3 tricks to extend the lifespan of your old AMD graphics card (Forcing FSR, Installing Community Drivers, Switching to SteamOS)
Trick 1 – force FSR
Rendering games in higher resolutions gets exponentially more demanding. 4K (3840x2160) has over 8.3 million pixels, compared to Full HD (1920x1080) which has just over 2 million pixels.
And while rendering a game in 4 times higher resolution, is not exactly 4 times more taxing on the graphics card (as some elements need to be calculated anyway, regardless of the resolution) – lowering resolution is by far the easiest way to increase performance.
FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is used to upscale games from lower resolutions to higher resolutions, without the performance cost, and with as little impact to visual fidelity as possible.
While FSR is often associated with modern games, played on modern graphics cards on modern 4K displays, the principles remain the same on older hardware and lower resolutions.
1920x1080 Full HD resolution with its 2 million pixels may be too challenging for your aging graphics card. But 1280x720 HD resolution with only 0.9 million pixels will be much easier to handle.
And with the help of FSR – it looks almost as good.
In many modern games, it can be turned on using in-game settings
While over 500 supported titles sound like an impressive number, there are over 73,000 games on Steam alone. So there is a good chance that your game may not be supported.
In that case, there is an option to force FSR into any game, when using any AMD graphics card (okay, any AMD graphics card on architecture released after 2007, so realistically any AMD graphics card)
by using Magpie FSR in Universal x86 Tuning Utility.
A great guide on how to do that can be found here:
Trick 2 – install Community Drivers
On one hand, AMD doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to driver support. For example, Radeon Vega VII was released in 2019 and then was officially abandoned in 2023, just over 3 years after its debut.
On the other hand, AMD drivers are open-source. So there is nothing preventing the open-source community from getting the latest features and performance optimizations to older graphics cards for an insanely long time.
Radeon HD 2000 series cards (based on the same architecture as Xbox 360 GPU, released in 2005), had been supported unofficially until late 2022.
So if any game is giving you warnings that your drivers are up to date, or if the performance doesn’t seem right (compared to other graphics cards in a similar performance segment) – try installing unofficial drivers.
A great guide on how to do that can be found here:
Trick 3 – Switch to SteamOS (or any other Linux Distro)
Yes, I know you’ve heard that one before. Your computer is getting slow, but once you switch to Linux, it will work just fine*
*except all these things that won’t work at all - such as games.
Before Steam Deck was released back in 2022, gaming on Linux was not for the faint-hearted.
Figuring out which Linux distribution is the most suitable for gaming was challenging, installing Steam was challenging, installing drivers was challenging, and figuring out which game has any chance of running was challenging.
And then Steam Deck came, and it turned out you don’t need a PhD in applied computer science to enjoy gaming on Linux.
Just install SteamOS following one of the many (easy) guides and you’re good to go.
https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown
There is also an easy way to check if a particular game is playable – by accessing the ProtonDB website (over 20 thousand games are supported, but it doesn’t mean that every single game ever released is supported – you still need to check).
https://www.protondb.com/
And if you ever face any problems – the guides and tutorials for Steam Deck are significantly easier than those for “standard” Linux. More akin to Windows guides asking you to ‘click here and drag the icon there’ instead of Linux guides asking you to ‘decompile this tar and move up in the terminal’.
But being lighter on resources and achieving better performance in many games is not the only reason why SteamOS can be the saving grace for older graphics cards.
SteamOS with its Proton compatibility layer uses open-source Vulkan (instead of Microsoft DirectX) to render games. Thanks to that, DirectX Feature Level requirements no longer apply.
For example, Forspoken requires DirectX Feature Level 12_1 and is completely unplayable on Windows on slightly older graphics cards such as the Radeon RX 580 from 2016 (that can only be updated up to DirectX Feature Level 12_0).
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/forspoken-first-game-that-renders-the-radeon-rx-580-590-obsolete.2610222/
But once you move to SteamOS (or any other Linux) – it just works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/radeon/comments/10s4dlo/forspoken_on_linux_vkd3d_rx_580_and_6700_xt/