ATI Limits Official Windows 7 Support to DirectX 10 Graphics Cards

From X-bit Labs: ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, does not support DirectX 9 graphics cards officially under Windows 7 operating system. The news hardly affects many end-users, however, some customers may find it frustrating.

Apparently, all ATI Radeon graphics cards that only support DirectX 9 application programming interface – including ATI Radeon 9000, ATI Radeon X300/X600/X800 and ATI Radeon X1000 graphics adapters – have been moved to legacy driver support structure, which, among other things, means that these graphics accelerators are not officially supported under Windows 7. Still, AMD may periodically provide Windows XP and Windows Vista driver updates for critical fixes only.

If the user chooses to, they can install the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista graphics driver (version 9.8) under Windows 7, notes HardOCP web-site. However, none of the new Windows 7 graphics driver (WDDM 1.1) features are supported (as the Windows Vista level graphics driver is limited to WDDM 1.0 level support), moreover, usage of the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista driver under Windows 7 is not officially supported by AMD.

Obviously, DirectX 9 hardware is outdated by today’s standards. However, systems that featured ATI Radeon X1600- or X1900-series graphics cards were available till very late 2007, which means that they are not that old and, at least, some customers may decide to upgrade to Windows 7 or may just want to continue using their PCs with newer software, which may require modern drivers. Moreover, there are notebooks that are based on AMD 690G core-logic with ATI Radeon X1200 graphics cores available even now in some regions.

Moving old graphics cards to legacy support status allows ATI to concentrate on making better drivers for modern ATI Radeon HD 2000-, 3000-, 4000- or 5000-series products.

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