AMD to Drop Support for Pre-HD 5000 GPUs with Catalyst 12.7.

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by TheDeeGee, Apr 21, 2012.

  1. TheDeeGee

    TheDeeGee Ancient Guru

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    http://www.techpowerup.com/164573/AMD-to-Drop-Support-for-Pre-HD-5000-GPUs-with-Catalyst-12.7.html

     
  2. PhazeDelta1

    PhazeDelta1 Guest

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    About time.
     
  3. TheDeeGee

    TheDeeGee Ancient Guru

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    It's one way to make your customers move to nVidia i guess :)
     
  4. airbud7

    airbud7 Guest

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    This^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
     

  5. IcE

    IcE Don Snow

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    Indeed. Although to be fair they drop support as soon as a new card series comes out usually anyway. Stuff gets broken for older series that never gets fixed. Just lazy. If Nvidia can roll out a driver that supports from the 6 series all the way to the latest 600 series, why can't AMD do the same for their own cards?
     
  6. dchalf10

    dchalf10 Banned

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    How ridiculous. I would lose my $#!+ If I had my GTX280 still and Nvidia completely dropped support.

    As far as I'm concerned they should support it until the API of the day is dead.

    Until developers move to DX11 native ( and support nothing below it ), they should offer driver support for their products.

    It's not like they have to make a 4000 series driver every other month.

    6 monthly driver updates would do the trick.

    If grey screen errors, poor xfire scaling and lack of AA override ( and AO override ) options weren't enough to convince people to move to team green this surely will.

    P.S oh yeah and the lack of physx and cuda gaming features ( GPU Transcoding in RAGE and GPU water simulation in Just Cause 2 ).

    @ice445

    They're probably spending their R&D money on perfecting their 'gaming ram'.
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2012
  7. k1net1cs

    k1net1cs Ancient Guru

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    That question would usually be met with the generic answer revolving around "Because AMD graphics division is smaller than Nvidia." along with apologetic sentences.

    But not that I don't understand their position in the 'grand scale of things', though.
    Their 'underdog' image has always been their saving grace, and the most fervent AMD defenders would usually go with something along the "LOL why are you still using old cards?!" line.

    If cutting support to older cards means cutting their expenses, then why not?
    It's a sound business practice, given AMD's lackluster monetary performance on this year's first quarter.
    Might deter the 'old guards' who already sit on the fence, but newcomers and early adopters who buys newer generation cards will always welcome AMD cards for its price.

    Besides, look at it this way.

    Nvidia's GPGPU tradition starts from the 8 series, specifically the unified shader model which uses 'stream processors', and they still support older series up to two generations behind.
    Fermi and Kepler might be new architectures, but they still don't change the unified shader concept with stream processors and still RISC-based.
    Even the 6 series is still RISC-based; CMIIW, though.

    Now, AMD side.
    While the unified shader model did start from HD 2000 series, it still doesn't change the fact that GCN is not only a new architecture, it's also a departure from a line of VLIW (SIMD)-based generations to a RISC (MIMD)-based architecture.
    This alone (probably) requires a different 'base', or 'template', to build the drivers upon, which entails supporting two quite different instruction sets if AMD still wants to support cards older than the HD 7000 series.
    Yes, GCN is only used in 79xx, but even if simply supporting HD 7000 series means to also supporting two different instruction sets, why not extend that a bit to HD 5000 series?
    At least this way their existing user base (minus HD 4000 owners) can keep calm.

    Well, mostly anyway.

    So maybe, just maybe, we should look at them cutting support for cards older than the HD 5000 series because Nvidia is 'doing it too'.
    AMD's basically treating HD 5000 series like Nvidia's 6 series, as a baseline on where to cut support for older cards.

    Just maybe, alright?
    Save those torches and pitchforks for AMD later on. :p
    If anything, I'm one of the more skeptical person on whatever AMD do ('gaming' RAM sticks, anyone?), but I also like to view things from multiple perspectives.
     
  8. Mikedogg

    Mikedogg Guest

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    They can just go **** themselves if they are pulling this ****. :flame::flame::flame::flame::flame::flame::flame:

    Yeah yeah I know, upgrade, err, laptop. To get a setup like half of you people on here, it is literally a small fortune, and I'm not financially secure enough for that.

    I'd rather pay for their drivers and have them done right, then drop support all together.

    Thank god for people like "Asder."
     
  9. perosmct

    perosmct Banned

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  10. TheDeeGee

    TheDeeGee Ancient Guru

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    When i had my HD5970 i was stuck with Catalyst 10.10e for 6-7 months untill they fixed the infamous 99% GPU Load bug that 70% of the users had. So i had my experience with AMD Drivers and Support.

    Id rather pay more for an nVidia Card with better Drivers and Support.
     

  11. IcE

    IcE Don Snow

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    I had the same experience with my 4850 after the 5000 series released. Tons of bugs and glitches in the drivers (hell even before the 5000 series). Never touching again.
     
  12. eat@joes

    eat@joes Maha Guru

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    I can't really complain about that to be honest. I have a 4670 that I can't remember when I last updated the driver on and it's still solid. I only use it to play games it can handle and for media so there's really no point to keep updating the driver it uses (except for OS support in the future).
     
  13. Illnino

    Illnino Guest

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    I havent seen any real support from 4000 < for ages its just probably the last driver they made repacked all they way up to 12.7 and i dare say its probably that way with nvidia 200 < , saves havin 150m+b installer i guess.
     
  14. thatguy91

    thatguy91 Guest

    I think its realistic. Afterall, the main reason you want to update drivers is for games, and most people playing those new games would be on a faster series card.

    Also, it may be true that the latest 30x.x series Nvidia drivers support everything back to the 6000 series, but how much support is there really for these old cards? is it just Nvidia moving the code over to each new drive release? (effectively meaning you are stuck on an older driver anyway). If AMD did the same thing, it would be like driver 13.2 (for example) for the pre HD5000 series being the exact same as 12.6, so really there wouldn't be any benefit in doing so.

    So, Nvidia may have the driver support for (for example) the 8600GTS, but is there the product support there? or is the driver just (for example) using recycled 150.x code.
     
  15. Rich_Guy

    Rich_Guy Ancient Guru

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    They not just dropping them to legacy, so will get a driver every 3 months or something.
     

  16. Illnino

    Illnino Guest

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    My thoughts exactly, you just worded it better.
     
  17. Exodite

    Exodite Guest

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    People complain that new drivers suck and swear to 10.5, 11.11c or whatever... and then we have the rage over not getting new drivers that they won't use anyway.

    *sigh*
     
  18. Xzibit

    Xzibit Banned

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    Would be great if they will drop support for Win XP
    [​IMG]
     
  19. Rich_Guy

    Rich_Guy Ancient Guru

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    Nvidia are probably doing what everyone with a card thats not supported by a newer driver does, just adding their id into the .inf, so it can be installed, which is all you have to do to get the latest Cat's installed on your unsupported card, so its no biggie.
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2012
  20. Yxskaft

    Yxskaft Maha Guru

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    Can't confirm it myself because I don't have an Nvidia card, but I've seen users with the 8000 series and GT200 series say that their cards support DX11 multithreaded rendering fully...So it seems that Nvidia does support their older cards somewhat

    It's pretty damn miserable if the 8800GT supports DX11 multithreaded rendering fully, and none of the more advanced HD4000 cards ever will

    For me who don't upgrade that often, this gives me a very bad impression of AMD if I'm to consider getting their future video cards
     

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