nsane.forums Posted April 24, 2012 Share Posted April 24, 2012 AMD has announced that its older Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 family of graphics cards will now receive quarterly Catalyst driver updates rather than monthly updates. If you own a PC with an older Radeon graphics card inside, you won't be getting a monthly driver update anymore. Hardware Canucks reports that, according to a statement from AMD, three older versions of the Radeon family of graphics cards will now be getting maintenance-style quarterly driver updates. The graphics cards that are affected by this move are members of the the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 series. The quarterly driver updates for these card will begin in May. AMD says that from that time period, the drivers for those cards will "focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates." AMD says the reason for the decision was they felt the older Radeon cards " ... have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective." Those cards also won't be getting much in the way of Windows 8 support. AMD confirms, " ... the In-the-box AMD Graphics driver that ships with Windows 8 will include support for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 Series, and it will support the WDDM 1.1 driver level features." The graphics cards that belong to the Radeon HD 5000 family, along with the cards that are newer than the 5000 series, will continue to receive monthly Catalyst driver updates as previously announced. Those cards will also be getting more Windows 8 driver support. AMD states, "The AMD Catalyst driver for Windows 8 will only include support for WDDM 1.2 support products." View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxhedroom Posted April 24, 2012 Share Posted April 24, 2012 I can live with that...still running a Asus 4850 with an Actric Cooling TwinTurbo cooler and custom copper VRM heatsinks in my old P45/C2D rig. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tezza Posted April 24, 2012 Share Posted April 24, 2012 AMD cutting HD 2000/3000/4000 support on Linux?In what will certainly be controversial and disappointing to some Radeon Linux desktop users, AMD will soon announce that they will effectively be discontinuing support for several Radeon product families from their proprietary Catalyst driver. After that point, for future Linux distribution updates, the open-source Radeon Linux driver will be your only option for accelerated graphics. This is likely happening with the Windows Catalyst driver too, but at least there they have a better-maintained legacy driver process.This summer, around the time of Catalyst 12.7, AMD will be dropping support for pre-Evergreen hardware from their proprietary graphics driver. This means that the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series will cease to be supported by the mainline driver. The support will live on in a legacy branch of Catalyst, but that branch for Linux users will not be updated with new X.Org Server and Linux kernel support.At the moment I don't know for certain whether the HD 2000/3000/4000 series support will be removed from the Windows Catalyst driver too, but it looks that way and I would assume so as the ~40-million-line Catalyst driver code-base is largely shared across platforms. The last time AMD dropped hardware support from their mainline Catalyst code-base, they did it at the same time for Windows and Linux. At least Windows users have the benefit of Microsoft maintaining a stable API/ABI for Windows so that the current driver will continue working for the foreseeable future. Even with AMD's older legacy Catalyst driver, they have made new releases to support Windows updates. On Linux, this isn't so easy.The official announcement has yet to come out of AMD, but it has been confirmed by multiple contacts and is deemed important to get that information out there. Unlike the last time when AMD dropped several generations of hardware support from the Catalyst driver, there is still pre-HD5000 series being sold to this day. Soon Linux consumers will have no other choice but to use the open-source driver, which may or may not work for your needs, so it is important that this information is available now so you can make more informed buying decisions. In a quick look at a popular Internet shopping site still shows 25 graphics cards from the Radeon HD 4000 series still being for sale, 13 different cards for the Radeon HD 3000 series, and three graphics cards from the Radeon HD 2000 series (including the original R600; the Radeon HD 2900XT).The last time there was a mass removal of hardware support from the Catalyst code-base was in early 2009 when they decided to drop R300 through R500 support.With the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) through Radeon HD 4000 series (RV770) support going away, this means for all future major Linux distribution updates (Ubuntu 12.10, Fedora 18, etc), there is no option but to use the open-source Radeon Linux driver. With new X.Org Server releases and Linux kernel updates, the Catalyst driver before the support is discontinued from mainline (Catalyst ~12.6; fglrx 8.97 will be the last) will no longer be compatible.http://www.phoronix....t_legacy2&num=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted April 24, 2012 Administrator Share Posted April 24, 2012 Threads merged. The subject is similar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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