AMD drops Ryzen Z1 Extreme driver support, impacting original Legion Go and ROG Ally X owners

New reports appearing online from users and even hardware manufacturers suggest that AMD has discontinued official driver support for its first major PC gaming handheld APU, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme. The APU, which pairs Zen 4 CPU Cores with RDNA 3 Radeon Graphics, is only a couple of years old, which is why this is cause for concern.

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The Ryzen Z1 Extreme powers the original Lenovo Legion Go and ASUS ROG Ally X flagship Windows 11 gaming handhelds, and users of both devices report that neither has received a driver update for several months. In the case of the Lenovo Legion Go, the company's Korean community team responded to a user asking about support that there are "no more plans" to release new drivers for the original Legion Go handheld.

Now, it's worth noting that AMD hasn't announced it won't release drivers for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, so this isn't official. However, no new driver releases for several months is not great news for PC gamers with these devices. Without updated drivers, they'll miss out on optimizations for new game releases and other performance-related updates.

Now, these devices will continue to work, but on the Radeon side of the equation, they're effectively in maintenance mode. Unfortunately, due to the specific hardware configuration and power profiles, users can't simply install the driver for a different Ryzen APU. The only thing Legion Go and ROG Ally X could theoretically do is install the SteamOS-like Bazzite version of Linux, which relies on open-source drivers that are continuously updated to support a wide range of hardware.