Read more.And Fermi GPUs move to legacy status, so will no longer receive driver feature updates.
Read more.And Fermi GPUs move to legacy status, so will no longer receive driver feature updates.
Can't imagine too many people with recent GPUs are gaming on a 32bit OS anyway. If nothing else some modern GPUs have more memory than a 32bit OS can address, even before factoring in system RAM.
4 to 5 years seems normal for driver support, so no shock here and anyone with a GTX 4xx card has done rather better than that. My GTX460 died a couple of years ago, so mainline support outlasted the hardware for me (possibly not a good thing).
As for 32 bit support, how long has it been since Intel made hardware that was locked to 32 bits? I can't see 32 bit users being surprised at ending up with only legacy drivers at this point.
My old and since twice replaced Asus GTX560 is a complete trooper and still works to this day, even after having being completely abused for a number of months in a friends old (and very hot) office tower (I think it 90C at one point, the stickers started bubbling! - We have since built him a better rig so that card is now in storage thank god!).
But yes, I can't imagine anyone still rocking a 32bit environment would find much use for the latest game ready drivers in any event? Mostly as all the latest AAA titles that these drivers get made for are generally 64bit only games anyway!
This isn't so much an issue for "gaming pc" cards, but rather the range of low-end GPUs that were often rebadged and reissued. If you look at the list, there were even 800-series cards that were rebadged fermi, and the 710/730 remain common low-end, low-cost GPUs for non-gamers. Whilst lack of new drivers doesn't stop these cards working, there are secruity and other concerns.
For example, Scan still sell those boards, and if you want an Nvidia card for less than about 65-70ukp (1030) then they're Nvidia's solution for you. Let's not forget that many AMD CPUs (and Intel HEDT) lack integrated video, so non-gamers will be needing such boards.
Admitedly AMD aren't much better when it comes to this - low end cards have been decidedly missing in action for a while. Are they still selling HD5450 rebadges?
Side comment that pretty much all the "supported" cards require fans, so finding fanless cards is also tricky for noise conscious customers. Most of the lower end boards were fanless by design, historically.
Removed my MSI N460GTX SE Cyclone from the old machine just last week. Not really sure what to do with it, a little dusty but in otherwise good condition. Probably gonna sit around until I need to test something.
Picked it up brand new for £95, last batch of them from Ebuyer years ago. Ah, back when you could buy something good for less than £100...
Finding software generally is going this way. Due to some legacy hardware I won't be getting rid of any time soon my music pc is x86 and will be for ever I guess but Ableton Live (My DAW of choice) is now x64 and other software following suite rapidly. I might have to get a cheap laptop to interface with said hardware (Creamware Noah EX) and move to x64 as it can betriggered via midi but it's a bit of a ball ache
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
yeah, compare that to amd who moved their 5000 series cards to legacy a good 3-4 years ago
The current entry level AMD card is the R5 230. It's hard to be sure exactly what it is from the site - AMD's product pages claim it can do 4k60, which was beyond even the 6450 iirc and would imply at the very least that it has a new display engine compared to the older cards, [b]but[/i] it's definitely still 40nm, DX11, and the footnote includes this qualification: "Supported resolution varies by GPU model and board design; confirm specifications with manufacturer before purchase.", which sounds like at least some of the cards are direct rebadges, even if others have an updated display engine. Not exactly a coherent picture
less than 2 and a half, in fact: https://betanews.com/2015/11/24/amd-kills-gpu/
But to temper that statement - at the same time they dropped mainline driver support for all non-GCN cards, which included rebrands through to both the 7000 and 8000 series, plus many of their iGPUs. And given they're *still* selling non-GCN cards as R5-series low end models....?
But in both cases cards move to legacy drivers, they don't stop working. So you can expect some updates, but on cards that aren't going to be running newly released AAA titles anyway a lack of game tuning doesn't seem that bit a deal.
Only problem historically is AMD's Linux legacy drivers, but thankfully the open source drivers work just fine (and again, you won't be gaming in Linux let alone with old cards in Linux). That is one of the things that drove me to AMD instead of Nvidia last time, their open source support for recent graphics cards is pitiful so when they drop off the official support radar then for Linux users they are probably junk.
Yeah, absolutely - the same thing's happening with the Fermi cards here. I ran my laptop on the final beta for > 2 years quite happily
There's two points there though, really - when they dropped mainstream driver updates some of those cards were less than 3 years old, and perhaps more importantly, AMD are still selling products based on those chips, which are already in Legacy driver support and haven't had a new WHQL driver since July 2015. Got a driver-based problem with ANYTHING you're doing on those cards, and you're stuffed. No updates for you.
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Mind you I've just remembered my music pc (again) has a Radeon 6350 card with dms-59 for easy multi-output
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
If you were building a new PC with an 8-core Ryzen CPU, and were running only CPU-intensive workloads so your GPU is purely for display output, then you might reasonably think that buying a brand new, apparently recent series, < £30 AMD GPU is an ideal solution. There's nothing obvious to indicate that the R5 230 is actually a tweaked 2010 GPU, that hasn't been in mainstream driver support for almost 2 and a half years.
Perhaps it's not a huge thing, and perhaps the drivers for DX11 VLIW5 were about as mature as they were likely to get, but the constant rebranding is a mess. If those cards were still sold as HD 6450s, it wouldn't take much research at all to see that they were older cards. The rebrand through 7000 and 8000 series and into the R5 line really muddies the waters.
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