Enlarge / AMD's RX 480, which got good reviews back in 2016 for its performance and budget-friendly $200 starting price. (credit: Mark Walton)

After a couple of years of cryptocurrency- and pandemic-fueled shortages, 2023 has been a surprisingly sensible time to buy a new graphics card. New midrange GPUs like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD's Radeon RX 7600 haven't been huge upgrades over their predecessors, but they're at least reliable performers that you can consistently buy at or under their launch prices.

If you've been hanging on to an old AMD Radeon GPU, though, there's some bad news: According to AnandTech, AMD is beginning to pull back on driver support for some of its late-2010s-era GPUs, most notably its Polaris and Vega GPU architectures. Support for these GPUs has already been removed from the company's Linux drivers , and Windows drivers for the GPUs will be limited mostly to "critical updates."

"The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning," reads AMD's official statement. "Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available. The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products."

Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn, from left: Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon, pose in front of SpaceX's Super Heavy rocket in South Texas. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit.

The federal agency has signed a "Space Act Agreement" with SpaceX to conduct a six-month study to determine the practicability of Dragon docking with the 32-year-old telescope and boosting it into a higher orbit. The study is not exclusive, meaning that other companies can propose similar concepts with alternative rockets and spacecraft.

The agreement comes after SpaceX and the Polaris Program—a series of private missions self-funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman—approached NASA about potential servicing missions including the Hubble Space Telescope. Isaacman is the first private citizen to command an orbital spaceflight, when he led a crew of four aboard SpaceX's Dragon in 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission . With Polaris he is seeking to push the boundaries of private space exploration outward. The first Polaris mission is scheduled for March 2022 on Dragon, and will fly to an altitude of 750 km while also conducting the first private spacewalks.