Saturday, April 21st 2012
AMD to Drop Support for Pre-HD 5000 GPUs with Catalyst 12.7
AMD will conclude driver updates for pre-Evergreen, or pre-Radeon HD 5000 (that's HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000) series GPUs, starting this summer. The change could take effect with Catalyst 12.7 (around July). Users of these older GPUs can use the (then) latest driver (Catalyst 12.6) to run their older DirectX 10/10.1 graphics cards. The elimination of pre-Evergreen GPUs could also slim down the driver package a bit, in terms of file-size.
Source:
Phoronix
130 Comments on AMD to Drop Support for Pre-HD 5000 GPUs with Catalyst 12.7
less support less programers hours more $ per stock.
And this was my old 4850:
Edit:
Getting off topic now anyway. Back to the farewell party!
My old 4870 is in a friends computer now and he is not too computer savvy but for the most part all the difference this will make to him is i have to tell him to go to a different link on the AMD website to get the right driver in the future.
The 4000 series flagship card was the 4870X2 and it was released in June 2008, that is 4 years. So yes you got over 3 years support which is the average warranty period for electronics.
So you accidentally agreed with AMD's practices.I doubt its to do with saving money, they are just being efficient, it isnt wise to have a team of programmers working on drivers for a products which people are moving away from. Why cater for the 10% whom refuse to upgrade, when the 90% need looking after?
i guess it makes sense for amd. not supporting old stuff means there is less personell required to qualify new driver versions, which means they can fire more, or make up for fired people
Why make drivers for cards that don't have the hardware in them to play the games that are being played today?
It makes no sense AMD optimising drivers for video cards which can't cope with today's game anyways. You really want AMD to waste resources trying to get a 6 year old ATI 2600 to run Battlefield 3 above 10FPS on low detail.
But people with ATI 2000, 3000 and 4000 series can still use Catalyst 12.6 and older drivers which are stable. These older drivers will be in AMD's legacy section on their website. So no big deal.
they stop monthly updating the drivers, but updated ones (and CAP) will appear every now and then.
as long as you have a stable driver with updated crossfire profiles, who cares? 4K cards are long past performance improvements, and DX10 gaming is dead. there is no more gains to be had.
lol joking aside i see something like this will come sooner when they started changing architecture once a year. but i think people with GCN architecture should have longer support if the rumor about upcoming series will still based on GCN (GCN+)
But not everyone can follow the GPU trend, like sophisticated women of fashion. This is ridiculous to consider only a small bunch ppl who buy the top cards each year/few month just for sake of buying. Imagine many ppl cannot afford even middle-end cards, even by working 12 hours per day 7 days a week.
Nevertheless, after 4 years, 4xxxx series still got not a single fully sufficient driver. Let just hope, that by abandoning old series, AMD will focus all their "might" on actual GPUs and will make perfect drivers.
Don't get me wrong. I understand and agree that the time for cards that are not in use is gone. But imo, they can do it only after some decent investigation, surveys, and monitoring of users base. And to cut a certain series only if there's NO users at all, or only tiny bit. But this looks more as just a fashion.
:D
Fixed it right
Speaking of Asus, the entire graphics card product section is DOWN for a 2nd day now, so something must be going on pretty big???
At least the US website.
I think cutting support for anything below 4000 is fine. But then again, there is a lot of people out there who will want to upgrade to Windows 8 and I know even the high-end 2000 series are capable of doing so (w/out DX10/11 obviously).
Oh well, kind of an aggressive move but let see what happens.