AMD Ends Windows 8.1 32-Bit Support with Latest Radeon Software Release

Megalith

Megalith

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This information is essentially for trivia purposes only, since I can’t imagine how anyone could live with 4GB of user addressable memory in 2017, but AMD is officially killing off driver support for the 32-bit version of Windows 8.1. Nvidia continues to offer support for the lower-bit edition, but I think AMD’s decision is pretty justifiable.

When we got in touch with AMD, we were told that the company doesn't have new drivers for 32-bit Windows 8.1. We were even told that it's because nobody cares about 32-bit Windows 8.1 anymore, citing extremely low download numbers. Apparently, AMD is cutting down costs and time for its driver development team by discarding operating systems and architectures that only a few people use. It was first to dump Windows XP support, and support for Windows 8 (in favor of Windows 8.1). While the company does provide 64-bit Windows 8.1 WHQL drivers as regularly as its popular Windows 7 and Windows 10 ones; it is skipping support for 32-bit Windows 8.1 going forward.
 
Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell = Windows 10 kernel and performance improvements over 7 WITHOUT the massively embedded dragnet spying of 10 (Windows 8 is vastly easier to 100% rid of telemetry). As the kernel is pretty much the same as 10, odd AMD would single it out. "Unofficially" I'm certain with little more than a ini tweak Windows 10 drivers will work fine in Windows 8.
 
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Iceshot said:
Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell = Windows 10 kernel and performance improvements over 7 WITHOUT the massively embedded dragnet spying of 10 (Windows 8 is vastly easier to 100% rid of telemetry). As the kernel is pretty much the same as 10, odd AMD would single it out. "Unofficially" I'm certain with little more than a ini tweak Windows 10 drivers will work fine in Windows 8.
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Yeah, but 32-bit? Who still does that?
 
SolidBladez said:
Damn. I guess it's time for me to upgrade my X99 rig running Windows 8.1 x86 to x64. :(
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If your 32-bit (4gb limited) it probably does not apply to you since generally you only need driver updates for the latest games.
 
Kudos to NV for the consistently longer support for "legacy" products and OSes.
 
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Iceshot said:
Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell = Windows 10 kernel and performance improvements over 7 WITHOUT the massively embedded dragnet spying of 10 (Windows 8 is vastly easier to 100% rid of telemetry). As the kernel is pretty much the same as 10, odd AMD would single it out. "Unofficially" I'm certain with little more than a ini tweak Windows 10 drivers will work fine in Windows 8.
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Bingo. Windows 10 = 8.2 with nonremovable crapware, forced updates and spying.

8.1 with a Start Menu replacement gives you the best of 7 and 10 without the worst of 10. DX12 has proven to be a worse performer than DX11 in most games, so that marketing checkbox is moot.

As for 32bit vs 64bit, I guess it was time to move on.
 
Waiting for the same people freaking out over WoW not supporting Vista anymore to freak out over this in 3...2...1...
 
DPI said:
Bingo. Windows 10 = 8.2 with nonremovable crapware, forced updates and spying.
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Nothing is forced, you can still turn it off with a few reg tweaks. If you're worried about it and don't have those skills, Google can help you. It's literally easier than installing Nvidia's spyware. Errr... telemetry.
 
Megalith said:
Apparently, AMD is cutting down costs and time for its driver development team by discarding operating systems and architectures that only a few people use. It was first to dump Windows XP support, and support for Windows 8 (in favor of Windows 8.1)
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Last I checked it was a simple checkbox to build for another processor target.

Once they are written automated scripting tools for testing need very little hands on attention. We can run through 100 test units daily with integration and testing and spit out a report to say what's changed between those 100 units from the previous round. We as engineers then analyze the results to see if they were expected or acceptable. Although they would need double the computers for QA to run regression and integration testing.

I do agree 4GB limit is absurd for a machine that is using a video card with just about the same amount of memory.
 
Simplyfun said:
Nothing is forced, you can still turn it off with a few reg tweaks. If you're worried about it and don't have those skills, Google can help you. It's literally easier than installing Nvidia's spyware. Errr... telemetry.
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Sure there are some unofficial hacks and tweaks that might suppress the user-hostile stuff for a moment.. until the next update kills them. But you have to hunt around for them.

.. then you have to stay on top of it to see if anyone found any NEW ones.
...then you have to check your settings periodically to make sure that the last 'invisible' update didn't reset everything back to Microsoft defaults.

It's all extra work, and it's not fun, and I don't have time or patience for it. My PC's will work for me, not the other way around. And I can't efficiently do my work if I'm having to checking under the hood constantly to make sure the engine is still there, and that MS hasn't replaced the steering wheel with a touchscreen or stuck advertisements to the windshield.
 
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DPI said:
And I can't efficiently do my work if I'm having to checking under the hood constantly to make sure the engine is still there, and that MS hasn't replaced the steering wheel with a touchscreen or stuck advertisements to the windshield.
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So what work can you not do effectively that's because of the things you mention here? I get that you may not like this or that or think "privacy issue" and that's fair. But what work can you do more effectively as a matter of routine on 8.1 with Classic Shell than Windows 10 stock with basic telemetry?

That said, in an enterprise environment none of this applies. We're moving to 10, full steam ahead. There really are no alternatives for us as a big bank with 200k Windows clients. Unless you can guarantee that in the next two years some distro of Linux will be 90% compatible with all that we do on the desktop client.

In that case, we'd be happy to switch to whatever you think is best. It's that simple.
 
heatlesssun said:
In that case, we'd be happy to switch to whatever you think is best. It's that simple.
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Exactly.
DPI said:
Sure there are some unofficial hacks and tweaks that might suppress the user-hostile stuff for a moment.. until the next update kills them. But you have to hunt around for them.
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It's not much of a hunt, and this was always the case for all windows functions that didn't have a GUI function dating back to 3.51 when NT first became functional (imo). You can even turn off the upgrades. It's really very, very easy.
 
Simplyfun said:
Exactly.
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Here's the thing. Ok, Windows 10 sucks. It's this horrible invasion or privacy, which it can't be in the age of smartphones where Microsoft has almost totally failed and it's horrible at everything desktop Windows has been which it isn't because try using anything less than Windows 7 for anything you've always done on a Windows desktop.

It's time for the bitching to end. Give people a REAL alternative, not some "1/3rd of my Steam games work" nonsense. And I'm not saying anything bad about anything else, just some plan. And I get that's hard, hell people will bitch about how good Microsoft Office is because LibreOffice is supposedly more compatible because they totally get about 10k pages of documentation and even nuances of it and then say things like "Who cares about ink" when one of the major improvements in LibreOffice was ink and they didn't even understand that improvement.
 
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I use Windows 10 and could never go back to 7. It is a real improvement in both speed, memory management and features. I play lots of older PC games as well as new ones. Windows 8 could be a real pain with legacy software, but in 10 I can get even older 16bit programs to run with the right installer. My great fear with 10 is the idea of it being one OS continually improved upon. Apple showed us how to do it with OS X, but even they at times did really large changes and I worry Win 10 could suffer from bloat and serious feature creep.
 
heatlesssun said:
Here's the thing. Ok, Windows 10 sucks. It's this horrible invasion or privacy, which it can't be in the age of smartphones where Microsoft has almost totally failed and it's horrible at everything desktop Windows has been which it isn't because try using anything less than Windows 7 for anything you've always down on a Windows desktop.

It's time for the bitching to end. Give people a REAL alternative, not some "1/3rd of my Steam games work" nonsense. And I'm not saying anything bad about anything else, just some plan.
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Linux could have actually been the real alternative, but the neckbeards are always too busy battling over three lines of code that don't actually matter. IMO the monopoly and subsequent fallout was granted to MS the day IBM threw in the towel on OS/2 after the Win 95 launch. Everything since then has either been open sourced with no marketing dollars or simply non competitive.

Anyhow, I actually have clients on Win 10 32 bit because they still run DOS apps I built in the early 80's. No real reason to re code, it would get them nothing and it still works. If they want to pay to recode them, I'm game, but they're not. But in those cases video driver support from AMD just doesn't matter.
 
Simplyfun said:
Linux could have actually been the real alternative, but the neckbeards are always too busy battling over three lines of code that don't actually matter.
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After nearly two decades of dealing with desktop Linux folks, it's beyond obvious to me that they don't listen any better than Microsoft. And I try to give them all the benefit. I get that they can't create Microsoft Office without Microsoft. But then there's insane spiral about file formats, which really aren't the issue, ink, which was apparently enough of an issue for the LibreOffice team to put resources on finally to make that appear well from Office documents in the last stable release, but hey, let's argue over file formats?

I mean, damn. Even the LibreOffice guys got that in the age of 2 in 1s that displaying ink properly was not an option anymore, had ZERO to do will file formats and just did it. Hats off to them.

Simplyfun said:
IMO the monopoly and subsequent fallout was granted to MS the day IBM threw in the towel on OS/2 after the Win 95 launch. Everything since then has either been open sourced with no marketing dollars or simply non competitive.
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OS/2 was pretty good for it's time but even it was undone by Windows. Windows 3.0 hit gold and everything else one the desktop. And Microsoft did a lot a bad stuff to keep it that way without question. But we're just past that after all this time. Just make something better than Windows. And by better than Windows, better than what Windows is great at, compatibility.
 
heatlesssun said:
Here's the thing. Ok, Windows 10 sucks. It's this horrible invasion or privacy, which it can't be in the age of smartphones where Microsoft has almost totally failed and it's horrible at everything desktop Windows has been which it isn't because try using anything less than Windows 7 for anything you've always done on a Windows desktop.

It's time for the bitching to end. Give people a REAL alternative, not some "1/3rd of my Steam games work" nonsense. And I'm not saying anything bad about anything else, just some plan. And I get that's hard, hell people will bitch about how good Microsoft Office is because LibreOffice is supposedly more compatible because they totally get about 10k pages of documentation and even nuances of it and then say things like "Who cares about ink" when one of the major improvements in LibreOffice was ink and they didn't even understand that improvement.
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But, I like Windows. I know Windows. I'm good at Windows. I like Linux, too, but I really prefer Windows. However, if newer software didn't work with it and I had to go for the alternative to stay relevant, I would.

Windows works. It does everything I want it to do. Everything. If Linux does what you want it to do, great. Just use whatever OS you can use and that does everything you need it to. That's all it comes down to. If I like OSX, but it doesn't run anything I need it to run, it's worthless. Regardless of how I feel about the OS itself...
 
Ur_Mom said:
But, I like Windows. I know Windows. I'm good at Windows. I like Linux, too, but I really prefer Windows. However, if newer software didn't work with it and I had to go for the alternative to stay relevant, I would.

Windows works. It does everything I want it to do. Everything. If Linux does what you want it to do, great. Just use whatever OS you can use and that does everything you need it to. That's all it comes down to. If I like OSX, but it doesn't run anything I need it to run, it's worthless. Regardless of how I feel about the OS itself...
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I like Windows as well. Because it supports the money I've spent on PCs and that's really all there is to it. Pro-desktop Linux folks love to dive into tons of nonsense about this very simple thing, but really, that's all there is to it. For people that proclaim such vast knowledge about computers, they don't seem to get simple stuff.
 
For newer video cards going forward, I can understand this.

That said, I hope at least someone continues to maintain driver support for at least Windows 10 32-bit.

I am actually currently in the process of downgrading a new Dell machine from Windows 10 x64 to Windows 10 x86 right now -- because the company I work for still sells hardware that hooks to it that has no 64-bit drivers available and, due to the components on the board, never will. As the board in question is in the multiple thousands of dollars to produce (per unit) and the original design effort involved numerous engineers for over a year, plus layout, plus a board house, and the part that needs the 64-bit drivers is the main processor on the board that unifies everything, the cost of a full redesign is somewhat prohibitive (gross understatement). Essentially, until machines capable of running 32-bit Windows are no longer available, no redesign will happen.

Of course, we still have some other legacy equipment in daily use that won't run on anything faster than a Pentium 266Mhz and with nothing newer than Windows 95 (which was only upgraded to from WFW 3.11 within the last couple of years).

I run into to similar situations in medical and industrial environments all the time -- the equipment and machines to run them often cost anywhere from $100K to well over $1M per unit, they are designed to and expected to last and be used for 20+ years, and the control equipment they are connected to has to be able to be maintained and/or replaced during this entire product life-cycle.

The entire rate of change of PC equipment is a very bad thing in the industrial/medical markets.
 
ecktt said:
Kudo to NV for the consistently longer support for "legacy" products and OSes.
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Exactly this. 4 years ago when I was building my media PC I spent a little more for an NVidia gpu knowing that it would have a longer supported life vs equivalent AMD. The PC is running 8.1 (x64) but it's pretty much a given that AMD will be dropping support well before nvidia does.
 
TrailRunner said:
Exactly this. 4 years ago when I was building my media PC I spent a little more for an NVidia gpu knowing that it would have a longer supported life vs equivalent AMD. The PC is running 8.1 (x64) but it's pretty much a given that AMD will be dropping support well before nvidia does.
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I completely disagree. 32-bit support needs to die when it comes to enthusiast GPU drivers. It's really kind of insane that there's a 32-bit version of Windows 10 to be honest. I never would have guessed that it would hang on this long.
 
lazz said:
I completely disagree. 32-bit support needs to die when it comes to enthusiast GPU drivers. It's really kind of insane that there's a 32-bit version of Windows 10 to be honest. I never would have guessed that it would hang on this long.
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It's mostly for business, there's still a lot of 16 bit code out there that runs perfectly fine on Win 32 platforms but won't run on Win 64 platforms. Trying to map your enthusiast GPU into that limited memory is never what it was meant for really ever since Vista/7 went mainstream.
 
Simplyfun said:
It's mostly for business, there's still a lot of 16 bit code out there that runs perfectly fine on Win 32 platforms but won't run on Win 64 platforms. Trying to map your enthusiast GPU into that limited memory is never what it was meant for really ever since Vista/7 went mainstream.
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I work in enterprise IT for an energy corp here in Calgary, and I've been working in the same sector for most of a decade. I've seen all sorts of bizarre legacy software and even raw scripts and code blocks that were critical to the function of a certain small group. But there are solutions in place for that. Citrix, VMWare or other VDI environment, etc. etc.

And none of that stuff has ever needed GPU support. In fact now I'm curious as to what the support is for workstation cards.. we've got lots and lots of Quadro and FirePro cards out there, but they tend to get replaced after 4-5 years.
 
The majority of people here think PCs have more than 3GB RAM and everyone upgrades their graphics card frequently. That simply isn't the case. Most people get by with integrated graphics and 4 (or less)GB of RAM. Killing support for a fairly recent OS is BS.
 
What's the Windows vs Linux shit doing here?

buzzbomb said:
Yeah, but 32-bit? Who still does that?
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On very rare occasions I do 32 bit.
If someone has a weak CPU and doesn't need more than 3 Gigs, I sometimes install (only after explaning the difference and possible issues to the user) 32 bit editions of older OS like Vista, or 7.
32 bit code is slightly smaller - which can make a difference as far as the CPU (cache) goes. Obviously HDD space is not the issue.

Thankfully you can still keep the older version or upgrade to 64 bit if you really need that software and it won't be a dealbreaker. The difference is there, but IMHO it's not too much of an issue in this particular case.
 
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