYour thoughts? Can you add the review link to the original post for more information to the readers?

[Taf the Ghost]

7 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Looking at this review, I gotta say I'm impressed - probably because I didn't expect much, nice! Especially for owners of older cards like the RX 580 during the shortage. Can't say this feature is going to be very useful for someone with an RX 6900 XT or even a 6800 XT since those are high performing cards anyway, unless there was also RT implemented in the game.

@porinaYour thoughts? Can you add the review link to the original post for more information to the readers?

The utility is probably going to be more in early RT games, games like Anno and on Laptops. We'll have to see how it plays out, but it might make laptop gaming more viable for a lot of titles. 

[Morgan MLGman]

8 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

The utility is probably going to be more in early RT games, games like Anno and on Laptops. We'll have to see how it plays out, but it might make laptop gaming more viable for a lot of titles. 

Yeah, exactly. Lower-end hardware will benefit much more from FSR. My RX 560X laptop would love that.

This also makes me question the utility of Nvidia's Tensor Cores in RTX GPUs.

[NeuesTestament]

As far as I am concerned this might give me 2 more years using my RX570. That's nice I guess.

[porina]

37 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Your thoughts? Can you add the review link to the original post for more information to the readers?

I put the link in for now. Looking at the samples now.

[TetraSky]

Oh wait, they finally dropped support for my GPU!?

.... Now if I could just... Buy a new one, that'd be great. Hopefully with China cracking down on crypto, the demand for GPUs will be slightly lower and I will finally be able to get one at MSRP.... right? .... RIGHT!?!

 

Narrator : It was not.