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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system you will not receive audio, chipset, video, or any other drivers for your XP system and must upgrade or use an outdated legacy version.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."
If you're buying the latest and greatest gaming cards, you're probably going to want DirectX 10 or 11, good multicore support, and an OS that can handle more than 3-ish GB of RAM.
XP supports older games like unreal tournament 1. Even now new games still have some XP support because gamers still use it for compatibility reasons or they hate change and assume XP is supperior to longhorn.
After slashdoters wrote posts like WIndows 7 == Vista SP 2 they had an effect. Many assume WIndows 7 must suck too because that lie was repeated so many times everywhere by XP loyalists. Many are hesitant to change thinking it is just as slow and bloated and that somehow XP will run faster 100% of the time (not understanding algorithm changes and extra optimizations from the compiler added to the kernel for newer cpus).
But this is bad as AMD based boards come with ethernet, wifi, and other devices that wont work with XP at all.
http://saveie6.com/
I've been an AMD/ATI guy for a very long time... but AMD/ATI has really gotten bad over the past few years. Driver support in Linux is terrible, but I don't really do gaming in Linux anyway... but worse, their support for Hardware Accelerated video decoding is a nightmare. I finally gave up on it with my Media PC and bought my first Nvidia card in 10 years a few months ago. I plugged it in and Hardware Acceleration just worked. I didn't have to do a damned thing. Then there's their Multi-monitor support which sucks, feels tacked on, and again when you go try the same thing with Nvidia, it just works right out of the box. So now I'm done with ATI. I wish they hadn't failed, but they did.
Dude as someone that has to work on PCs six days a week let me make ONE thing clear, there is NOTHING extra you gotta do to pwn XP, that OS is oooolllllldddddd, okay? It has had 3 service packs, God knows how many patches, hell when it came out a decent PC was a 700Mhz P3 with 128MB of RAM!
Look I get wanting to save old gear okay? But XP wasn't great to start with and its practically ancient now, let it RIP okay?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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