AMD has confirmed that new drivers for the RX 6000 series and older graphics cards will be available within the next two weeks. This is an odd scenario, and I don't usually report on upcoming sober driver packages, but the recent lack of drivers for AMD's older GPUs makes this surprisingly remarkable.

A tweet from AMD's Frank Azor confirms that new drivers for previous and older generation graphics cards will be available soon. [This is significant because AMD has not released new driver packages for the RX 6000 series and earlier GPUs since December 8, 2022. This is a rather long period of time for a major graphics card company to leave without new drivers for many of its products, but the delay is all the more apparent because new drivers for AMD's RX 7900 series have been released since that time.

AMD has released several driver packages for the RX 7900 series this year, one on January 11, 2023 (opens in new tab) and another on January 25 (opens in new tab). Oddly enough, the latest packages offering improvements to Forspoken and Vulkan come and go from AMD's driver download page. For example, today I cannot see it, but it was released ...

This two-pronged driver approach has been the case ever since the launch of AMD's RX 7900 series. Prior to that, AMD had just one driver package for almost everything, except for the odd APU in the past. However, AMD has sent new driver packages for the RX 7900 XTX (open in new tab) and RX 7900 XT Review (open in new tab) units. These new drivers have different versions of the AMD logo on the package icon and everything.

I thought at the time that this was a pre-release review driver anomaly and would not last forever. Unfortunately, I was mistaken, and to this day I continue to wait for new drivers for AMD's older cards.

"We remain committed to the unified driver strategy and are working to get there again as soon as possible," Azor said.

So in time, we should see regular driver updates that work well with all AMD graphics cards. The question remains, however, why AMD has not been able to continue these releases over the past several months. No doubt the new chiplet RDNA 3 architecture has something to do with it, and it may be that AMD has work to do to bring both non-chiplet and chiplet GPUs up to speed with the same code. Or it may be that they do not need to increase the GPU driver install size to accommodate both cards.