Own an AMD Polaris or Vega GPU? These graphics cards just took a step closer to retirement

AMD's older Polaris and Vega GPUs aren't having support withdrawn, but that process is definitely underway.

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That's according to a report from Anandtech, which observes that AMD recently ceased support for these graphics cards in its Vulkan driver for Linux - and the company is stepping back with Windows drivers, too.

This doesn't mean support has been pulled totally, but AMD will only deliver critical (security) updates for Polaris and Vega, and functionality updates will be provided where they are available.

AMD explained in a statement to Anandtech:

"Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available. The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products."

In short, security updates will be covered, as well as some new features and tweaking as AMD deems appropriate to bring across from its main Adrenalin graphics driver.

The question is how long it will take for these generations to be consigned to the 'legacy' dustbin, which is the full cessation of driver support, at which point, it's time to move on and upgrade. (That said, even in this case, one-off bug fixes for really nasty flaws can still be issued for graphics cards in this category).

In other recent AMD news, the company has launched a Radeon RX 7900M laptop GPU, and this powerful mobile effort is apparently slightly faster than NVIDIA's RTX 4080 graphics card for gaming notebooks.