Is it worth getting new drivers for old cards?

[Joseph F]

I have a Radeon 4850 and it's working well with Catalyst 11.6. Is there any reason for me to update my driver with such an old card?

 

[nanaki333]

depends if it's a newer game that needed optimizations

 

[Leyawiin]

That's not that old of a card. If you're consistently playing new games installing the latest drivers would be a good idea (for the reason stated in the post above).

 

[Obsoleet]

There's all sorts of enhancements in new drivers.
http://widescreengamingforum.com/catalyst

I would definitely upgrade to 11.9, unless somethings crippled in a driver release for you I'd install every WHQL. I stopped using betas years ago, don't like messing with their random issues.

 

[Spjut]

I doubt that AMD cares about their HD4000 series anymore

I guess it could be worth updating when for example DX11 MTR is supported, but I doubt that AMD will make any effort to make it work to its full extent on their DX10.1 cards

 

[Joseph F]

I'll get the newest stable drivers next time I'm somewhere where there's broadband.

BTW, What's DX11 MTR?

 

[Spjut]

I'll get the newest stable drivers next time I'm somewhere where there's broadband.

BTW, What's DX11 MTR?

I mean DX11 multithreaded rendering, it's one of those neat features that apparently will carry over to DX10/10.1 hardware as well, though they need driver work to take full advantage of it...Civ5 is currently the only game using it, BF3 is the next game to use it
Anandtech has written about it in their Power of Directx 11 article

 

[GotNoRice]

I doubt that AMD cares about their HD4000 series anymore

I'm curious what would lead you to that conclusion. Pure assumption on your part?

I run 2x 4870x2 in Quad CF and I can say with absolute certainty that they work with and benefit greatly from using newer drivers. The BF3 Preview drivers made a clear difference on my hardware. You don't get much newer than that as far as drivers are concerned, which makes me feel that they certainly are continuing driver development.

Take a look at the steam hardware survey:
64%+ of all GPUs currently still in use are DX10-era. DX11 represents less than 29%. 6 out of the top 10 cards are DX10 hardware including two cards from the 48xx series.

AMD isn't going to drop the ball on tons of people who still use these cards. It's WAY too soon. Also, 48xx series is VLIW5 just like the 5xxx series and the 68xx series, supporting these cards is probably very easy.

 

[Spjut]

You obviously benefit from new drivers because AMD provides support for Crossfire in their new drivers/caps
Single GPUs though? Newer drivers compared with older ones(which gets harder now that test sites think the HD4000 series is too old) don't seem to show any differences

Then we have stuff like MLAA being exclusive to the newer series(ok they have Compute Shader 5 and other features not available on their DX10.1 GPUs, but I doubt that AMD couldn't support MLAA by another way, even if it were more expensive in terms of performance)

We also have comments about OpenCL when the HD5000 series were released, that they wouldn't put any focus on getting better OpenCL performance on the HD4000 cards, even though they were aware of known performance issues
(instead they said any performance benefits for the HD4000 series would be strictly because of improvements on the HD5000 series)