Regeneration

AMD has sent us a clarification for this matter: "We will be moving the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series of products to a new driver support model. We will continue to support the mentioned products in our Catalyst releases, but we're moving their updates to a quarterly basis, whereas our AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later products will continue to see monthly updates. The Quarterly Catalyst releases will focus on resolving application specific issues and critical updates.

The reason for the shift in support policy is largely due to the fact that the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective. The 8.97 based driver, released in May 2012 will be the first driver for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, AMD Radeon HD 3000, and AMD Radeon HD 4000 Series under the new support model; it is an extremely stable and robust driver branch for these products and will be the baseline for our quarterly updates.

Our main development and testing efforts will now be focused on the AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later products. This is the best use of our resources, as the AMD Radeon HD 5000, AMD Radeon HD 6000, AMD Radeon HD 7000, and future products have the greatest potential for further performance and feature enhancements.

Also with regards to Windows 8 support for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 Series of products; the In-the-box AMD Graphics driver that ships with Windows 8 will include support for the AMD Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 Series, and it will support the WDDM 1.1 driver level features. The AMD Catalyst driver for Windows 8 will only include support for WDDM 1.2 support products (AMD Radeon HD 5000 and later)."

  

DarkLobo

Morons... they just keep shooting themselves in the foot... I am tired of them, next build going back to Intel/nVidia.

Unregistered

In before people start complaining about missing triangles/polygons with Catalyst v12.4.

Nacelle

the 4800 series are still decent cards. Kinda dumb to drop them along with the rest of the chaff.

Unregistered

AMD IN CHARGE OF DRIVERS

AMD HAS NO DRIVERS

Unregistered

This is why people buy Nvidia, Nvidia has superb driver support and doesn't drop driver support at a whim like AMD/ATI.

IModIntel

They're stopping MONTHLY support, doesn't they'll stop supporting them completely.

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Brotherhood of Eternal Sleep.

Thunder350

People have a hard time reading, most just read the title and post, and think Nvidia doesn't do the same. Fanboism is a terrible thing. It's not like a company is going to continue to support old, out of date hardware forever.

blindartist

Make no mistake, they mean there will never be another update, they said the same thing for the last cards they dropped and there was never an update released for them since.

Granted I dont really care as there is almost never any poit in updating drivers a couple years after a card is released but Im done with AMD's gpu's - it just doesnt make sense to own one.

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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.