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AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support
Billly Gates writes "The latest beta drivers for the Catalyst drivers control suite only list Vista as the lowest version they will support. We still have almost a year before Windows XP support finally ends. Will NVidia follow? So if you own a AMD system you will not receive audio, chipset, video, or any other drivers for your XP system and must upgrade or use an outdated legacy version. Looks like another death knell for this very long lasting platform."
Catalyst includes AMD chipset drivers as well. I use it on my AMD based system.
http://saveie6.com/
Make sure you buy an older card. The free software driver driver for 7000+ cards is a broken joke. Works well for older cards, though. Evil proprietary drivers does sort-of work alright with newer cards but doesn't support older cards. Also know that you can't use 1 old and 1 new card since free driver only works with old cards and proprietary only new.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
The submitter is reading too much into this. The drivers linked are beta drivers - this is not the first time AMD hasn't published an XP version of a beta driver, due to the relatively low number of XP users on 5000/6000/7000 series video cards (all of which are post-Win7). XP is supported by the current WHQL certified driver (13.4) and I expect the next certified driver will support XP, too. If and when AMD does drop XP support they'll announce it a couple of versions ahead of time, just as they did for Win9x and Win2K.
Also, there's an important point here which isn't being addressed in the summary.
Vista and later (all NT 6.x versions) use a new "WDDM" driver model for video drivers. Although there are various characteristics of WDDM, the really defining one is that only a tiny shim that basically wraps the direct hardware access lives in kernel mode. Everything else - the actual program logic of the video driver - lives in user mode. This is fantastic for a number of reasons:
1) All the crash-prone code is now user-mode. When a XP video driver crashes, it causes a bluescreen. When a Win7 video driver crashes, it causes a blank screen for about a second while the user-mode driver restarts.
2) Updating and rolling back video drivers no longer requires a reboot; in fact, it only takes a couple seconds. It's actually practical, if you really want to, to switch video drivers between games (for example, if the latest and "greatest" doesn't work with one of your older games, but you want to use it for everything else).
3) Developing and debugging user-mode code is a lot easier than doing the same for kernel-mode code. This change lets developers spend a greater portion of their time improving the driver logic, rather than making the driver work with the various configurations of the NT kernel.
My guess is that AMD decided the benefits of item #3 were worth more than continuing to release drivers for 12-year-old OS. By no longer maintaining the pre-WDDM version, they can focus their resources on supporting modern platforms that are also easier to develop for.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Maybe 3 years ago this was true, but at this point I literally know zero gamers that still run Windows XP. And I know a lot of WoW players who haven't upgraded their PCs in years. Just look at the Steam hardware survey. Windows XP is sitting at ~8% when you combine 32 and 64 bit versions.
No, modern versions of Windows have only unprivileged users by default. "Administrators" is the equivalent of the sudoers or wheel group on *nix.
Dude pick up an ATI HD4850, you can pick those up for like $35 if you look around. I am running one and I can tell you all my games run GREAT in Win 7, I can fire up Just Cause II and do the whole "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit, Batman AA and AC run great, the Borderland series run fine, its no problem.
If you want something faster and have a little bit more green an HD7750 runs close to the 6850s while using half the power and again runs great in windows 7. XP is nearly 14 years old man, hell it can't even take a full 3GB of RAM if you have a decent amount of VRAM on your GPU, if my GF's Pentium D can run Win 7 (slapped in an HD2400XT,cost a grand total of $9) then so can your PC.
A final bit of advice, go to Starmicro and pick up a dual core if that board will support it, hell I've had pretty decent luck getting AM2 boards to take the MOR Athlon 64 X2s even if the board's chiplist don't show one and their chips are cheap enough you can afford to take the chance. I've been buying from those guys for years, great bunch and they'll have a chip for just about any socket. You'd be surprised how little money it takes to turn your system into a pretty kicking Windows 7 machine, and the increased security and extra features are WELL worth the upgrade. When I use XP now I feel like I've gone back to Win95, how I lived without jumplists and breadcrumbs is beyond me. Well worth a few bucks friend.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Your XP installation is overcomplicated. You only need Service Pack 3, because on XP they were cumulative. Your steps for downloading another browser is the same for any Windows version. As for drivers, you need to research your hardware purchasesefore you buy to ensure driver support (just like Linux).
The reason AMD would drop support for XP is not because it is hard for the user to install, but because they changed the driver model with Vista. If they don't need to support two driver models then it would greatly simplify the development process. They probably have an idea on how many XP users actually update their drivers. Sure the OS still has a large percentage of users, but how many of those feel the need to constantly update their graphics drivers. With more and more games coming out with system requirements that exclude XP, the need to keep such an old system up-to-date is reduced.