Tuesday, 24 April 2012 14:25
AMD won't ditch pre-HD 5000 support completely
Written by Slobodan Simic
Switches it to quarterly updates
After the initial story over at Phoronix, there has been some talk regarding AMD's decision to ditch pre-HD 5000 druver support and it appears that, although removed from the regular monthly Catalyst driver update, support will continoue via seperate, quarterly updates.
According to AMD, the reason behind a move of the AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000 and HD 4000 series support to quarterly update lies in the fact that they have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective. To be quite honest, the switch does not come as a surprise considering tha we have not seen any major performance improvements or updates for those in quite a while.
The 8.97 driver, that will be released in May 2012, will be the first driver for the AMD HD 2000, 3000 and HD 4000 series graphics cards under the new support model and will bne a baseline for future quarterly updates.
AMD also noted that Windows 8 support for AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000 and HD 4000 series graphics cards isn't questionable and will ship with Windows 8 as the in-the-box AMD Graphics driver with support for WDDM a1.1 driver level features. The downloadable AMD Catalyst Windows 8 driver will only include support for WDDM 1.2 products, or simply HD 5000 and newer.
You can check out the full AMD statement here, and we like to thank all those that sent this one in.
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