AMD kills off support for some older GPUs – and Windows 7

Graphics cards getting the driver chop include R9 Fury, R9 300 and 200 series

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AMD’s latest graphics driver brought in some cool stuff – including sending FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) support live,initially with seven games including Godfall– but it also removed support for some older graphics cards, and Windows 7 as well.

Version 21.6.1 of the Radeon Software Adrenalin driver ditches support for AMD’s R9 Fury models, and R9 300 series plus R9 200 series GPUs, plus a bunch of other cards including the Radeon HD 8500 to HD 8900 series, and HD 7700 to HD 7900 series.

This also includes corresponding mobile variants of these GPUs, and some APUs with integrated Radeon graphics, namely those which came before the Ryzen 2200G and 2400G chips.

Head here to peruse the full listof now unsupported graphics cards.

Redirecting resources

As mentioned at the outset, with version 21.6.1 support forWindows 7has also been dropped, withNvidia announcing the same recently, although Team Green’s support will continue for a bit longer yet, through to October 2021.

Just as withNvidia, AMD notes that getting rid of support for the now seriously out of date version of Windows will allow it to redirect the resources that have been maintaining Windows 7, and apply them toWindows 10instead.

Of course, at least when it comes to gamers, there are precious few left on Windows 7, as you would hope given thatMicrosoft dropped official support for the OS in January 2020. Going by the latestSteamhardware survey, only around 2% of gamers are still languishing on Windows 7, which is even less than the number of Mac gamers (3%).

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ViaTom’s Hardware

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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