AMD Raven Ridge Ryzen APU Driver Updates Limited To Quarterly Releases

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this policy will get much better, as it has been confirmed that AMD APUs (a la Raven Ridge) will only be updated every three months (quarterly). A forum member over at Overclockers UK wondered aloud, "How come there is no raven ridge support with the last two drivers? I thought they were now unified release?" AMD representative AMDMatt responded, stating, “APU drivers are updated every 3 months as WHQL releases only”.

Waiting three months between releases is a somewhat odd strategy to take, especially considering that AMD talks up the gaming capabilities of its APUs. However, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. AMD has also been on a slow pace with regards to releasing drivers for Intel Kaby Lake-G processors, which have on-package Radeon Vega graphics. Kaby Lake-G was announced in November and launched in January. The drivers that shipped with Kaby Lake-G processor dated back to November. It was only this past week that a new driver package based on Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.6.1 was released.

The downside to these quarterly updates is that gamers will miss out on bug fixes and performance updates for newly released games. If there's one thing that we love about NVIDIA and AMD driver updates, it's that they typically have launch day updates ready for newly released games (or at least shortly after launch).