Alongside the launch of AMD's new Radeon Software Crimson driver, the company has retired support for all remaining non-GCN-based graphics cards, which means that cards from AMD's Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 series will no longer receive driver updates.
The HD 5000 and 6000 series aren't the only products affected by making VLIW (AMD's previous graphics architecture) legacy; AMD has also retired the Radeon HD 7000 to 7600 graphics cards, and their corresponding HD 8000 to 8400 parts, as well as all Llano, Trinity and Richland APUs.
For owners of AMD's now-legacy products, there are two final driver updates that users can select to use. The Catalyst 15.7.1 driver, released in July for the launch of Windows 10, is the last WHQL-certified driver to support the HD 5000 and 6000 series. A Crimson 15.11 beta driver is also available for those that want something slightly more up-to-date.
The last major product launch in AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series occurred in early 2011, making the newest legacy cards just under five years old. Considering they don't support up-and-coming features such as DirectX 12 or FreeSync, AMD's choice to retire support for these products is understandable, and those still rocking a five-year-old card should probably consider an upgrade.
In AMD's statement on the retirement of non-GCN-based products, the company says that their older architectures have "reached peak performance optimization." By no longer attempting to improve gaming performance on these cards, AMD can "dedicate valuable engineering resources to developing new features and enhancements for graphics products based on the GCN Architecture."