AMD 13.9 WHQLs out, drops support for Vista 64bit?

[taq8ojh]

According to release notes as well

 

[Chiropteran]

Nobody uses Vista.

 

[nemesismk2]

They didn't post XP drivers either. So it looks like they in fact discontinued both.

After thinking about it more amd said a few years ago that some amd video cards would be going legacy support (with infrequent driver releases) and only new video cards would be fully supported with new drivers. Until i see a page on AMD to say that Vista and Windows XP will not be getting any drivers even legacy drivers then i would believe it.

 

[dguy6789]

It can be argued that vista (w/SP2) is better than win 8, but, that is beside the point.

Sorry but that is not true.

 

[pchelpdesk]

I use Vista, because I have lots of games and some of them only support Vista. It has been a good OS for me no problems. If I have to stay at Catalyst 13.4 the next computer I buy is going to have an Nvidia card in it. I just spent a ton of money on a 6990 maybe a couple years ago and if I can't keep drivers up to date with my current computer now, I will go to Nvidia out of spite.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

I have a 6850 in my HTPC running Vista so this this irritates me as well. Immensely. I have an extra Win7 license but this machine with Vista has been so solid for me I think I'd rather ditch the Radeon instead of going through an OS upgrade.

 

[Nec_V20]

Naturally, who even uses Vista anymore? You have 7 and 8, both solid, both worth supporting. XP and Vista belong in the bin. They've been replaced.

WinXP was solid since SP2 and Intel had a lot to do with the fact that Vista was such a disaster.

Win8 however is a completely self inflicted wound by Micro$haft and anyone considering this piece of garbage to be "solid" really needs to have their head examined.

 

[SPBHM]

I have a 6850 in my HTPC running Vista so this this irritates me as well. Immensely. I have an extra Win7 license but this machine with Vista has been so solid for me I think I'd rather ditch the Radeon instead of going through an OS upgrade.

is it really that important for your HTPC to have new drivers?

my XP install works better with some catalyst from 2011 than the latest (04/2013) for my 5800.

Win8 however is a completely self inflicted wound by Micro$haft and anyone considering this piece of garbage to be "solid" really needs to have their head examined.

I'm pretty happy with Windows 8, using it for over a year now, as much as one can hate the start screen, I don't see how you can justify calling the OS "piece of garbage", when it improves over Win 7 in some areas.

 

[Elixer]

Can we stop with the thread derails ?

This isn't about why Vista sucks, if you don't like the mentioned OS, good for you.
This isn't about updating from vista either.

Remember, Vista can play every single game that runs on win 7/8 just fine.

This thread is about AMD's WHQL release and their decision to remove support for Vista, which is still a supported OS from MS, and intel/nvidia still have full support for it.

 

[Obsoleet]

I use Vista, because I have lots of games and some of them only support Vista. It has been a good OS for me no problems. If I have to stay at Catalyst 13.4 the next computer I buy is going to have an Nvidia card in it. I just spent a ton of money on a 6990 maybe a couple years ago and if I can't keep drivers up to date with my current computer now, I will go to Nvidia out of spite.

That's kind of a strange statement from my perspective. Like saying you still keep Windows 3.0 installed because certain games only play on it. That's fine, but don't expect the world to not move on.

If they tacked on Vista support, and didn't really ever do anything- would that make people happy? I'll answer that, yes. That's how stupid people are, and they'd still have to validate them for what is truly almost no reason at all.
Vista is 4% of the *total* market, that's not even 4% of the gamer market!

I don't think anything has been updated for my 5870 in ages, updating drivers in that case when everything is working is just asking for things to break. Which is all your request is really going to get you anyway if they did oblige (and that is true for Intel, AMD and Nvidia).

 

[24601]

That's kind of a strange statement from my perspective. Like saying you still keep Windows 3.0 installed because certain games only play on it. That's fine, but don't expect the world to not move on.

If they tacked on Vista support, and didn't really ever do anything- would that make people happy? I'll answer that, yes. That's how stupid people are, and they'd still have to validate them for what is truly almost no reason at all.
Vista is 4% of the *total* market, that's not even 4% of the gamer market!

I don't think anything has been updated for my 5870 in ages, updating drivers in that case when everything is working is just asking for things to break. Which is all your request is really going to get you anyway if they did oblige (and that is true for Intel, AMD and Nvidia).

So you're arguing that since AMD/ATi is so bad at supporting their older cards you shouldn't care that they drop support of older operating systems in newer drivers?

One retardation doesn't make the other retardation any less retarded.

This is coming from a 8800 GTS 320 mb owner that has had one until half a year before 7970 released. When Nvidia breaks something for their older cards they usually fix it 1-2 drivers later maximum.

I hear absolute horror stories (as well as having seen my friend's frustrations at lan parties) about AMD/ATi's support of older cards on such a regular basis that I'm pretty sure it doesn't go both ways.

(I also have a 460 768mB and it still works fine with newest drivers on my 2nd computer. I think this is relevent since 5xxx series is roughly equivalent to 4xx series in time of release.)

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

is it really that important for your HTPC to have new drivers?

Considering I play games on it, yes.

 

[Keysplayr]

Well, what do most of you think is a reasonable amount of time an OS should be supported in drivers? 5 years? 10 ? When the OS vendor drops support?

 

[stahlhart]

This thread is about AMD driver support for Vista, not Vista. Stay on topic, or it will be moved to Operating Systems.
-- stahlhart

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

Well, what do most of you think is a reasonable amount of time an OS should be supported in drivers? 5 years? 10 ? When the OS vendor drops support?

I don't think an arbitrary time limit is fair to set since both Vista and Win7 use wddm 1.1. Vista doesn't use all the features, but the drivers should be more or less interchangeable. It should be a minimal effort for AMD to take what they have in the Win7 driver and use it for Vista. In fact I fully expect someone to kludge the appropriate Vista files from 13.4 into newer versions to get them working if necessary, but that makes the point that if that can work why wouldn't AMD just do it properly?

 

[Elixer]

13.11 Betas are released... and still no Vista support.

 

[Stuka87]

I don't think an arbitrary time limit is fair to set since both Vista and Win7 use wddm 1.1. Vista doesn't use all the features, but the drivers should be more or less interchangeable. It should be a minimal effort for AMD to take what they have in the Win7 driver and use it for Vista. In fact I fully expect someone to kludge the appropriate Vista files from 13.4 into newer versions to get them working if necessary, but that makes the point that if that can work why wouldn't AMD just do it properly?

Vista uses WDDM 1.0. Windows 7 is 1.1, and Windows 8 is 1.2.

1.0 is missing a lot of features that were introduced into 1.1.

 

[Z15CAM]

No doubt Vista was a piece of Crap.

No doubt this was a thread crap.
-- stahlhart

 

[Elixer]

Vista uses WDDM 1.0. Windows 7 is 1.1, and Windows 8 is 1.2.

1.0 is missing a lot of features that were introduced into 1.1.

While true, it is also true that WDDM 1.1 drivers are backward compatible with WDDM 1.0 specification. Both 1.0 and 1.1 drivers can be used in Windows Vista.

Direct from MS
To reduce the complexity of testing, the Windows 7 WDDM v1.1 driver interfaces are backward compatible with Windows Vista. Therefore, IHVs that implement Windows 7 WDDM v1.1 driver features can integrate them into common driver source code and build a single driver that runs on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
When installed on Windows Vista, such a driver simply acts as a WDDM v1 driver. When the same driver is installed on Windows 7, it can use the new WDDM v1.1 functionality. IHVs are not required to build and maintain multiple source code branches for Windows releases that support the WDDM driver model. Vendors who plan both to provide new drivers for Windows 7 and to update existing ones for Windows Vista also benefit from this approach

So, obviously, it is something else, like perhaps testing.
All they have to do is put back the info in the .inf files, and they will work, and keep the fixes coming for games and other stuff, instead of shutting out people and forcing them going to the green camp for no good reason.

 

[Brekyrself]

Just when I was looking forward to picking up a 290x....I'd rather not format and force myself to upgrade everything again.......