The guy that writes release notes used the internal language without the filter. Enough to generate drama. Sure, they worded it... poorly. But talking about "backtracking" and "bullshit response" now is actually stupid. This reminds me not to watch tech YouTubers at all because they have no morals. They cannot bestow information without playing with the viewer feelings.
I haven't watched the GN video, but judging by the thumbnail the author was thinking exactly what I was thinking when I read the press release. It *is* utter bullshit and gaslighting behaviour for AMD to talk about "confusion".
The only time a company should be talking about "confusion" is when the company's communications have been ambiguous *and* the company is apologising for not presenting a specific and consistent message. What AMD did here however was to use specific wording in the hope that they could get away with their attempt to lower users' expectations for product support, then when they realised they weren't going to get away with it, they backtracked and claimed that the users were "confused".
Specific wording, such as the word "maintenance": From the word "maintain", it means to keep something in a consistent state, to protect it from failure. Maintenance does not involve upgrading the product in any way, it's a necessary job that is not enjoyed in a capitalistic setting but an unfortunately necessary duty until it is deemed unnecessary, because capitalists want people to buy new products rather than use old ones forever.
In the context of graphics driver design, maintenance *could* be construed to mean that if a new game comes along during the "maintenance" phase of a product and that game won't even run, then that would be considered to be a fault that needs correcting and so qualify as "maintenance", but there are plenty of potential scenarios that result in suboptimal performance and so not qualify as "maintenance" because that would be improving a product rather than just maintaining it. Such decisions could then come down to how much the decision-makers are thinking about "the bottom line" rather than customer service, and the consistency of the decisions could change depending on how the key decision maker is feeling that day.
So while the word "maintenance" has a lot of potential wiggle room, I highly doubt that even the most optimistic and naive AMD fan is going to construe:
"In order to focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 places Radeon RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) in maintenance mode,"
to mean:
"Your Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs will continue to receive:
Game support for new releases
Stability and game optimizations
Security and bug fixes"
Because the difference between those two statements is virtually night and day.
Yeah, the release note writer
If you want to believe that some random person in the driver dev department has sole responsibility to determine the support phases for a billion-dollar company's products, that's entirely on you.
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