It’s been a rocky week for some owners of older AMD Radeon GPUs following driver updates and confusing information regarding them. Earlier this week, AMD rolled out driver 25.10.2, which was delivered via two sub-branches, one for RX 7000/9000 and another for RX5000/6000 series GPUs. The CPU and GPU manufacturer, which is generally known for its positive customer support in the PC enthusiast sector, caught more than a folks by surprise when the driver notes stated that USB-C power charging would be disabled on RX 7900 series graphics cards, but this was only the beginning of a long and twisted road involving different statements to various media outlets.
VideoCardz has provided a clear timeline of events for the tangled web involving this driver, along with the various statements given to the media.
- October 29 – Driver 25.10.2 is released. Notes indicate that users who wish to retain the USB Type-C Charging feature should avoid this driver.
- October 30 – AMD issues the following statement to PC Games Hardware (machine translated): “RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes. To focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 is placing Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) into maintenance mode. Future driver updates with targeted game optimizations will focus on RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs.”, meanwhile notes for the driver indicate day 1 game and expanded Vulkan support are now limited to Radeon RX 7000/9000 series GPUs.
- October 31 – AMD contacts TechPowerUp to say that “We’d like to inform you that the release notes for AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10 2 posted today included misinformation that has since been corrected. There is no change to USB-C functionality on the RX 7900 series GPUs in the 25.10.2 driver. There was an incorrect line in the originally posted release notes that has been removed, and the release notes have been updated. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
- October 31 – AMD tells Tom’s Hardware regarding RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 support that “New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch,” which essentially means that, for now, owners of these older GPUs needn’t worry about continued support.
TechPowerUp did its own testing to confirm that USB Type-C functionality on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX has not changed. Clearly, some folks at Team Red could’ve done better this week in communicating, but stories like this are somewhat rare for them, so here’s hoping this week is a one-off and not a sign of storms on the horizon.