@daveRedShed9UK, "This should have either been regression tested properly..."
I think industry dynamics prevent even a large application vendor like Adobe from thoroughly testing GPUs and driver versions to an extent necessary to catch problems like this thread that strike a very small number of older GPUs.
Just look at the many dozens of GPUs introduced by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel since 2015. Even the much more constrained Mac ecosystem churned through many GPU models every year (until Apple started migrating to Apple Silicon processors a few years ago). Consider the GPUs included in new Mac models in 2015, 2016, and 2017:
2015: HD Graphics 5300, HD Graphics 6000, Iris Graphics 6100, Iris Pro 5200, Iris Pro 6200, Radeon R9 M290, Radeon R9 M370X, Radeon R9 M380, Radeon R9 M390, Radeon R9 M395
2016: HD Graphics 515, Iris Graphics 540, Iris Graphics 550, Radeon Pro 450, Radeon Pro 455
2017: HD Graphics 6000, HD Graphics 615, HD Graphics 630, Iris Plus Graphics 640, Iris Plus Graphics 650, Radeon Pro 555, Radeon Pro 560, Radeon Pro 570, Radeon Pro 575, Radeon Pro 580, Radeon Pro Vega 56
As for drivers, Nvidia releases a new Studio driver for Windows every month, and AMD is on a similar schedule. Apple releases a new version of Mac OS about every two months, but they provide no transparency on how often they include new GPU drivers from the manufacturers.
Of course, there's a lot of similarity between GPU models in an architectural family, often just differing in the number and type of cores and the amount of memory, and the drivers have a lot of shared code that spans models in a family. But I'm guessing it's likely there are occasional driver and LR bugs triggered by small differences between models (e.g. see the People masking problem below). In general, I think it would be very hard for Adobe QA engineers to figure out which small subset of GPUs and driver versions would give the best testing coverage.
Application developers don't test against the huge variety of storage hardware, but instead trust that the operating system and the hardware manufacturers will thoroughly test against industry standards. Ideally, application developers would take the same approach with GPUs and simply test against the Mac and Windows graphics APIs. But the graphics APIs are much more complicated than disk i/o, and application developers clearly can't rely on the OS vendors and GPU manufacturers to deliver bug-free drivers (yet).
"...or Adobe should be clear about what is not supported by them any more in terms of legacy / deprecated platforms and acted accordingly in terms of customer contact and options"
I agree that Adobe could do a better job at this. They do sometimes publish help articles about emerging issues with compatibility and update minimum system requirements, but as with most things Adobe, it can take many months. For example, when Adobe discovered that People selection was crashing on Macs with Intel Iris Plus Graphics with 1.5 GB graphics memory, they published a help article about 2 months after the first reports came in, and the system requirements for LR were eventually updated to require at least 2 GB of graphics memory.
It wouldn't surprise me if, after completing their investigation of this thread's issue, they eventually publish another help article and/or incorporate the findings in minimum system requirements, providing an update to this thread.
As you pointed out, the Creative Cloud app could proactively deliver compatibility alerts to affected users as issues are discovered, rather than rely on users having to come to adobe.com after tripping over a problem.
In the past year, Adobe did try to have LR alert users about very old Intel graphics drivers, though I think the results of that were mixed, with false positives reported here.
One thing Adobe does better than most other big-corporate vendors is this forum. In comparison to Apple, Microsoft, and Quicken (all of which I use occasionally), Adobe employees engage in their "community" forum much more frequently, with official posts on emerging issues, with helping users, with squelching bogus information and promoting correct information, and providing transparency around problems and bug reports.
Adobe is far from perfect with this, but much better than many bigger companies. I've learned to take with three grains of salt things published in the Apple, Microsoft, and Quicken forums, even posts by officially blessed MVPs. Many other software vendors have dropped their forums entirely.
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