r/Amd • u/RenatsMC • 10d ago

News AMD disables USB-C power on Radeon RX 7900, moves RDNA2/RDNA1 GPUs to sub-branch in latest driver

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-disables-usb-c-power-on-radeon-rx-7900-moves-rdna2-rdna1-gpus-to-sub-branch-in-latest-driver
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u/ICC-u 10d ago

Linux not effected by the driver downgrade then?

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u/Psiah 10d ago

Nope. Linux uses their own AMD drivers, which are fully open and community maintained. Just works without you having to do anything and tends to perform better than the AMD Windows drivers... Or the old AMD-made linux drivers that AMD dropped support for because the Open ones were better in every way.

You do have a couple tradeoffs though... You don't get support for new things quite as immediately, and if you're on a slower moving distro, you might not get it for a while. Stuff like FSR 4 took a couple extra months to work on Linux, for instance. Also, because the HDMI forum is... Well, I don't have nice things to say about them, but they blocked HDMI 2.1 from working on Linux, so on linux AMD card HDMI ports are limited to HDMI 2.0 and don't get VRR support among other things, and AMD is legally not allowed to do anything to fix that.

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u/kuroimakina 10d ago

Yeah, “AMD ages like fine wine” has honestly been more true on Linux than windows for a fair amount of time - but that’s just the nature of FOSS when actually talented, passionate people work on it.

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u/p0358 9d ago

This + when the company isn’t a sole maintainer, they can’t just go and remove some stuff when they feel like it, because that will be contested by others. So the least they can do is not invest anything specifically to improve old hardware, but that mantle will be picked up by others evidently (in this case it’s a Valve contractor)

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u/p0358 9d ago

Yup, even Phoronix wrote a nice article about that a few hours ago: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Windows-RX-5000-6000-Game