ATI first with WHQL drivers for Windows 7

[yacoub]

Originally posted by: lavaheadache

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
It figures. They strip out the X1900 and X800 driver code, JUST BEFORE they release the Win7 drivers, so owners of prior graphics cards get totally screwed.

Fuck stupid ATI.

if you are going to buy windows 7, I'm sure you up on the newest tech and you would have replaced your circa 2005 GPU by now. A $50 or less hd3850 is better than anything of that generation and you could probbly sell your "old" harware to someone with an "old" OS for about that amount of money. Not that I don't think it is a little silly to exclude these cards but I think a "F#ck Stupid ATi" (btw should be AMD) reponse is a little overboard.

wtf are you talking about, 90+% of PC owners run older generation GPUs and many of them will switch to Win7 just like many non-gamers/non-technical people switched to Vista too.

It IS stupid to remove support for your older hardware that a lot of people are still using, especially when they only do it because they want to force you to upgrade.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: AmdInside

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Did anyone expect differently? ATI was also first with Windows Vista drivers. And unlike their competitors drivers, theirs worked.

Actually this is not true. ATI drivers sucked at launch also. It's just that they did not suck nearly as much as NVIDIA's did.

I disagree. I had Vista on launch day and my Radeon X850XT card worked flawlessly in every one of my games from day one.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Uhmm... why is this such a huge issue? Could someone please explain to me why ATI has to continue driver support for their old DX9 cards? Are they going to be unlocking features or getting people 10%-20% performance improvements in modern games, or doing GPGPU work on them or what? How are people being kicked out to the curb?

What is wrong with using Vista Drivers on Windows 7? They work just fine, and demonstrate a negligible performance loss (if any at all) than if they were simply being used on Vista itself.

I have a Lan Box that doubles as my Win7 beta box. It has an A64 3800X2, a GF 7950 GT (previously an x800) and 2 GB of frankenram all crammed into a microATX standard. For the 7950 I'm using Nvidia's 182.whatever VISTA drivers, and for the X800 I was using the 9.2 VISTA drivers as well. As it is currently built, my 7950 GT nets me a pretty ~5000 3D marks in 06, which is as good as I've ever gotten with the thing when it was in my full ATX system.


[Edit: I realized I came off as a bit of a pompous dick. Thats not what I'm going for. I'm just genuinely confused by why this is such an issue?]

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Did anyone expect differently? ATI was also first with Windows Vista drivers. And unlike their competitors drivers, theirs worked.

Vista lunched the same day as the G80, the first DX10 card out there. it took AMD more than 6 months to release a DX10 card. The majority of the "suck" of nvidia drivers on vista was during those 6 months when they were the only DX10 player around. ATI on the other hand, simply ported their DX9 driver over to vista. (G80 released on november 8th of 06, R600 on may 15th of 07).

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Did anyone expect differently? ATI was also first with Windows Vista drivers. And unlike their competitors drivers, theirs worked.

Vista lunched the same day as the G80, the first DX10 card out there. it took AMD more than 6 months to release a DX10 card. The majority of the "suck" of nvidia drivers on vista was during those 6 months when they were the only DX10 player around. ATI on the other hand, simply ported their DX9 driver over to vista. (G80 released on november 8th of 06, R600 on may 15th of 07).

Ported? LOLL, you seems to forget that Vista uses a vastly different driver model which cannot be obtained by simply "porting" the XP drivers to Vista. DX9 or DX10 has nothing to do with the stability issues experienced with nVidia hardware when Vista was launched, it was experienced in lots of nVidia videocards, from the brand new G80 to the old 6800 series.

 

[taltamir]

the hell it doesn't... Nvidia had to design a DX9 and DX10 capable driver in parallel, ATI only DX9. and yes code CAN be ported. Yes there are differences that must be accounted for, but it is not a complete rewrite. partial rewrite is called porting. Complete rewrite is called rewrite, and simple recompile without any rewriting of code is called "recompile"

ATI ported their DX9 code. (partial rewrite)
nVidia porter their DX10 code (partial rewrite) AND wrote entirely new DX10 code, from scratch. and most of the nvidia crashing was in DX10 mode (big surprise /sarcasm)

 

[waffleironhead]

Originally posted by: ghost recon88

Originally posted by: ronnn

Originally posted by: lavaheadache


if you are going to buy windows 7, I'm sure you up on the newest tech

That will be a problem for microsoft than.

If you expect to run Windows 7 on a P4 or AMD64, you're just looking for trouble :disgust:

Actually win7 runs smoother on my p4 than xp or vista, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

 

[Leyawiin]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Did anyone expect differently? ATI was also first with Windows Vista drivers. And unlike their competitors drivers, theirs worked.

Gee willikers they beat 'em by a whole day for Win 7 WHQL. Yay ATI! Nvidia sucks. blah blah blah.

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: Leyawiin

Originally posted by: Bateluer
Did anyone expect differently? ATI was also first with Windows Vista drivers. And unlike their competitors drivers, theirs worked.

Gee willikers they beat 'em by a whole day for Win 7 WHQL. Yay ATI! Nvidia sucks. blah blah blah.

Thanks for your brilliant apportation to this thread. ATi had a Win7 driver much before nVidia did, but it wasn't WHQL.

 

[Wreckage]

Originally posted by: waffleironhead


Actually win7 runs smoother on my p4 than xp or vista, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

It should at least run better than Vista. One of the problems they had with Vista is that it would not run on Netbooks. That is supposed to change with Win7.

 

[angry hampster]

As I said in the nVidia WHQL thread :laugh:, my 4870 runs cooler with the WHQL driver. I am very, very impressed with Win7 64 and ATI's newest drivers. My CPU, RAM, and GPU usage is considerably lower in Win7 than Vista Ultimate 32-bit while gaming.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: waffleironhead

Originally posted by: ghost recon88

Originally posted by: ronnn

Originally posted by: lavaheadache


if you are going to buy windows 7, I'm sure you up on the newest tech

That will be a problem for microsoft than.

If you expect to run Windows 7 on a P4 or AMD64, you're just looking for trouble :disgust:

Actually win7 runs smoother on my p4 than xp or vista, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

yes, this is the entire point of windows 7, ms saw that people did not want the "bloated" vista, so they focused on making it faster, and consume less ram, win7 is lighter then XP, so it WILL run on older hardware.

 

[Qbah]

The support is not dropped... It's just put on a 3 month cycle (or was that 4?). Since you won't be gaming on those cards anyway, why would you need a monthly update for a driver that's used to run Aero mostly?

EDIT: Quote from ExtremeTech.com

After Catalyst 9.3, products prior to the R6xx generation of graphics cards (that go by the Radeon HD 2000 series brand names) will be changed to "legacy support status." This means that these products will get quarterly WHQL driver updates, instead of monthly updates. AMD assures us that these products will still receive critical "hotfix" drivers if high-priority fixes are needed.

So there, you will get WHQL drivers for the older cards, it's just gonna be every 3 months, not every month. Big deal. You won't be running the newest games on those anyway!

Link to the news.

 

[Keysplayr]

It's not such a big deal. A driver every 3 to 4 months for older DX9 cards isn't too bad. At least they're not being dropped altogether.

 

[taltamir]

i wouldnt care if they just updated the drivers whenever there was a bug to fix in them... ancient cards are used exclusively for 2d desktop acceleration
just as long as they actually DO work on the latest os and future os versions.

 

[KidTempo]

Terrible move on AMD/ATI's part. The majority of the great unwashed are running either integrated graphics cards or laptops. My wife's Dell Inspiron laptop is only 18months old and the card is not supported!

While Windows 7 did a half decent attempt at installing a driver, and I was impressed that it did it automatically, I couldn't install the latest drivers. Video in XMBC, which was working fine in Vista, is scrunched up in the top-left corner of the screen overlayed by a semi-opaque double sized shadow stretched across the screen. A driver problem, but I know that from experience rather than anything I managed to google.

Without looking again at the driver installation, it wasn't immediately obvious that the ATI drivers had not installed (it reported CCC was a success - good enough for me at first glance). Overall a very bad user experience.

I hate it when people assume that the "average user" will upgrade their hardware/use a workaround/whatever. The "average user" knows next to nothing about their computer - for 90% as long as they have a browser, IM, music/video player, photo viewer and a game or two then they're happy. You can bet that they only update drivers when prompted to...

Bad ATI, Bad!

 

[mrrman]

speaking of vid cards...I have the X1800 SLI which I like....what would be the next best card to support the features/enhancements down the road