I'm sure this will inflame many but....

Simpson5774 said:
I bet if Nvidia decided to cut support for the 6-7 series for windows 7 the ATi fans would be all over this shit, but when its their own chip maker, "well this not a problem at all, you all should upgrade anyways, ATi cards are inexpensive" bla bla bla.

I have an x1950pro for a backup card, its kind of a meh card but if I needed it to, it would play some "basic" DX9 games which I would play anyways and would be able to play on this card like CSS or TF2 or FEAR or maybe UT2004 or even CoD4 (maybe not at the highest of settings, but playable). Now I don't know the specifics of "no driver support means", everyone is just saying use vista 9.8 drivers. but this card is by no means ancient, now I doubt any "improvements" for these cards have been added in 2 years, but still, I think its a bit of a run around especially for people who cant figure out, okay I have a x1900 card, I have windows 7, but there is no "driver" available on the ATi site for this card, you have to dick around and use a "vista driver" for windows 7, thats something not everyone is going to be able to figure out.

they should produce one windows 7 catalyst release which supports these cards, then cut support, so if I have an x1950 or something and want drivers off their website, it just defaults this one driver they made.
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Your choices are like mine. I chose to seriously limit my PC gaming hobby due to the $$ and time sink that it had been. It was fun but I have new hobbies now and have decided to dilute my gaming down to consoles and portables. Not as good, obviously, but time wise and expense wise a big win.
 
Who really cares. If you have these cards, they will still work in Windows 7. Chances are they will perform just as good as if you had Vista. Typically with cards that old, they barely do any updating with new drivers anyway. At this point, they are very stable all around. Only issue would be if a new game came out that didn't work correctly with the old cards. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be a game patch to fix it. I don't see really see any likely issues with this.
 
This is a necessary evil, hiring decent coders isn't cheap. You wouldn't expect your car mfr to keep changing your oil for free after your warranty expired9assuming you car came with a service contract.). Same thing here, this is technically also on the box that came with your card, I guarantee none of those cards came with "Windows 7" as a supported OS on the box. The card also still works for every OS(probably more) listed on the original packaging, there just won't be updates for future (not listed as supported) games, features, etc.

I would rather see companies EOL products after a reasonable amount of time, than pay for the support cost (every time I upgrade) for people who refuse to use modern hardware.
 
Doesn't this defeat the purpose of a unified driver? Bad AMD, BAD! *sprays AMD with water bottle*

I'm still holding out hope that the industry isn't trying to kill PC gaming.
 
If someone was spent 200$ on a new OS to pair with their 5 year old graphics card.... well they got what they deserved.
 
AMD may periodically provide Windows XP and Windows Vista driver updates (for the products listed above) for critical fixes only. No new features will be provided in future driver updates.
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so this means it's not totally dropped altogether, critical fix will still be provided.
 
SonDa5 said:
I can see this being a problem with people who already bought 5000 series cards and are still using XP.

I'd quickly demand my money back if I were one of them.
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That's a good thing Windows XP needs to die already, sick of that Malware infested POS OS.
 
vengence said:
If someone was spent 200$ on a new OS to pair with their 5 year old graphics card.... well they got what they deserved.
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this could affect those with older laptop igps, like the 1200 series, according to the link. in fact, i was going to get a cheaper laptop last year that came with that igp and vista. and i just recently upgraded my laptop to 7 this month. but i opted for a better laptop that happened to come with a slightly better 3000 series igp. so i'm sure for some with these kinds of laptops upgrading to 7, it might affect them. i mean they can still play some older games on them and even some newer casual games, or new games with very low system requirements. but yeah, it's unreasonable to expect the support to be there forever.
 
kumquatsrus said:
this could affect those with older laptop igps, like the 1200 series, according to the link. in fact, i was going to get a cheaper laptop last year that came with that igp and vista. and i just recently upgraded my laptop to 7 this month. but i opted for a better laptop that happened to come with a slightly better 3000 series igp. so i'm sure for some with these kinds of laptops upgrading to 7, it might affect them. i mean they can still play some older games on them and even some newer casual games, or new games with very low system requirements. but yeah, it's unreasonable to expect the support to be there forever.
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Ati's drvier support for mobile pretty much sucks anyway. They tell you to go to the laptop MFR most of the time and they usually don't have updates available.
 
kumquatsrus said:
this could affect those with older laptop igps, like the 1200 series, according to the link. in fact, i was going to get a cheaper laptop last year that came with that igp and vista. and i just recently upgraded my laptop to 7 this month. but i opted for a better laptop that happened to come with a slightly better 3000 series igp. so i'm sure for some with these kinds of laptops upgrading to 7, it might affect them. i mean they can still play some older games on them and even some newer casual games, or new games with very low system requirements. but yeah, it's unreasonable to expect the support to be there forever.
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I need to go find that post where someone said he expected his 20 year old printer to still work on windows vista.
 
That must have been me and the Star NL-10 dot-matrix printer that I can only use daytime because it wakes up the neighbours.
 
Draiko said:
I'm still holding out hope that the industry isn't trying to kill PC gaming.
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If you're referring to this mess, I would think that if anything, this would push PC gaming forward. What's the point of continuing to work in DX9 if DX10 is the new mainstream deal, and now DX11 hardware is out?
 
I can't see why anyone who would 'upgrade' to to Win7 wouldn't already have a DX10 card anyway. And like someone else said (sorry for not quoting) If you don't have a DX10 card and don't really care about DX10 for gaming. An upgrade would cost what... $30 bucks? Sigh.
 
Via another forum I just found out that Windows 7 ships with drivers that let X1900 cards and the like play games and do their job, welp.

You're not going to get much better performance out of your ancient cards. Spend $25 and get over it.

(Not counting mobile chipsets, but who wants to game on a laptop anyway)
 
jeez.

AMD's driver support is rather good.
its 5 year old products, thats ~5 year support, warranty is out.
Youre product still runs.

complain to intel for letting out igp's 100%

915 in vista, does it work ? well, i dont get aero, it got decreased performance, beta runs way faster than SP1!!!!!!
and yeah it had aero in the beta and worked fine.

You can still use 9.8 driver.
The product still runs fine.
Spend 30 bucks and get a uqually performing card. 1900XT got 40gb mem bandwidth ? that translates to a modern 64 bit gddr 5 design!
they might have had x1xxx support for another gen, x850 and that stuff is just way too old :p
 
First, this has *NOTHING* to do with Windows XP, Windows Vista, or the ability to run DirectX 9 games in Windows 7.

This has nothing to do with Radeon 2000, 3000, 4000, or 5000-series cards.

This has to do SOLELY with using an OLDER card, X1000-series or older, in Windows 7.

What this means is that if you have an X1000-series or older video card, and you want to run Windows 7, you have to use Vista drivers. This may not matter much on the desktop, where you can get a cheap DX10 card; but it really matters in the mobile space. All those Mobility Radeon X1600-equipped notebooks are left out cold. The Vista drivers work, but it's not the same.
 
I think ATI should just release one offical Windows 7 driver for the x1*** series. They are still good cards for everything, even gaming if your running the x1800/x1950 cards. Plus there's many laptop/mobile users that might like to upgrade to windows 7 from Vista or XP. It doesn't seem like it would be much work for ATI either, since there are Vista drivers that already support these cards and that you can install in Windows 7.
 
Why??? The vista drivers work for Win7. If some groundbreaking flaw pops up that requires attention they'll fix it, but not until then.
 
ClearM4 said:
I think ATI should just release one offical Windows 7 driver for the x1*** series. They are still good cards for everything, even gaming if your running the x1800/x1950 cards. Plus there's many laptop/mobile users that might like to upgrade to windows 7 from Vista or XP. It doesn't seem like it would be much work for ATI either, since there are Vista drivers that already support these cards and that you can install in Windows 7.
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Yes, my problem exactly. I can't run Windows 7 on my laptop with an x1300? WTF?

They should at least create a stable baseline Windows 7 driver, it doesn't have to support multiple GPUs or other advanced features, or be super-optimized. Can W7 use vista or XP drivers?
 
At first this seemed like an odd decision, but then I figured that the "people using 3 year old graphics cards, who also use windows 7, who also care deeply about cutting edge driver support" audience is probably pretty small.
 
I've used an X1800 in Windows 7 on and it works fine on 9.8. All the DX9 features on the drivers are pretty much set for the card so it's not like it's gonna hurt. It just means you'll get no further updates but a card like that doesn't need it. I remember NVIDIA ending GeForce FX series cards when Vista went to RC testing and never came out with a driver ever since. /shrug
 
ClearM4 said:
I think ATI should just release one offical Windows 7 driver for the x1*** series. They are still good cards for everything, even gaming if your running the x1800/x1950 cards. Plus there's many laptop/mobile users that might like to upgrade to windows 7 from Vista or XP. It doesn't seem like it would be much work for ATI either, since there are Vista drivers that already support these cards and that you can install in Windows 7.
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There's no point to this when using the ATI Catalyst 9.8 legacy driver for Vista works fine under Windows 7, without any performance difference (compared to Vista) or drawbacks. Aero still works fine on these cards in 7. This isn't like using XP video drivers under Vista, which could have unforseen consequences.

The only issue with dropping support is like what tomiboy59 said about game or 3D app bugs with legacy DX 9 cards in 7.

EDIT: My brother just upgraded his family PC (which has a Radeon 9800 Pro) to Windows 7 a few days ago and his Radeon 9800 Pro works just fine under Windows 7, using the legacy Vista Catalyst driver. Games like Far Cry and Max Payne 2 run exactly the same as they did under Vista.
 
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Anemone said:
Think twice before buying that nice new video card, because you don't know how many years till DX12 and 10.1 gets dropped by AMD. If MS is any judge it won't be very long.
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Good point, man. Good point. Let me think about it. If I buy a DX11 card today and DX10.1 gets dropped by AMD, it means my DX11 card will still work. Looking at AMD's history, they dropped support for a 4 year old card. DX11 cards were released about 1 month ago.

So if I spend $100.00 on the cheapest model, it'll only last another 3 years and 11 months. Then, my games won't get performance enchancements of 5-10%. 3 years, 11 months / $100.00 = $25.00 per year?? $2.00 per month? Who can afford such an expensive cost. The OUTRAGE I FEEL. If I spend $300.00 on a top of the line video card, it would be almost 6 dollars a month. $6.00 dollars. That's like one-coffee less a month I'd have to have. OUTRAGEOUS!

Sorry for the sarcasim but really, for $30.00 you could get a card with double the horsepower of our current video card that'll be supported for probably at least 2 years more. That's like 50 cents a month to enjoy better graphics in your games. If gaming, using facebook or just using a pc in general is your hobby, 0.50 cents a month doesn't seem that bad by any means.

You should direct that outrage where it belongs. Ask those damn bastards at Intel why my Pentium 1 could play Lara Croft tomb raider just fine in 1993 but the newest lara croft game wont run? When will I get a new firmware for my intel motherboard to make my pentium 1 run this game properly? I don't want to spend $30.00 on a E2400.
 
WBurchnall said:
So if I spend $100.00 on the cheapest model, it'll only last another 3 years and 11 months. Then, my games won't get performance enchancements of 5-10%. 3 years, 11 months / $100.00 = $25.00 per year?? $2.00 per month? Who can afford such an expensive cost. The OUTRAGE I FEEL. If I spend $300.00 on a top of the line video card, it would be almost 6 dollars a month. $6.00 dollars. That's like one-coffee less a month I'd have to have. OUTRAGEOUS!
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I LOLed, thank you :D

As someone else said, it's not like your card won't work either. It just won't have "official" support. At this point the drivers are so refined that there aren't likely to be any serious problems. It's not like ATi/AMD has been providing much support for them anyway. Yes drivers were available, but there were almost no optimizations/fixes aimed at those older cards recently.
 
Those cards were all ALREADY on leagcy status in XP and VISTA. That was announced with the release of the CAT 9.3s way the hell back in MARCH. Yeah, they did do something for them with the 9.8s, but that was inline with their already announced policy.

What DUMBASS is going to expect them to support them in Win 7 when they had ALREADY dropped support for them in two earlier OSs ???
 
WBurchnall said:
Good point, man. Good point. Let me think about it. If I buy a DX11 card today and DX10.1 gets dropped by AMD, it means my DX11 card will still work. Looking at AMD's history, they dropped support for a 4 year old card. DX11 cards were released about 1 month ago.

So if I spend $100.00 on the cheapest model, it'll only last another 3 years and 11 months. Then, my games won't get performance enchancements of 5-10%. 3 years, 11 months / $100.00 = $25.00 per year?? $2.00 per month? Who can afford such an expensive cost. The OUTRAGE I FEEL. If I spend $300.00 on a top of the line video card, it would be almost 6 dollars a month. $6.00 dollars. That's like one-coffee less a month I'd have to have. OUTRAGEOUS!

Sorry for the sarcasim but really, for $30.00 you could get a card with double the horsepower of our current video card that'll be supported for probably at least 2 years more. That's like 50 cents a month to enjoy better graphics in your games. If gaming, using facebook or just using a pc in general is your hobby, 0.50 cents a month doesn't seem that bad by any means.

You should direct that outrage where it belongs. Ask those damn bastards at Intel why my Pentium 1 could play Lara Croft tomb raider just fine in 1993 but the newest lara croft game wont run? When will I get a new firmware for my intel motherboard to make my pentium 1 run this game properly? I don't want to spend $30.00 on a E2400.
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wow pull your head out. Not everyone is a super nerd. Also, have you thought of businesses? We have 2000 workstations, a big chunk of them have ati cards that are no longer supported (yet still under warranty from dell/hp). These are business models that have a 4 year life span.

im testing windows 7 now and without a driver its laggy as shit. The vista driver keeps causing blue screens

gg ati
 
ATI do not support laptop video cards, they say they do or are going to but they fail at that at this time, Nvidia most laptops i have come across you have to force load the drivers on laptops (more so for BR support to make them play) but they work most of the time
 
Its not like anyone is working on enhancing the DX9 api/function calls/whatever in the DX9 programming space. What does it matter unless there are some glaring bugs/issues with DX9 unresolved ? Really I am asking for real, what is the problem ? I stopped installing the latest Nvidia drivers because reading the release notes nothing new in the ast few drivers affected my old card.
 
FoBZY said:
We have 2000 workstations, a big chunk of them have ati cards that are no longer supported (yet still under warranty from dell/hp). These are business models that have a 4 year life span.

im testing windows 7 now and without a driver its laggy as shit. The vista driver keeps causing blue screens

gg ati
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these workstations would not be approved/tested to run windows7 by HP/Dell, either stump up $30 per workstation for new cards or replace these legacy boxes, sure HP/Dell would love to sell you some shinny i5/i7 desktops. your 4 year cycle sounds like a bit of bad luck running into a large issue, stuff happens but i wouldn't blame AMD for EOL these cards.
 
Agreed. Wake up and smell the $30 upgrade, otherwise stay away from the new os, in a business environment.
 
FoBZY said:
wow pull your head out. Not everyone is a super nerd. Also, have you thought of businesses? We have 2000 workstations, a big chunk of them have ati cards that are no longer supported (yet still under warranty from dell/hp). These are business models that have a 4 year life span.

im testing windows 7 now and without a driver its laggy as shit. The vista driver keeps causing blue screens

gg ati
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If the IT department of any company is considering spending cash upgrading to windows 7 while still using obsolete machines not certified to run it, the entire IT department should be fired for being incompetent and clueless. After 4 years they should be upgrading hardware across the board and it will come with Windows 7 pre installed. Or if they can't afford it just replace those workstations that are no longer supported.

gg clueless IT managers.
 
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people quit yer bitchin

even those of you supporting a large number of PCs at businesses

Why the hell are you trying to run a 2009 OS on a 2005 video card anyway????

facepalm
 
I'm a little cranky about my x1950xtx. I bought it in early 2007. It came out in August 2006. A barely 3 year old card has been relegated to legacy support? :confused:

I don't really have a lot of gaming time on the thing any more. Most of what I play is older games like Baldur's Gate II...along with some Civ 4, etc. Nothing that requires graphical oomph. I think the most recent graphical FPS I played up was Quake 4.

This has been known for some months, though.

I may end up upgrading for Dragon Age. But at least one solid, stable, verified win7 release would have been nice, instead of Vista-compatibility-mode installs.

That said I just bought a Radeon 9550 for my 160w $25 Pentium 4 secondary-monitor slave. It was the lowest power / cheapest AGP card I could find that had 9.8 support listed. Got it installed on Win7 with the 9.8 drivers, real easy (Vista compatibility mode). :D That, I appreciate.
 
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GreenMonkey said:
I'm a little cranky about my x1950xtx. I bought it in early 2007. It came out in August 2006. A barely 3 year old card has been relegated to legacy support? :confused:

I don't really have a lot of gaming time on the thing any more. Most of what I play is older games like Baldur's Gate II...along with some Civ 4, etc. Nothing that requires graphical oomph. I think the most recent graphical FPS I played up was Quake 4.

That said I may end up upgrading for Dragon Age. But at least one solid, stable, verified win7 release would have been nice, instead of Vista-compatibility-mode installs.

That said I just bought a Radeon 9550 for my 160w $25 Pentium 4 secondary-monitor slave and got it installed on Win7 with Vista drivers. :D That, I appreciate.
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You dont have to use "vista-compatibility-mode" to use Vista drivers in 7. You just click the .exe and it goes. Nothing to change, no headache. It is the same as a native Win 7 driver.

I don't see this as a big deal. A $60 4670 outperforms every single card on that list. If for some reason you're stuck with something older and absolutely can't upgrade than you have Catalyst 9.8 available to you which was an extremely solid driver set. It's not like a driver update is going to give you any increase in performance playing newer games with 2-3 year old cards. You really aren't losing much at all, if anything.
 
I think its a double edged sword. On one side they can now dedicate more resources to other things that are more current.

On the other end big companies and such that happen to use those cards could be left in the lurch with using improper drivers. If they release one last update to bring the hardware up to working capabilities with the current OS's etc that would be good IMO.
 
I can't speak for the company folks but see how this might affect folks that have upgraded to newer cards (dx10 and 11). It is if you wanted to run the old card along side your new card. THe amd site says if you have one of the now legacy cards along with a nonlegacy card you can only use 9.3 catalyst drivers. Why wold anyone want to do that? To push extra monitors. I used to have a geforce 5200. Upgraded to geforce 6800, but still rocked the 5200 so I can push 4 monitors (daytrading purposes). THen i upgraded to an 8800 Ultra. After that I couldnt rock the 5200 anymore cause the newer forcewares conflicted with it. Probably same situation with AMD now and using an old card with a new one. Other than that, I'm all for AMD putting more resources into newer hardware.
 
some people seem to be confused about exactly what this announcement means.

You all make it sound like you won't be able to play games on your cards anymore. That isn't true.

You can use Catalyst 9.8 to your hearts content. Or, at least, until game devs stop allowing directx9 as an option. :D

SirCumsized said:
I can't speak for the company folks but see how this might affect folks that have upgraded to newer cards (dx10 and 11). It is if you wanted to run the old card along side your new card. THe amd site says if you have one of the now legacy cards along with a nonlegacy card you can only use 9.3 catalyst drivers. Why wold anyone want to do that? To push extra monitors. I used to have a geforce 5200. Upgraded to geforce 6800, but still rocked the 5200 so I can push 4 monitors (daytrading purposes). THen i upgraded to an 8800 Ultra. After that I couldnt rock the 5200 anymore cause the newer forcewares conflicted with it. Probably same situation with AMD now and using an old card with a new one. Other than that, I'm all for AMD putting more resources into newer hardware.
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You win the "I actually have a legitimate complaint" award. Allow me to be the first to congratulate you :)

As a reward, I present to you a link to a $20 answer to solve all your problems:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127436

Enjoy ;)
 
TheBlueChanell said:
You dont have to use "vista-compatibility-mode" to use Vista drivers in 7. You just click the .exe and it goes. Nothing to change, no headache. It is the same as a native Win 7 driver.

I don't see this as a big deal. A $60 4670 outperforms every single card on that list. If for some reason you're stuck with something older and absolutely can't upgrade than you have Catalyst 9.8 available to you which was an extremely solid driver set. It's not like a driver update is going to give you any increase in performance playing newer games with 2-3 year old cards. You really aren't losing much at all, if anything.
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Mmm, maybe that's how it is now. First install of win7 required some wrangling / inf hacking in July. Don't remember on the last install about a month ago. You're probably right.

Older cards are definitely requiring Vista compatibility mode though. The Radeon 9550 I just installed definitely needed it (kept getting error that the Radeon hardware was not detected). Worked fine w/ Vista comp mode.

I guess if you guys are ok with 2-3 year old cards being marked as legacy support...not all of us upgrade that often. $60 is $60.
 
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