Update - 11:45 am ET, October 31: In a statement of clarification to Tom's Hardware, AMD says that "New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch" to its RDNA 1 and 2-based GPUs, following community pushback and some confusion regarding its recent decision to put the cards in 'maintenance mode'. AMD had previously stated cards would "continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes." Full story here. The rest of yesterday's story remains as published.
Update - October 31 6 am ET: AMD has confirmed to Tom's Hardware that references in its latest Adrenalin driver update to USB-C functionality being removed on RX 7900 GPUs was a mistake. ". 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," the company told us in a statement. "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." The rest of the article remains below as published.
Why is AMD making these changes? It could certainly be down to the fact that AMD's graphics driver package is now too large to fit on two CD-ROMs. In the era of ubiquitous broadband internet, a 1.6GB driver package is arguably no big deal, but many people around the world still labor under the limitation of metered internet connections with limited transfer allowances. For reference, NVIDIA's graphics driver package is less than 900 megabytes, although some of that is no doubt because NVIDIA includes neither the Control Panel nor its new NVIDIA App in that download. For AMD's part, the company hints at focusing on its more recent product offerings as the recent for the change, as per the above statement.
Beyond those changes, the 25.10.2 driver release brings support for DirectX 12 Work Graphs to the Radeon RX 9000 series. Work Graphs are a little-used feature that essentially allows the GPU to act fully independently of the CPU by dispatching its own work. It's currently supported by Radeon RX 7000, GeForce RTX 30 series, and newer non-Intel GPUs; it's surprising to learn that Work Graphs were not supported on Radeon RX 9000 series parts until now.
Of course, as with any new driver release, AMD has packed in some bug fixes for the new bundle. Crashes in The Last of Us Part II, Remedy's co-op Control follow-up FBC Firebreak, and NBA 2K25's MyCareer mode should be resolved, while stuttering in Baldur's Gate 3, corruption in Serious Sam 4, and VR issues in VTOL VR should be all sewn up. Also, AMD seems to have resolved a problem where running VR headsets at 80 or 90 Hz could cause stuttering. Finally, no less than ten separate security issues have apparently been resolved in this driver.
Remaining known issues include a long-standing bug where Cyberpunk 2077 crashes when trying to play in RT Overdrive mode, intermittent crashes or driver timeouts in Battlefield 6 on certain integrated graphics, similar behavior in Roblox on RX 7000 GPUs, texture flickering in BF6 when using AMD Record and Stream, and missing Radeon Anti-Lag 2 in Counter-Strike 2 on Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs. AMD says to try switching to Vulkan (by adding -vulkan to your Steam launch options) if you must have Anti-Lag 2 support in CS2.
Now, AMD has confirmed the reason for the change. In AMD's defense, Battlefield 6 already runs pretty well on Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, so there's not exactly a pressing need for that update on those cards. Still, it would be awfully early for AMD to be dropping non-security driver update support for RDNA 2.
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