AMD moves Radeon 5000 and 6000 series to legacy status

My several years old 5850HD is still running. Reliable little (well it wasn't really small) thing, it was. I eventually just gave it to a friend and he put it in his system. It's been running fine.

And no, it's not really obsolete. I mean yeah it's not gonna max out AAA titles, but it's still more than capable. I think a lot of people overestimate how much you need in order to get acceptable (note: subjective measurement) performance in most games. I remember when Crysis 1 came out, I played through it on that card without too much issue. Probably wasn't even maxed out back then, but it still looked great. Even today, I think Crysis 1's graphics were far from bad. That alone should imply that it's relevant enough.

These costs are nonlinear. We pay a huge premium for "maxing things out". For "just playing at a decent level", the cost is exponentially lower.
 
then you dont need driver updates if you are happy with the performance.

just use what you have.
 
The Mac said:
then you dont need driver updates if you are happy with the performance.

just use what you have.
Click to expand...

Pretty much nailed it. If you're happy with performance at this point then you don't need to bother updating. As titles become more demanding your performance will drop off to a point where driver optimization isn't going to help any.

The 5 and 6000 series had a great run. The first GPUs I even purchased were a 6870, 6870x2, and reference 5870. All of them died rather quickly so if you're still running one of these devices, you got your moneys worth at this point.
 
What are you guys worried about video drivers for on a server OS? The default MS driver will work fine for that.
 
ecmaster76 said:
What are you guys worried about video drivers for on a server OS? The default MS driver will work fine for that.
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Because a lot of people still use UNIX and GNU/Linux for gaming on primary and secondary systems.
Not everyone uses those OSes as a server OS, just fyi.
 
Don't blame them. Everything goes out of support eventually. Still very happy with my 6950 on a 2K monitor.
 
GotNoRice said:
While it's official now, in many ways it feels like they already dumped the 5000 and 6000 series a while back.
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They very clearly abandoned them after GCN 1.0 and the 7000 series came, those cards never received any optimizations after the fact and were only left with token support because of how bad it would've been for PR to drop support only ~18 months after the cards had been released.
 
Eh, I got more than my money's worth out of my 5870. It's still chugging along fine in my wife's rig at 1680x1050@76hz. It was worth paying msrp at launch for it. It's also my favorite gpu and has my favorite I/O (6 minidp). I feel the 5870 was a better buy than my 7970.

4870 to 5870 = huge jump
5870 to 7970 = not so huge jump

As a person who only really updates drivers when there's an issue or s new feature I want, this is a non - issue.
 
suiken_2mieu said:
Eh, I got more than my money's worth out of my 5870. It's still chugging along fine in my wife's rig at 1680x1050@76hz. It was worth paying msrp at launch for it. It's also my favorite gpu and has my favorite I/O (6 minidp). I feel the 5870 was a better buy than my 7970.

4870 to 5870 = huge jump
5870 to 7970 = not so huge jump

As a person who only really updates drivers when there's an issue or s new feature I want, this is a non - issue.
Click to expand...

lol are you serious?... 100% jump in performance from 5870 to 7970 is not a huge jump?.. :confused:
 
it was bound to happen... so nothing new here. I was able to use my 4870 on most games even after it was retired...
 
Eh, as long as my 6950 holds out until Mass Effect: Andromeda I'll be fine :)
 
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