The last several days has been quite the chaos over at AMD’s GPU department, as two separate announcements relating to its RX 7900 GPU and RDNA / RDNA2 architecture have caused a great deal of confusion. The company has now came out and clarified some things, mostly backtracking what has been announced, mistakenly or otherwise.
RX 7900 Series USB-C Functionality: “Misinformation”, Corrected
The first part of this relates to AMD Radeon RX 7900 GPU, where the original changelog wrote: “USB-C power charging has been disabled for Radeon™ RX 7900 series graphics products. Users requiring this feature are recommended to use AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition version 25.3.1.” Quite baffling a whole line of text managed to slip all the way to public announcements, but the company has clarified that this isn’t the case, and the USB-C port found on these cards will function as usual.
In a statement to TechPowerUP, AMD said:
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.
RDNA1/2 “Maintenance Mode” Status: Game Optimizations Available Based On “Market Needs”
Another one is perhaps more concerning, since it involves all GPUs featuring RDNA and RDNA2 architecture, including Radeon RX 5000 series, RX 6000 series, and a good number of onboard graphics (Radeon 600M series) found on Ryzen processors, including Ryzen Z2 A, Ryzen Z2 Go, and “Van Gogh” APU for gaming handhelds – the Ryzen Z2 A in particular is also powering the just-announced ROG Xbox Ally (while the Ally X gets the more powerful Z2 Extreme with RDNA3.5-based graphics).
In the same announcement alongside the erroneous RX 7900 series USB-C functionality changelog, AMD also noted that RX 5000/6000 (RDNA1/2) enters maintenance mode, which means future game optimizations will no longer focus on these cards. The statement (to PCGamesHardware) was as follows (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.
Chaos naturally ensued, and in the latest announcement to Tom’s Hardware, AMD said:
New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch.
This is where things get rather muddy – AMD didn’t clarify what exactly “market needs” constitutes, so it’s hard to say at what level, past the basic security and bugfixes, is AMD committing to supporting these older GPUs. Considering that brand-new devices like the ROG Xbox Ally still depends on it to get proper optimization, AMD dropping active game support for RDNA2 would effectively render this handheld “dead-on-arrival”.
Pokdepinion: Dropping RDNA2 game optimization support in particular might be an unpopular decision given that these cards are still quite recent and very widespread by AMD’s standards.
