AMD/ATI Drops Windows XP Support 251
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system you will not receive audio, chipset, video, or any other drivers for your XP system and must upgrade or use an outdated legacy version.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."
Re:Ugh. Another Timothy Lord post (Score:3, Informative)
Catalyst includes AMD chipset drivers as well. I use it on my AMD based system.
Re: Buying AMD? choose cheap old card (Score:4, Informative)
Keyword: Beta Driver (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Probably wanted to drop pre-WDDM (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Informative)
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 [steampowered.com]. Windows XP is sitting at ~8% when you combine 32 and 64 bit versions.
Re:except when there's a security bug (Score:3, Informative)
No, modern versions of Windows have only unprivileged users by default. "Administrators" is the equivalent of the sudoers or wheel group on *nix.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Buying AMD (Score:5, Informative)
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.