New AMD driver snubs Radeon RX 5000, 6000 GPUs with latest updates — also disables USB-C functionality on RX 7900 series

Are you still stuck deep in Battlefield 6 and dearly desiring a driver update to improve performance on your Radeon RX 6000 series GPU? Well, we have good and bad news for you: the latest Adrenalin update adds game-specific support for Battlefield 6 as well as Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines 2, but that doesn't include your GPU. Indeed, with AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2, AMD has added support for those two games and a number of new Vulkan extensions, yet those updates are only available to gamers with Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series graphics cards.

It's not even all good news for Radeon RX 7000 series owners. Folks who have a Radeon RX 7900 series card—that's the XT or XTX—that includes a USB Type-C port on the back may be dismayed to know that the new driver disables that port's ability to power external devices. It also disables the port's ability to act as a USB port at all. Instead, it is simply an oddly-shaped DisplayPort connection now.

Why is AMD making these changes? We don't know, and the company wasn't immediately available for comment. 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.

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.

AMD did not explain whether its choice to deploy New Game Support and Expanded Vulkan Support to just its two newest generations of GPUs is indicative of the RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs being moved to legacy support like the Vega architecture, or if it's simply a one-off for this driver release. 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. We've sent in a request for comment to AMD and will update this post if we hear back.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.