AMD has announced that it will be ending driver support for its GCN GPU architecture-based graphics cards. It includes the Radeon 7000, 200, 300, and Fury series graphics cards. The graphics card based on the GCN architecture has now been given the legacy status and no additional driver releases are planned for them.
In its official announcement, AMD confirmed that not only the driver support for the GCN graphics cards is ending, but support for Radeon Software for Windows 7 64-bit based operating systems is also ending and moving to legacy.
AMD has decided to allocate its engineering resources to developing new and enhanced features for graphics products based on their latest architectures such as Polaris, Vega, RDNA 1, and RDNA 2. The very first graphic card series based on the GCN GPU architecture was the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series, which was first released in 2011.
The AMD Radeon HD 7000 series competed against NVIDIA’s Kepler GPU architecture. The Radeon Fury lineup was the last family to utilize the GCN architecture and was launched back in 2015 and it competed with the NVIDIA Maxwell architecture. NVIDIA also recently retired their Kepler GPU architecture (2011-2013) but they still support Maxwell given the large userbase that still runs those GPUs.
Below is the list of all the AMD GCN desktop and mobile graphics cards whose support has been ended by AMD.
AMD Radeon GCN Architecture Desktop graphics cards
- A-Series APUs with Radeon R4, R5, R6, or R7 Graphics
- Pro A-Series APUs with Radeon R5 or R7 Graphics
- Athlon Series APUs with Radeon R3 Graphics
- Sempron Series APUs with R3 Graphics
- AMD Radeon R9 Fury Series,
- R9 Nano Series Graphics
- R9 300 Series Graphics
- R9 200 Series Graphics
- R7 300 Series Graphics
- R7 200 Series Graphics
- R5 300 Series Graphics
- R5 200 Series Graphics
- HD 8500 – HD 8900 Series Graphics
- HD 7700 – HD 7900 Series Graphics
AMD Radeon GCN Architecture Mobile graphics cards
- A-Series PRO processors with Radeon Graphics
- FX-Series APUs with Radeon R7 Graphics
- E-Series APUs with Radeon R2 Graphics
- R7 M400 Series Graphics
- R9 M300 Series Graphics
- R7 M300 Series Graphics
- R5 M300 Series Graphics
- R9 M200 Series Graphics
- R7 M200 Series Graphics
- R5 M200 Series Graphics
- HD 8500M – HD 8900M Series Graphics
- HD 7700M – HD 7900M Series Graphics
