ATI Radeon x1950 - ATI has dropped the support

Hi all,

As we had read in this forum, ATI has dropped the support for the DirectX 9 graphic cards like mine, the Radeon X1950.
This means no working Windows 7 drivers and no longer support for OpenSuse!
I had installed the Catalyst x64 drivers 9.1 on Win7 RC x64 but the driver is quite erratic: If I move the mouse over an icon, normaly the tooltips will be shown as long as the mouse pointer is over an icon. If I move the mouse pointer away, the tooltips should go away.
But not with Catalyst x64 drivers 9.1: After some time of working I have a lot of vodoo toolstips on the screen, which cannot been eliminated.
There is a workaround: Change the Screen Refresh Rate from 59Hz to 60 Hz or back from 60 Hz to 59Hz to vodoo tooltips go away.
I had the same phenomenon also on the last Catalyst x64 drivers for Vista (9.3), so I also switched in Vista x64 SP2 back to version 9.1.

What should I do?
Throw away the Radeon X1950 which in under 3 years old now and purchase a new graphic card?

After that lousy support of ATI I don't have so much motivation to purchase a ATI card again, but they have pricy offers (Radeon 4890, 4870 or the inexpensive 4770, which is announced but no dealer has it in stock at the moment.

Or should I wait up to end of the year when DirectX 11 graphic cards are available?

I also own a Nvidia 8800GTS in a second machine, same age but no problem with drivers for Server 2008 R2! Can you recommend a Nvida card and which model?

Normally I need support for 2 digital ports (flat screens) and support for the newest Windows and OpenSUSE / Ubuntu versions!

By the way, X11 is aged 25 in this days - Congratulations and happy birthday.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions

Oblomow

P.S.: By myself I am not am gamer but sometimes I like to recreate myself with 3D anymations.

Glad I just updated my ATI X1900 video card at the time when I bought it was 250 bucks. The card I bought to replace the X1900 is a ATI HD3650 1GB got it for about 50 bucks.

Oblomow58 said:

Hi all,

As we had read in this forum, ATI has dropped the support for the DirectX 9 graphic cards like mine, the Radeon X1950.

Yes and no. This is as good a write-up about it as any,

ATI Reduces Support for Older Graphics Cards - Lab Notes by ExtremeTech

and if I can remember where and find the link(s), I also saw it mentioned that there is something in the architecture of those cards that is incompatible with the WDDM 1.1 that Windows 7 uses.

Hi,

I also read that note on legacy support, but I am not sure what this will mean in reality.

Catalyst 9.3 works fine in Vista x86 SP2, but when switching to x64 that driver has the same problems as the 9.1 versions I am using in Win7 x64 RC.
Up to that situation I was a satisfied customer of ATI for years now.

If it is necessary to purchase a new video card I will have to decide to buy an ATI again or also switch to Nvidia.

My Motherboard (ASUS P5W DH DELUXE) has a PIC-E x16 slot but does not version 2.0 of that slot specification, all cards offered nowadays will support.

I take a look on the ATI 4850 or 4870 or the new 4770 - I prefer low noise and energy consumption.
On the other hand there is for nearly the same price a passive cooled ASUS card with NVidia 9600 GTS

Can someone give a recommendation especially, the new card should also give a good Linux support (proprietary drivers supporting the recent version of the graphics subsystem).

Thanks in advance, Oblomow

Thank you for all your replies.

I think I will wait until Win7 is on the market and wait until christmas is over for then inexpensive sucessors of the current models. Also I will try out version 9.6 of the catalyst driver, possibly it will refresh the screen without leaving any obolete tooltips open.

Oblomow

Ati has always had crappy support for drivers.... if ur running linux i always say buy nvidia.