[CarstenS]

Just found this in my inbox:

Originally Posted by AMD

AMD will be moving the AMD Radeon™ HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series of products to a new driver support model. We will continue to support the mentioned products in our Catalyst releases, but we’re moving their updates to a quarterly basis, whereas our AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later products will continue to see monthly updates. The Quarterly Catalyst releases will focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates. The reason for the shift in support policy is largely due to the fact that the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective. The 8.97 based driver, released in May 2012 will be the first driver for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series under the new support model; it is an extremely stable and robust driver branch for these products and will be the baseline for our quarterly updates.

Our main development and testing efforts will now be focused on the AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 and later products. This is the best use of our resources, as the AMD Radeon HD 5000, AMD Radeon HD 6000, AMD Radeon HD 7000, and future products have the greatest potential for further performance and feature enhancements.

Also with regards to Windows 8 support for the AMD Radeon™ HD 2000, 3000, 4000 Series of products; 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 AMD Catalyst driver for Windows 8 will only include support for WDDM 1.2 support products (AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later).

This is analogue to 2009, when X1950 was announced the same status. IIRC, three drivers were released in this schedule before the cards were moved to legacy status and no newer drivers than 10.2 are provided for X1950 and older.

[Davros]

The AMD Catalyst driver for Windows 8 will only include support for WDDM 1.2 support products

Why are only 5000 and later labeled as wddm 1.2? can earlier cards not do wddm 1.2 ?
and what will that mean for the end user

[Svensk Viking]

This really puts into question whether I shall get AMD or not in the future

Nvidia still releases new features(FXAA, FPS limiter) for their Geforce 8 series, no?

Originally Posted by Davros

Why are only 5000 and later labeled as wddm 1.2? can earlier cards not do wddm 1.2 ?

I wonder this too...Nvidia's Windows 8 driver says it works even on the Geforce 6 series, and it specifically mentions that it enables support for WDDM 1.2

[CarstenS]

Rather than new features, I'd prefer that new games are playable, i.e. bug fixing continues also for older cards. On four-year-old hardware, you'll hardly see Battlefield 3 at max. details running smoothly in Full HD anyways. And AMD said, they'll be providing new drivers on a quarterly basis, so I would not worry too much.

[Davros]

what do you lose not having support for wddm 1.2 ?

edit : from wiki

WDDM 1.2

Windows 8 includes WDDM 1.2and DXGI 1.2. New features were first previewed at the Windows BUILD conference and include performance improvements as well as support for stereoscopic 3D rendering and video playback.

Other major features include preemptive multitasking with finer granularity (DMA buffer, primitive, triangle, pixel, or instruction-level), reduced memory footprint, improved resource sharing, and faster timeout detection and recovery. 16-bit color surface formats (565, 5551, 4444) are mandatory in Windows 8, and Direct3D 11 Video supports YUV 4:4:4/4:2:2/4:2:0/4:1:1 video formats with 8, 10, and 16-bit precision, as well as 4 and 8-bit palletized formats.

WDDM 1.0/1.1 only allows rudimentary task scheduling using "batch queue" granularity; improvements to multitasking, as well as fast context switching and support for virtual memory, were initially expected in WDDM 2.0 and 2.1, announced at WinHEC 2006

about "16-bit color surface formats (565, 5551, 4444) are mandatory in Windows 8"
why is that good I want to watch video in 24bit colour

[Blazkowicz]

it's for saving bandwith and power on tablets maybe, and not all too related to video ; maybe your surface is for reading PDF on a very small laptop with a 2560x1600 display.

[swaaye]

It will be interesting to see how long this quarterly status lasts for them. As said, it didn't last long for X1950 and friends and it was a bit of a shame because the X1900/1950 can still run some of the modern PS360 ports when there aren't driver problems in the way.

NV still maintains Geforce 6 to some degree and the mainline drivers run on them.

[Blazkowicz]

I checked, and they are still selling motherboards with geforce 6 IGP

a new model supports Bulldozer CPU, it's a low cost mobo with COM and LPT headers, one PCIe 16x and one PCI.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.as...Specifications

[boxleitnerb]

Will they provide only these quarterly drivers and nothing in between or will hotfixed and betas be provided as well?
For example, if a new game doesn't run properly on a HD4000 (which - if bought a short time before the 5000 series came out - is only about 2.5 years old), will there be a timely fix or will the customer have to wait 3 months in the worst case?