Radeon HD 2000-4000 starts "death" next month and does not support Win8

There have been reports on the weekend that the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series of graphics cards will give up mainstream support from Catalyst 12.7 in July. Today, AMD issued a statement confirming that these "old cards" will be on the wood, but the time is much faster, and next month will be "on the road".

AMD said that starting with Catalyst 12.5 in May, the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series will move from mainstream to obsolete, which means Their driver update frequency will be slowed down from once a month to once every quarter, and there will be no new feature additions and performance improvements, only bug fixes and emergency maintenance. They could not be seen in the catalyst 12.6.

AMD believes that the potential of this batch of DX10 GPUs has been exhausted, and only need to be perfected for new games in the future.

AMD also stressed that the Radeon HD 2000-4000 series does not fully support the WDDM 1.2 specification, so the experience under Windows 8 will be incomplete. AMD officially will not support these old cards under Windows 8, but Microsoft will bring an old version of the driver to provide support, on the other hand, AMD's future quarterly support drivers will certainly be installed on Windows 8 without any problems. So regardless of support or not, at least in the next year, Radeon HD 2000-4000 series users can continue to sit back and relax.

Looking back at history, Catalyst 9.3 in March 2009 gave up mainstream support for DX9 graphics cards, also changed to a quarterly update driver, and the last one was Catalyst 10.2 in February 2010, which is It only took a year. According to this rule, the Radeon HD 2000-4000 series will live up to this time next year.

AMD official statement full text:

AMD will transfer AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 series products to the new driver support model. We will continue to support these products in the Catalyst Drive, but the update frequency will be changed to quarterly, while the AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series and newer products will continue to receive monthly updates. The focus of the quarterly catalyst release is to address application-specific issues and critical updates.

The main reason for this policy change is that the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 series products have been optimized to release the maximum potential in terms of performance and functionality.

The 8.97 version, which will be released in May 2012, will be the first driver to treat AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 series based on the new support model. For the above products, it is extremely stable and has excellent performance, which will become the benchmark for future quarterly updates.

Our main development and testing efforts will be transferred to the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series and newer products. This makes the most efficient use of our resources, as the AMD Radeon HD 5000, AMD Radeon HD 6000, AMD Radeon HD 7000 and future products have great potential to further enhance performance and enhance features in the future.

About AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 series support for Windows 8, the system comes with AMD drivers will include support for them, and fully compatible with WDDM 1.1 level features. AMD's official Windows 8 Catalyst driver will only support WDDM 1.2-class products, namely the AMD Radeon HD 5000 series and newer products.