AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

[DanL]

Except Optimus case, in most other cases answer is "no".

They finally fixed that in 12.04. Jockey does not offer Nvidia binary on Optimus if intel driver is loaded.

[AlbertP]

IIRC 11.10 did that already (11.04 didn't yet) but I don't have Optimus hardware here to confirm it.

[BlackStar]

The official comment for win8 is nice too: win8 will ship with the last supported hd2-4k driver, no downloadable win8 driver will support those cards. Find a bug? Tough luck.

Which is pretty annoying, since there is very little reason to upgrade from a 4850. This card can still handle the latest games marvelously, so it's forced obsoletion of the most cynical kind.

Good work, AMD, annoy your most loyal customers. That's the way to go.

[Qaridarium]

The official comment for win8 is nice too: win8 will ship with the last supported hd2-4k driver, no downloadable win8 driver will support those cards. Find a bug? Tough luck.

the bug is if there is only a built in driver and no download driver then you don't get openGL support because the build in driver only support directX and not openGL.... very sad!

[locovaca]

Which is pretty annoying, since there is very little reason to upgrade from a 4850. This card can still handle the latest games marvelously, so it's forced obsoletion of the most cynical kind.

Good work, AMD, annoy your most loyal customers. That's the way to go.

What the heck did I miss? The 4850 isn't broken by the default driver, there simply are not any more updates. Where's your list of killer bugs that are still outstanding for the 4000 series driver?

[Kano]

Let the fun begin with xserver 1.12 There is still no amd driver that supports it. That means you can stay with 1.11 forever. Nobody asked for 1.12 support because ubuntu used their frankenstein xserver as they wanted to have got working fglrx. So thats partly a problem caused by ubuntu as fglrx is only changed when u needs it. If you really want oss driver support you can stay with intel onboard as well, if you want raw speed over a few more gfx generations nvidia seems to be the smarter choice. Amd just wants that you sell old cards and buy new ones, nice idea to increase demand

[curaga]

What the heck did I miss? The 4850 isn't broken by the default driver, there simply are not any more updates. Where's your list of killer bugs that are still outstanding for the 4000 series driver?

Assume the card has ten more years of life. How many new games, apps, situations is it going to see? How many of those do you think will expose a bug?

[locovaca]

Assume the card has ten more years of life. How many new games, apps, situations is it going to see? How many of those do you think will expose a bug?

Uhm, I will not assume that a 2009 era graphics card will still be running mainstream games in 2022. That's absurd. How many people are running 2012 era games on Rage 128 hardware (1999)? And even shortening the life by 5 years, how many people are running 2012 era games on Radeon X800 hardware (2004)?

[archibald]

how many people are running 2012 era games on Radeon X800 hardware (2004)?

Not many - support got dropped :-)

[locovaca]

Not many - support got dropped :-)

Sure, but aside from that, the technology requirements of newer games significantly outpaces the throughput that an X800 would've delivered at a decent resolution. At any rate, there's nothing holding back an X800 user from running XP and the 9.4 drivers.