Tuesday, March 29th 2016
AMD Preparing to Drop 32-bit Support for Radeon Drivers?
Is AMD planning to retire driver support for 32-bit Windows? A bulk of the company's Radeon R9 and Fury series GPUs feature 4 GB or more of video memory, and 64-bit Windows users making up the overwhelming majority, the company has begun steering users away from using 32-bit Windows altogether. We got whiff of this when we visited AMD's Drivers + Download Center on the company website, and tried clicking on the "32-bit" links of some of its Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 drivers, which redirected to an ominously-worded AMD knowledge-base article (Article #GPU-622).
This knowledge-base article, intended for people looking for 32-bit drivers, reads:
This knowledge-base article, intended for people looking for 32-bit drivers, reads:
A system running Microsoft Windows 10 64 Bit can take full advantage of the advanced visual and performance features of these graphics cards. However, AMD also provides 64 Bit drivers for Microsoft Windows 8.1 and Microsoft Windows 7 to accomodate those users who choose to use an older Microsoft Operating System.The knowledge-base article has no links for the drivers users are looking for. A little URL guessing later, we did manage to find 32-bit versions of Radeon Software 16.3.2, but that's something ordinary users will not be able to make. According to the download page, AMD's recently launched Radeon Pro Duo already completely lacks 32-bit Windows support, and the company is only providing 64-bit drivers. This move could prove useful for AMD as it frees up resources inside the driver team.
83 Comments on AMD Preparing to Drop 32-bit Support for Radeon Drivers?
And yeah, when gfx cards are fast approaching norm of 4Gb, why on earth would you stay on a 32bit OS with it's memory limitation.
I'd love to see the absurdity of pairing a PC with 1GB RAM, and an 8GB graphics card running 32-bit XP. :laugh:
We need 128bit.
I also keep a dual-boot of 32-bit Windows just for playing old games that don't run on 64-bit.
Finally, redirecting to a knowledge base article when you click on the 32-bit driver link, with no easy way to find the 32-bit drivers, even the old ones, is 100% stupid. There is no excuse for that other than to screw over your customers. If they are going to stop making new 32-bit drivers, ok fine, but don't make it nearly impossible to find the old ones that already exist.
For AMD/Nvidia sunsetting 32-bit might be a good business move.
So AMD, who needs to sell their new APUs in large quantities, and the APUs make most sense in the business market, just cut out a good portion of their business market for their new products... Not a smart move.
Also Zen in theory will support 32 bit so far this story is about GPU drivers not chipset. AMD the king of the rebrand will probably have no issues running legacy drivers for whatever onboard GPU exists. It's not like AMD will make something new.
Still, I don't see any good reason to run an old XP machine with a recent GPU. Partial 128-bit support has been available since the introduction of SSE, all recent CPUs have partial support for 256-bit, and 512-bit AVX is right around the corner.
Who, except Windows-Users is using such crap?