In this week's episode of DF Direct (episode #239, if you're tallying), we have picked up a topic that the Digital Foundry crew admittedly cut at the last minute last week: AMD's curious announcement about driver support for its older generations of RDNA graphics cards. The back-and-forth between one announcement and the next felt like a topic we could sit out for a moment, let some dust settle and eventually field our own questions.

Sadly, those questions haven't filled us with confidence about how fully AMD may support GPUs from its incredibly popular RDNA 2 line - which, we should note, remain not only popular but also still manufactured by the company. As a reminder, the RDNA 2-specced Xbox Ally (non-X) shipped just a few weeks ago.

Before we get to that, a recap. The story began on October 30th with what might have otherwise been an uneventful patch notes document for AMD's latest Adrenalin driver download, except that it included an unusual clarification: "New Game Support and Expanded Vulkan Extensions Support" being advertised for RX 7000 and RX 9000 series products.

German PC enthusiast site PCGamesHardware.de appears to have been the first to notice this and wonder to themselves: did that mean other GPUs would not receive that level of support? After emailing AMD reps directly, they were told that, in fact, this was the case. Tom's Hardware followed up with its own investigation and were given a similar response from AMD reps, this time in English:

In order to focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 places Radeon RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) in maintenance mode.

Days later, as the story made the rounds, and owners of AMD's most popular GPU in the current Steam Hardware Survey cried foul, AMD attempted damage control in replies to members of the press before publishing its own announcement. In it, AMD officially announced that this was "not the end of support for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2" but rather the beginning of "a dedicated, stable driver branch" that would, among other things, "insulate previous generation GPUs from rapid changes designed for newer architectures."

AMD cites "confusion" in its November 2 statement (a choice of phrase that GamersNexus Editor-in-Chief Steve Burke soundly took to task the following day), so in the spirit of clarity, we took the opportunity to ask AMD representatives follow-up questions about our remaining concerns.

We began by asking about driver release cadence. Will all RDNA GPU owners get driver updates at the same time, every time? AMD representatives were clear: "Game optimisations and support for RDNA Series 1-4 will roll out at the same time in both driver packages."

We also asked about whether RDNA 2 owners can expect future support in other aspects. We asked about upscaling technologies like FSR 4, an upscaling system whose early, leaked version already functions on RDNA 2 GPUs. Additionally, and arguably more crucial for the average PC gamer, is the question of whether this RDNA 2 driver branch will support DirectX shader model updates, which developers rely on to implement new coding functions or translate emerging lower-level functionality that has fueled console versions of their games.

AMD reps did not answer these questions. And AMD's lack of commitment to both issues is worrying, if not telling. Having tested FSR 4 on RDNA 2 GPUs, we can confirm it may be a matter of taste in both fidelity and performance on older GPUs, but it works, so lack of official support for it would be disappointing. The lack of a commitment to FSR Redstone support for RDNA 2 is also testing.

While we concede that deprecation of RDNA 1 support may make sense in terms of the line's hardware features (along with their age and lower sales numbers), the same cannot be said for RDNA 2 GPUs, which feature discrete support for ray tracing and DirectX 12 Ultimate compatibility.

We're additionally hopeful AMD can clean up whatever process led to last week's driver note confusion. Those notes included an apparently hallucinated talking point of USB-C power-draw support being removed from the RX 7900 family of GPUs, which AMD walked back so completely that we're unclear how it appeared in the first place.