No more new ATI R300-R500 drivers

[thilanliyan]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...=amd_r500_legacy&num=1

Doesn't affect me but I'm sure some people won't like this.

 

[nosfe]

well, it's not like there were improvements made to those cards in any recent driver. Hope this means better drivers because of fewer cards needed to test games on and smaller driver sizes because of fewer cards supported.

 

[Bateluer]

As cheap as ATI's current offerings are, if you're still using an R300 era card, its time to let that thing go.

 

[dug777]

Doesn't affect me, but I think it would annoy the hell out of me if:

1) I had a high-end, later model.

2) A game came along that didn't work on my card.

Out of interest, what at what cost gives equivalent performance to an x1950xtx today?

EDIT: On a very quick look at THG, a 4670 comfortably wipes the floor with it. How much do they cost these days?

 

[tcsenter]

But R500? I predicted AMD would soon follow NVIDIA's earlier move to cull GeForce FX 5 WDDM support, but I figured it would be limited to R300 at a minimum, up to R400 at most, but I couldn't see it culling R500 as well. So I guess that's it then, no guarantee there will be stable full-featured Windows 7 WDDM drivers for any DX9 ATI GPUs, including X1600/X1900 Series. Teh suck.

 

[nosfe]

windows 7 uses the same driver model as vista so it shouldn't pose a big problem. On the other hand, who would upgrade their OS while having such old cards?

 

[crazylegs]

Originally posted by: dug777

EDIT: On a very quick look at THG, a 4670 comfortably wipes the floor with it. How much do they cost these days?

In UK 4670 512mb is about £60, so probably the same or less in US $ (especially if you get one of ur rebates)

Agree with the opinion already voiced... If running that generation of GPU i wouldn't be worrying about compatibility with as of yet unreleased games or OS.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
But R500? I predicted AMD would soon follow NVIDIA's earlier move to cull GeForce FX 5 WDDM support, but I figured it would be limited to R300 at a minimum, up to R400 at most, but I couldn't see it culling R500 as well. So I guess that's it then, no guarantee there will be stable full-featured Windows 7 WDDM drivers for any DX9 ATI GPUs, including X1600/X1900 Series. Teh suck.

No kidding; what the hell is AMD thinking? The R300, sure, and even the R420 is reasonable. But dropping the R500? This means no card older than 2 years is supported; ATI only launched the 2900XT back in May of 2007. The 3 year hardware warranties on the good X1900 series cards haven't even expired yet.

This completely and utterly flabbergasts me.

 

[josh6079]

Using a X1950XTX, this is funny news. Today is the day my 9800 GTX+ arrives.

Strange coincidence. I'll have to let my brother know his card isn't going to be supported anymore when I give it back to him, lol.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: tcsenter
But R500? I predicted AMD would soon follow NVIDIA's earlier move to cull GeForce FX 5 WDDM support, but I figured it would be limited to R300 at a minimum, up to R400 at most, but I couldn't see it culling R500 as well. So I guess that's it then, no guarantee there will be stable full-featured Windows 7 WDDM drivers for any DX9 ATI GPUs, including X1600/X1900 Series. Teh suck.

No kidding; what the hell is AMD thinking? The R300, sure, and even the R420 is reasonable. But dropping the R500? This means no card older than 2 years is supported; ATI only launched the 2900XT back in May of 2007. The 3 year hardware warranties on the good X1900 series cards haven't even expired yet.

This completely and utterly flabbergasts me.

they didn't sell very many 2900xts ... i have one still; i think it may be a "collector's card" someday
- when you consider it is the FIRST ATi Dx10 card - and it can't run ANY dx10 games very well .. who cares?

Anyone who can afford Win7 should upgrade .. why drag down the rest of the line up
- that said - there is SO little difference between 2900 series and 3800 series, i am surprised

reading more carefully, it appears AMD is still supporting 2900 series

Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.

You guys are confusing r500 with r600

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R600

The graphics processing unit (GPU) codenamed R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series and the FireGL 2007 series video cards developed by ATI Technologies.

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: apoppin

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: tcsenter
But R500? I predicted AMD would soon follow NVIDIA's earlier move to cull GeForce FX 5 WDDM support, but I figured it would be limited to R300 at a minimum, up to R400 at most, but I couldn't see it culling R500 as well. So I guess that's it then, no guarantee there will be stable full-featured Windows 7 WDDM drivers for any DX9 ATI GPUs, including X1600/X1900 Series. Teh suck.

No kidding; what the hell is AMD thinking? The R300, sure, and even the R420 is reasonable. But dropping the R500? This means no card older than 2 years is supported; ATI only launched the 2900XT back in May of 2007. The 3 year hardware warranties on the good X1900 series cards haven't even expired yet.

This completely and utterly flabbergasts me.

they didn't sell very many 2900xts ... i have one still; i think it may be a "collector's card" someday
- when you consider it is the FIRST ATi Dx10 card - and it can't run ANY dx10 games very well .. who cares?

Anyone who can afford Win7 should upgrade .. why drag down the rest of the line up
- that said - there is SO little difference between 2900 series and 3800 series, i am surprised

reading more carefully, it appears AMD is still supporting 2900 series

Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver.

You guys are confusing r500 with r600

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R600

The graphics processing unit (GPU) codenamed R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series and the FireGL 2007 series video cards developed by ATI Technologies.

If you read ViRGE's post again, you'll see that he's well aware that R500 is the X1000 series cards. Josh6079 seemed to get it too. The only one that confused this was you.

With regards to Win7... I was under the impression that people with somewhat older hardware, netbooks, and less robust laptops were one of the target markets. High end systems don't see much improvement from Vista IIRC.

Too soon to drop support for these cards IMO. This would be like NVIDIA dropping support for the 7-series.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: nitromullet
If you read ViRGE's post again, you'll see that he's well aware that R500 is the X1000 series cards. Josh6079 seemed to get it too. The only one that confused this was you.

Bingo. My point is that the oldest card AMD supports, the 2900XT, is less than 2 years old. And while there's not nearly as many R5xx cards out there as G7x cards if you go by the Steam hardware survey, that's still a good number of cards that are not going to be supported any more in 2 months.

 

[Pantalaimon]

Bingo. My point is that the oldest card AMD supports, the 2900XT, is less than 2 years old. And while there's not nearly as many R5xx cards out there as G7x cards if you go by the Steam hardware survey, that's still a good number of cards that are not going to be supported any more in 2 months.

Well, according to this link http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2342476,00.asp They are not completely dropping support, but instead of monthly drivers, the old cards are getting quarterly driver updates and commitment to provide 'hot fix' drivers when or if needed.

 

[nerp]

Originally posted by: Pantalaimon

Bingo. My point is that the oldest card AMD supports, the 2900XT, is less than 2 years old. And while there's not nearly as many R5xx cards out there as G7x cards if you go by the Steam hardware survey, that's still a good number of cards that are not going to be supported any more in 2 months.

Well, according to this link http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2342476,00.asp They are not completely dropping support, but instead of monthly drivers, the old cards are getting quarterly driver updates and commitment to provide 'hot fix' drivers when or if needed.

Yeah and brand new cutting edge games would run like crap on the cards no matter what, so you'd be replacing the card for that when the time comes anyway.

 

[josh6079]

Originally posted by: Pantalaimon
Well, according to this link http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2342476,00.asp They are not completely dropping support, but instead of monthly drivers, the old cards are getting quarterly driver updates and commitment to provide 'hot fix' drivers when or if needed.

Shhhh....

I'm not telling my brother that when he gets his card back.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
But R500? I predicted AMD would soon follow NVIDIA's earlier move to cull GeForce FX 5 WDDM support, but I figured it would be limited to R300 at a minimum, up to R400 at most, but I couldn't see it culling R500 as well. So I guess that's it then, no guarantee there will be stable full-featured Windows 7 WDDM drivers for any DX9 ATI GPUs, including X1600/X1900 Series. Teh suck.

I hear you. This absolutely sucks. I still have and use a Radeon X1950GT (like a Pro, only clocked slightly slower), and I still have an AGP X800 in another machine.

I cannot believe that ATI is cutting support for the X1950Pro cards. That's nuts! They are still viable, alibeit slower, cards, supporting SM3.0. They're fine for all but the newest games.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Pantalaimon

Bingo. My point is that the oldest card AMD supports, the 2900XT, is less than 2 years old. And while there's not nearly as many R5xx cards out there as G7x cards if you go by the Steam hardware survey, that's still a good number of cards that are not going to be supported any more in 2 months.

Well, according to this link http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2342476,00.asp They are not completely dropping support, but instead of monthly drivers, the old cards are getting quarterly driver updates and commitment to provide 'hot fix' drivers when or if needed.

Well that's good news then. That's significantly different than how the Phoronix article reads. It's not as if AMD makes any driver changes for the older cards anyhow, beyond anything that's universal and applies to all cards. So the only thing changing here is that AMD is no longer regression testing old cards every month, and stripping them out of the INF file for the driver installer.

 

[Mana]

Originally posted by: ViRGEWell that's good news then. That's significantly different than how the Phoronix article reads. It's not as if AMD makes any driver changes for the older cards anyhow, beyond anything that's universal and applies to all cards. So the only thing changing here is that AMD is no longer regression testing old cards every month, and stripping them out of the INF file for the driver installer.

It's a sensible move, especially considering how different the architecture of those cards is from the R600 and R700. Not only that, but regression testing takes a serious amount of time, and cutting down on the amount of regression testing for models that aren't being updated very often will allow ATi to save time and improve overall driver quality.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: nitromullet
If you read ViRGE's post again, you'll see that he's well aware that R500 is the X1000 series cards. Josh6079 seemed to get it too. The only one that confused this was you.

Bingo. My point is that the oldest card AMD supports, the 2900XT, is less than 2 years old. And while there's not nearly as many R5xx cards out there as G7x cards if you go by the Steam hardware survey, that's still a good number of cards that are not going to be supported any more in 2 months.

thanks for the clarification - it wasn't clear to me what you meant

However i "covered" myself by saying, although 2900xt is 2 years old when they stop supporting older cards, it IS DX10; the x1900/1950 series is 3 years old and is DX9c. That is a huge difference as we are looking at DX11 this year, i believe.

And it isn't like they will just stop working. For the older games they are *capable* of playing well, they will function really well. New games - well, DX10 is new architecture and DX11 is this years; i expect the DX9 pathway will still be OK; if not, sadly it's "upgrade time" .. just as when there is a new console .. it is just that we had XP forever and now we have had Vista for less than 3 years and now Win7 coming shortly; it does practically outdate older HW.

i would not like it, of course, if i had an older card .. i am curious what Nvidia is doing about their 7800/7900 series
- i haven't been paying attention to near-legacy

But you guys realize the *Why*, don't you?
--this is a recession and AMD is cutting jobs. Even catalyst team i would say

and their obvious choice is:

1) keep supporting older architecture at the same level and weaken support for new games and new video cards

or

2) Put your efforts into you current cards and encourage your old customers with DX9c and older cards to upgrade

After all, you will get a message from MS that XP is no longer supported so well .. and that is not so far in the future

 

[chizow]

Wow that's horrible, looks like they're going to a forced upgrade model for continued driver support. Good news though for newer card owners as AMD will be able to better focus on drivers for newer models. I had a feeling this would be the end result of AMD's multi-GPU strategy. If they didn't start cutting support for older parts it was obvious they faced getting crushed under the weight of their multi-GPU strategy going forward, as each new SKU multiplies necessary hardware and driver support threads significantly.

 

[evolucion8]

Previous ATi cards like the R5x0, R4x0 and R3x0 etc, needed very little optimization with their drivers to maximize the usage of their execution resources, that's what it gave the edge against nVidia in the FX era and beyond until now, so beyond some fixes and issues, I don't see how it will affect the gaming experience, after all the cards regardless of their drivers must be able to run DX9 code at all times with no issues.

But since the ATi's current super scalar architecture approach is so different, that will help greatly in the development and optimizations, fixes and performance improvements while reducing greatly the driver code.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: Pantalaimon
Well, according to this link http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2342476,00.asp They are not completely dropping support, but instead of monthly drivers, the old cards are getting quarterly driver updates and commitment to provide 'hot fix' drivers when or if needed.

That would much better. :thumbsup:

Its not that I expect ATI to support R400/R500 forever, but I would like to have stable feature-complete and signed drivers for Windows 7, where someone is actually going to fix any glitches that might crop-up. Even if its just giving us a signed x64 driver, that would be great as current Vista drivers for R400/500 are reasonably solid. As for games, I only play casino/card/puzzle type or older games, so I'm not concerned about compatibility with the newest titles.

 

[Paratus]

Still on a P4 3.2E AGP X1950Pro 512 Win Xp machine here, so this is disapointing news.

Maybe the lack of support will help me get a new machine past the "comittee".

 

[BFG10K]

While dropping to quarterly driver updates for the R5xx is somewhat disappointing, keep in mind that up until recently going three months between supported drivers was quite normal for nVidia for their entire product line.

Also keep in mind nVidia has dropped support for the GF5 series, with the last supported XP driver released in July 2008, and the last supported Vista driver being released in October 2006. Meanwhile it appears ATi will still be supporting the equivalent generation (R3xx) quarterly.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
While dropping to quarterly driver updates for the R5xx is somewhat disappointing, keep in mind that up until recently going three months between supported drivers was quite normal for nVidia for their entire product line.

Also keep in mind nVidia has dropped support for the GF5 series, with the last supported XP driver released in July 2008, and the last supported Vista driver being released in October 2006. Meanwhile it appears ATi will still be supporting the equivalent generation (R3xx) quarterly.

What's this have to do with R300-500? Why should people keep this in mind?