AMD dumps DirectX 9 card support under Windows 7

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

Source: Fudzilla
Full article: AMD dumps DirectX 9 card support under Windows 7

AMD dumps DirectX 9 card support under Windows 7
Written by Fuad Abazovic
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 12:49

Get a new one

We were surprised to see that customer oriented AMD has decided to leave its all DirectX 9 supporters hanging. According to AMD's support site, its DirectX 9 cards won’t be officially supported under Windows 7.

AMD says: "Note: AMD’s DirectX 9 ATI Radeon graphics accelerators are not officially supported under Windows 7. If the user chooses to, they can install the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista graphics driver under Windows 7. Please be aware that none of the new Windows 7 graphics driver (WDDM 1.1) features are supported (as the Windows Vista level graphics driver is limited to WDDM 1.0 level support). Using the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista driver under Windows 7 is not officially supported by AMD, and as such AMD will not provide any form of customer support for users running in this configuration."

The list is quite long and it includes ATI Radeon 9500 Series, ATI Radeon 9550 Series, ATI Radeon 9600 Series, ATI Radeon 9700 Series, ATI Radeon 9800 Series, ATI Radeon X300 Series, ATI Radeon X550 Series, ATI Radeon X600 Series, ATI Radeon X700 Series, ATI Radeon X800 Series, ATI Radeon X850 Series, ATI Radeon X1050 Series, ATI Radeon X1300 Series, ATI Radeon X1550 Series, ATI Radeon X1600 Series, ATI Radeon X1650 Series, ATI Radeon X1800 Series, ATI Radeon X1900 Series, ATI Radeon X1200 Series, ATI Radeon X1250 Series ATI Radeon X2100 Series and ATI Radeon Xpress Series.

Most chipset IGPs won’t officially support Windows 7 which is kind of an issue if you ask us. The owners of the cards listed above won't get any support for any operating systems anymore and if you have in mind that most of the games on the market are DirectX 9 and they are programmed for consoles, it kind of makes things look bad. Nvidia's new Windows 7 driver supports cards all the way to Geforce 6 that is DirectX 9.

[...]

 

[Fernando]

Don't read too much into it. The statement simply says that "old" ATI cards won't support all new WDDM 1.1/1.0 features. It doesn't say that there's no driver available or you have to buy a new card if you use Windows 7.

And you can still play all DirectX9 games on Windows 7 as DirectX 9 is emulated on that OS. Emulation is key, it is and will always be emulated on Vista and Seven.

 

[Adbear]

Well they are all really old cards so I would find it no surprise that they don't want to bother giving them full support

 

[Fernando]

For instance, CloneBD & SlyPlayer could run on Windows 95 too. I could even make it run on 3.11 - but image the amount of additional work, workarounds, and special code you have to (re)write that was written by Microsoft in the product cycles from '95 to XP. There's no MMX-Support, no DMA access. And people still want to have the identical performance in either Windows 7 or Windows 3.11.

Software development is a learning process, an evolutionary process. I'm not a big fan of legacy support, it slows things down. Every few years you have to decide what old products aren't supported anymore. That doesn't mean that these products stop working, it simply means they won't get fixed anymore.

 

[tommarnk]

blame microsoft
basicly windows 7 limits cards to DX10+ level for 7 driver, you can still use vista driver for DX9 or older

 

[ocgw]

whoops didn't read thuroughly enough

ocgw

peace