There’s no guarantee that AMD will be bringing its Radeon Image Sharpening technology to the Vega generation of graphics cards having skipped over the architecture to ensure the popular Polaris GPUs receive support in the latest Radeon driver package. We had thought that maybe Vega was just a later priority than Polaris, but AMD is going to take a wait and see approach to furthering support for the image sharpening feature across more of the Radeon ecosystem.

“AMD will gauge end user reception and demand for Radeon Image Sharpening,” says AMD in response to our questions about future Vega support, “and will consider adding support for additional Radeon RX graphics cards in the future.”

That doesn’t mean never, but will be scant comfort for any Radeon gamer sitting there with either an RX Vega 64, RX Vega 56, or Radeon VII graphics card humming away inside their gaming rig of choice. Until the Navi-powered RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 GPUs were released this summer those were the most powerful Radeon graphics cards available and it’s a bit of a shame if they’re not going to get the same level of support as the ageing Polaris GPUs.

That said, AMD is leaving it up to the customers. If the introduction of the Radeon Image Sharpening feature to the Polaris range is well-received, and Vega users clamour for the tech to be enabled on their GPUs too, then it surely shouldn’t take too much extra dev work for AMD to enable it on Vega’s version of the GCN architecture as well.

But RIS is a checkbox feature in the Radeon Settings driver package, and the percentage of folk who actually dig into their software to enable all the funky features that AMD’s software team spend their lives creating just for gamers is always painfully low. People hate having things enabled by default, which means excellent gamer-benefiting features like Radeon Chill, Radeon Image Sharpening, and Radeon Anti-Lag are likely only ever used by a small proportion of those with the capabilities to switch them on.

If you’re a Vega GPU owner, first, life’s not been kind to you, has it? And second, it’s time to start a petition on r/AMD to get the red team to get its impressive image enhancing feature onto your cards.

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