AMD RV770 refresh -> RV790

Well not really the architecture drop happens at the same time for all platforms afaik (certainly did in the past).
That said, there are still the legacy drivers, and with windows it's not _that_ much of a problem. It means on linux some new xorg or kernel version will likely break compatibility but you can keep running it on your existing windows version.

 

Crap...I mean, at least the HD4850 and upwards still run new games decently at medium at least...And many multiplats are still DX9 only on PC, and can be played fine enough on high on these cards
As long as the cards still are viable for gaming, they should get support IMO...I haven't seen Nvidia officially drop their support for the Geforce 8000/9000 and 200 series yet

I don't have an Nvidia card, but their Windows 8 driver claims to support even their very old Geforce 6 series...AMD though has yet to release a Win8 driver for their much more modern HD4000 series

 

I just updated my drivers for a 7600gt win-xp

 

Those actually work quite bearable up to, or rather down to Geforce 6 - but only the native PCIe-models. Native AGP-chips with a bridge (yeah, I'm looking at you, 6800 GT and Ultra) suffer from slowdowns and crashes.

 

nvidia "legacy" drivers for linux support amazingly old cards, even down to the TNT sometimes. they do maintain old drivers for a really long time to let them stay compatible with new kernel and new xorg server.

I remember installing a TNT2 M64 on debian 5, which came out in 2009. was nice to have a real driver on that crappy PC. (the housekeeping with installing kernel headers, build environment, blacklisting default driver was boring)

 

sky actually is falling, not that long ago it was support for the radeon X1250 IGP that was abruptly dropped, it was only a few years old but based on R300.

timing is not über terrible this time, they have maintained support up to ubuntu 12.04 LTS. for "plain" users it is reasonable to use ubuntu LTS versions (or mint 13 which should be a LTS), geeks can even use backported software.

for other users it sucks. discrete IGP (I must be making that term up) will be left in the cold. it thus begs the question, how long will the IGP in APUs be supported, and if a small nvidia Maxwell CPU will be a better bet than a Bobcat descendant.

 

Though if it happens on Windows-front too, it is quite annoying considering how many laptops feature HD4200 + HD5xxx/6xxx switchable graphics - this would mean they couldn't apparently update drivers anymore either?

 

AMD Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, & HD 4000 Video Cards Being Moved To Legacy Status In May

Further performance improvements are not neccessary for current and old games, but for new-yet-to-be released games it is absolutely essential.

 

I'm pretty sure those cards haven't seen significant performance improvements in drivers for the past couple of years. At least the 2k and 3k series.

Bug fixes, yes. Performance optimizations, no.

I haven't even bothered to update drivers for my 4k series card in about 1.5 years now.

Regards,
SB

 

For the approximatively 5 people that use Radeons in Linux (out of the 200 people using Linux in a way that warrants a high-performance GPU driver)? I sincerely doubt it since FGLRX has been hardly loved in those spaces, and the true path is FOSS drivers 111oneoneone, which will keep on being developed. This is just formalising something that has been going on inside for a while, IMHO. The alternative would've been to keep quiet and just keep the DeviceIDs in the inf file - would that have been better?

 

It's not only Linux anymore:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=61834

But there'll be probably a couple more WHQL'ed Catalysts until AMD moves their DX10(.1)-cards to legacy, as was the case when they announced a similar programme back in 2009 with DX9-cards.

 

So that means they only support 2 archs at once now ?
HD5/6 and HD7...

Just did a quick check HD4 account for 6% of steam users GPU.
(There's a 30% unknown category, anyone know what's that about ?)

 

That's 3 right there, HD5 and most of HD6 is VLIW5, HD6900 is VLIW4 and HD7 is GCN

I suspect the move has something to do with Win8 & WDDM 1.2

 

In the context of the quote I replied to it was about Linux. Irrespective of that though, the basic question remains: this has quite probably been in place for quite a while behind the scenes, why is admitting it a problem? Moreover, what are the expectations WRT driver wins on these particular pieces of hardware? I'd rather prefer that the few SW engineers that ATI has spend their time working on something worthwhile...

 

I'd rather have them hire more engineers and try to match nvidia , there's no nvidia IGP or no APU with nvidia GPU. but hell I guess we can buy a low end Intel CPU and a GT520 if building a desktop.

 

Yeah, I am aware that your comment was wrt to Linux, that's why I wrote „not anymore“. I also don't see a problem with admitting, more, I think it's nothing that has to be admitted in the first. It's their business decision, fully within their right to do as they see fit.

Additionally, it's not that driver support is shut down, it's just not as often as people where used to anymore. Personally, I'd be equally happy with quarterly Catalyst releases for all Radeon cards, provided that they throw in an occasional hotfix if need be.

 

Not entirely. A new driver would only be needed if a new game engine came out and there was no existing code that worked without giving visual corruption or crashing. Seeing as most of the existing game engines get reused, the basics are there and only tweaks needed to be added. Enter Catalyst Application Profiles.

What we need to know is, will CAP's include updates for older h/w or not, for new titles?

 

A very quick Google suggests around 5 million concurrent users on a good day, so thats 300,000 users

 

Agreed, but it's IMHO too late for that now sadly, they've painted themselves into a corner with the monthly thing. I think that doing away with some of the validation and overhead involved with maintaining a monthly release cadence would help with the overall quality of things.

 

what does concurrent users have to do with anything?

how about this one
http://kotaku.com/5666690/30-million-accounts-and-other-impressive-steam-numbers