Can Custom Drivers Save Your Old Graphics Card? 

Just watched a ltt video on this and it's great that the community gets together and provides this for people to enjoy there cards for a bit longer.

Tonga and Fiji are 2 of AMDs Best Architectures (Tonga being exceptionally scalable) yet they both got dropped by AMD for little to no reason. Glad to see Modded Drivers working well on Tonga.

These are def interesting - what a dedicated community to make their own driver updates!

The great thing about the 200 and 300 series AMD gpus is that they overclock like a mfer. With the modded drivers and a strong OC the 380/380x still holds its own today.

This totally reminds me of the AMAZING ATI Omega Drivers from back in the day. Wherever Omega is, I salute him and hope his family is doing well!

I used those new drivers on my sons R9 Fury-X. His FPS in halo infinite went from 24 FPS all the way up to above 60 FPS on high settings, except textures, they had to be set to low. Now I no longer feel I have to replace a card that I originally purchased in 2015. This community is truly making hardware last longer. Thanks for a great video!

Literally released just an hour after LTT made a video about custom drivers on an old video card, amazing timing.

Discontinuing this generation seemed too early to me. Nvidia still keeps Maxwell alive, why couldn't AMD do the same with its cards? If they did so this year, might've felt a little different

The R9 290/380/390/Fury series of GPUs are still very capable and they do fully support DX12. I still find it sad that AMD turned their back on those GPUs, but at least custom drivers like these exist.

Great effort you put in those video. I like your video style and voice over so much!

Obligatory: beside custom Windows 10/11 drivers, driver support and performance for AMD GPUs under Linux is also amazing, so that's also an option.

A few months back I bought my brother a used R9 Fury for his birthday - and was surprised to see AMD dropped support for a major flagship card that still outperforms entry level cards today. Thankfully, I saw this video, and custom drivers came to the rescue, and I couldn’t thank you enough for bringing this to my attention. I’ve been watching pretty much all your videos since and honestly didn’t even realize I wasn’t subscribed until now. Good show, my man

OMG i have been looking for this for the past 5 months. Man did you ever save me, i have an r9 290x and i had problems with some games. Ty for making this one!

In my country, most of the sellers of these 8+ years old GPUs already do their research, so this custom driver become their reason to mark up the price.😑

Your content is always so full of information. Thank you. 👍

My R9 390 8GB is still a great card, I was a little bitter about it becoming Legacy so soon.

Its interesting to see. If in terms of hardware these gpus are still capable and all they need is updated drivers its unfortunate to see them lose support.

Its very Interesting, both you and Linus releasing similar content at the same time !!

The GCN based Radeon cards still offer some good gaming in many newer titles that normally wouldn’t be support by AMD software. It’s great to see the tech community stepping up to give these GPUs some much needed and deserved support! AMD imo, should have kept support till at least the end of this year considering the GPU issue that’s still occurring (although much improved) allowing budget gamers to get into the gaming arena. Awesome video once again RGinHD 🥰🥰👍🎉

A thumbs up from me for the Nimez drivers too. I put together a kind of poor man's gaming PC for a friend of mine with an i7-3770, 16gb RAM and an R9 290 and it runs stuff for him astonishingly well for his basic 1080p screen :) Looks like the GPU prices are finally creeping down a bit so maybe he can eventually upgrade for something more recent but its really amazing how such old parts can still run most stuff somewhat well.

i love this thanks for the video , the community is always amazing!!

I litterally just watch a LTT video about old GPU and modded driver a second ago

Thx for this Test. Nice to know there is a chance to get newer games playable.

That GPU on the thumbnail sure would look good in those colors if it was real

I have an MSI R9 280x 3gb model in my daily driver system, and it's a very capable little card even without modded drivers, so I daresay I'll be giving them a try soon! I have an R9 270x 2gb model that is a champion overclocker (it's a Toxic branded card) so trying out these drivers could bring it back into relevancy despite only having 2gb of vram. I'll have to have a look into it!

Funny timing LTT just did a video on this, but knowing your videos yours will be more relevant to us

Good timing with the Linus video coming out just a few hours earlier. Hopefully people watch both!

I love you, man. This channel rocks.

i love your outdoors shots

Love the recent stream of content :)

For any who may come along after this video was made, AMD improved drivers in general so there is more performance using different game API now, so for low end 1080p gaming the RX 580 is a capable GPU. Pricing is everything. I wouldn't pay over $150 for it and I wouldn't pay over $120 for the Chinese variant "Radeon RX 580 Graphic Cards, 2048SP" AMD still can update 500 series GPUs but GPUs older than that are done I believe.

Just downloaded NimeZ drivers for my 280x. Helped me out a lot with Elden Ring.

They’re currently saving my r9 fury lol. Have to reinstall drivers every time I play a game with easy anti cheat though

ITT: Omg two content creators made the same style of video!!! SHOCKING

wow you are so fast to look into it in minutes after LTT posted a video related to this

I still remember the golden days of the Omega driver for ATi GPUs in the early to mid 2000s. You often could get some drastic performance boosts, compared to the official drivers.

Swear u have a ltt spy watching what productions you are making . Love the videos

these drivers are really useful, i have an s9170 with the w9100 bios (to get it displaying on windows), and the nimez drivers basically make this card run like an r9 390x with 32gb of vram.

Lol you and ltt coming out with bangers on the same topic :D.

IDK about old drivers (have a 380x I'll have to try them on when I install it on the grandkid's PC) but I can tell ya they work a LOT better than the latest drivers for the RX 580 8GB! With the latest AMD driver my FPS jumped all over the place and if I tried to use Relive? I would get a stuttering slideshow, it was so bad I was constantly having to roll back the drivers when WU would force an update. But now? Solid as a rock on the modded drivers and Relive has frankly never worked better, a smooth as butter 60FPS with zero dips. Thanks modders keep up the great work!

Those modded drivers save my r9 390 I bought 2 months ago for 120 dollars

you and ltt made a video on the same subject at the same time, great minds think alike.

i have seen a few videos on this now. the best benifits from these drivers that i can see is better support for older api's like direct x 9 and so on. also it alows you to enable SAM which is typically only a 5000-6000-7000 series feature and this does have an impact in cirtain games. i think if you do a follow up video testing older games which run on older api's then you will see better improvements.

I haven't done much gaming in ages. On a whim, I just bought parts and built a computer. For the first time. I've upgraded parts before, but I've never bought every component and built a new PC. So, I have a Ryzen 5 5600x processor. New mother board, new ram, M.2 storage and an SSD (and an HDD). The one new component it didn't buy was a GPU. Obvious reasons, crazy prices. So, I have a Radeon r9 200 series card (unsure of anything more specific than that), with 4gb ddr5. Unsure speed, think 1400 mhz. What I do know is that AMD dropped driver support. I'm not a tech savvy person, but I'm not tech incapable, either. I mean, I manage enough that I bought parts that all work together and put it together myself, and it works, so I consider myself minimally competent, but there is a LOT of this stuff that flies over my head. What I do know, however, is that my card is 8-9 years old, and I'm not sure if the system is even better off with it at all or if I should be doing onboard graphics at this point. So, appealing to other people here who know better than I do... is there a chance that these drivers will breathe more life into my old card? Or would slowly and ponderously working my way through installing the drivers and getting them working, be a waste of my time with negligible improvement?

I wanted to ask if you would try a custom program in your benchmarks to gain a few extra frames: nvslimmer. Love the videos.

I can't find anything for the GTX 780 Ti. Do you know what modded drivers might work? Older 3xx drivers by NVidia had DSR support, which was dropped for this GPU in the 4xx series. Now drivers no longer support this GPU. What about the nouveau driver under Linux, is that a viable alternative for this GPU?

Linus timing?

your videos are all simply splendid

My HD 7870 also does pretty well with the nimez drivers. I can play Forza horizon 5 at about 40-60fps :D

couple weeks ago I also try the NimeZ Adrenalin 22.2.1 on my R9 290 Vapor-X (recognized as R9 290X) but had issue with the idle GPU usage being quite high (around 50%) so I decided to rollback into Adrenalin 21.5.2 WHQL for the sake of the temperature & power consumption

Yes they can! I'm using some sort of custom driver utilites to make my RX 5500 XT working faster. And I'm fascinated about this!

i love this channel so much :D

love that shout out to tech yes city, he's the man when it comes to turning potatoes into french fries

Name dropped in a Linus video...You've got it made :D

respect to those developers for keeping old gpus alive

Nvidia needs to have its own NimeZ drivers. Kepler and Fermi cards can still handle modern games with newer API drivers.

A big feature of the Nimezone drivers is SAM support for unsupported cards, such as GCN. Of course, you need a (preferrably) Zen 3 CPU, but it also works with Zen 2. Some say there are great performance uplifts, but I never found a trustworthy source. Would you be willing to test it for us? Thanks for the video!

I still have a pair (not in use) of Radeon 7870s I believe they are basically the R9 270 and was interested in these drivers and bringing them back to life. I used to crossfire them ages ago and in firestrike back then when they worked in CF they got the performance of a GTX 970. Overclocked they even passed my stock 970 in FS.

This exact model was the first ever gpu I owned personally. It sadly failed on me while running Fallout 4 on a hot summer day. I was really bummed out since it was barely 2 years old. I didn't have the money to buy a replacement at the time, so I had to use the integrated graphics of my i5-4460 for over a year. Great memories lmao.

It's amazing that you just came across the topic Linus Tech Tips is working on today.

nicely made video, indeed halo receives a huge boost in fps judging from all the comments which i have received over a few months, as for the rest of games it's about 1% improvement overall, nothing crazy :)

G'day Random, While not making a huge difference in some 2021 games that was a HUGE uplift in Halo😲, While it is sad that AMD dropped Continued Support for HD & R7/9 Series it is understandable that with a team so much smaller than nVIDIA that they need to focus more on Current 6000 & Next Gen 7000 Drivers to keep Competitive or strive to perform better than nVIDIA & Intel when they land. The biggest worry I have for Non-Manufacturer Drivers is "Can they be Trusted & Can I trust the Download Site not to Infect me?" so it is great to see Guru3D hosting these & with a detailed page for those interested, at a time when people are hanging on to older GPUs having help from those who Love Sharing their Knowledge for Good by continuing to create updated Drivers compatible with new Games released is Awesome🥰

I really like the black and grey shroud in the thumbnail, wish they actually made that!

My old R7 360 has been revived thanks to NimeZ! Been enjoying forza horizon 5 for a over a week now. With the old 21.5.1 driver it was unplayable, and I had to deal with a lot of stutters and crashes in quite a few other games as well. Now pretty much everything runs with better performance than the og xbox one im able to get locked 30/60 fps without stutters.

Nice review @RandomGamingHD, on Polaris/Vega there is a beta to use the DXNavi kernal over Polaris. It gives back some of the DirectX9 Unreal Engine 3 optimizations which AMD deleted for Polaris & Vega in 17.7.2 which to this day they only reintroduced for Navi after we have been reporting its' loss on Polaris since 2017. Pretty bad business from AMD in my opinion. It boosted the FPS by 30-40FPS extra in minimum FPS scenarios.

Do you know if these would work with a 295x2? I cannot get it to actually take a modern AMD driver update without BSODing windows.

I just got done watching today's LTT video where he discussed community driver and RU-vid recommends me this too

I just came from a Linus Tech Tips Video about old Gpu´s and modded Drivers and now this got recommended. :D

You and Linus released the same video on the same day :D

i just started using modded drivers for my r9 390 lol. its less of a headache if nothing else

Never even heard of custom GPU drivers, weird. Anything for the GTX 1070?

Pre-liked the video cause it's always gonna be a banger

I had r9 380 just like you have .But I did sell it to get rx 570 :) R9 380 was good card for me and my gameing .

With the custom drivers, can fsr be enabled on a r9 380x for example?

would love an R9 Fury with Nimez drivers video!

I wonder if this custom driver can help mitigate my issue with GOW. My 5500 XT is not being utilized to its fullest even with ultra graphics and higher resolution :( the highest it gets is 70-80 % utilization. I have an i7 6700 CPU so the bottlenecking is improbable. I don't have a problem with different games. Turning the setting from high to ultra won't even change the utilization and fps.

I had to use 3rd party drivers back in the mid 2000's (when they were still ATI). They (ATI/AMD) always were bad at giving you gimped final drivers to try to force you to upgrade. I had to install one when my ATI Radeon All in Wonder Card became defunct due to them no longer supporting a older OS., and the last official driver was dog "crud" to say the least..... In fact recently there was talk on the Dying light 2 forum about not being able to play it on a similar GPU (forgot if it was a 280 or 380) due to upgrades in the game not working well with the final drivers so I pointed the OP about 3rd Party drivers. In most cases this is the only way to keep your older GPUs running past their EOL.

Are the 3rd party drivers stable? Im having trouble with an r9 380 4gb crashing randomly while browsing and playing videos online. I went to an older driver and it seemed to help but still happens from time to time. I wonder if those custom drivers would fix this issue.

Ive used one of those drivers on guru3d for the radeon 6850 after they discontinued support and it ran so much better with higher fps than the latest driver amd had. Thankfully, I dont need to be running a 6850 anymore...

Im having crashes during the games, because of the outdated drivers on my R9 Fury x... Valorant, Cs Go it sends me the game to my windows screen, and gives a message that my drivers are outdated, to install new drivers...wilo theae drivers work on this?

I have a XPS 9575 (a laptop with the oddball Intel/AMD duo chip with the Vega M) and these drivers are also needed as both Intel and AMD stopped driver support for this gpu

This is only like $50 on ebay rn in nice shape. this is like, the perfect card for a mid tier budget build rn

so this one's strange, Linus Tech Tips and RGinHD released a video about custom drivers for 380 on the same day

Maybe more noticeable in low end graphics or APU. I noticed these drivers sacrificed OpenGL in favor of DX11 or Vulkan support, just in tone with DXVK optimizations for Linux (gained like 5fps in GTA V when i upgraded to WineGE 7.5, AMD A8-7650K user). And since Trinity those APU has DX11, if they have drivers for that series i can confirm the trend.

Hello i hope you reply (or any tech guru here): I have an old budget setup and i want to upgrade but with very limited budget; I have i5 6400 with h110 MB, 2x 8gb 2133mhz ddr4, sata SSD, RX 470 4gb, evga 700W psu; For around 300$ I plan to either go for a ryzen 5 3600 (or 2600) with faster ram (and maybe Nvme SSD later) or change the gpu (max is a RX6500 or RTX3500 but if they get a bit close to MSRP). What do you guys think? Change CPU or GPU?

Funny that Linus also releases a video on custom drivers for old graphics card on the same day similar timings too...

I remember that msi heatsink being so common on older MSI GPUs

you should try to download one of those applications that injects FSR support into games such as magpie, and see if that could pump a little more performance into this old r9 380. I know I heard it is possible to force FSR support on older GCN Cards. This could be a real game changer.

Any AMD card of the GCN family or later is supported on Linux using the open source RADV driver.

I wonder if these drivers work for laptop graphic cards as well, I got an HD8690M in mine and the driver support for it is long gone now, so if there are drivers for my card, it would probably help me out a bit more

@RandomGaminginHD can you revisit versus the new 22.6.1 drivers ... have AMD brought the performance and compatibility, or just a new version number and maybe some bugfixes

Not only that can save the old GPUs but those modded drivers from Mimez are super 👌 i used it for my rx570x and its very stable and works flawlessly

I wonder if there's some custom drivers for older NVIDIA cards like my GTX 660, any extra performance would be welcome.

Amazing that people do this, it gives some more life to the old beasts yet! I wonder if you could get similar with some now defunct Nvidia drivers, such as ones for the GTX 770?

I had this exact graphics card and it was good for something so cheap and old. It is fried now...

Hi, i have same radeon but from gigabyte since 2017, what is your temperatures while playing games?

Ltt did a similar video... And i asked this question are there any custom better drivers for my AMD rx 460 gpu

seems my favorite channels on youtube watch a lot of each others stuff too lol

Did you intentionally time your video with Linus, lmao.

i still use my sapphire nitro r9 380 and after this will be looking into those drivers, last time i used 3rd party onec was mit my voodoo3 oh the times :)