ATI Radeon x1950 - ATI has dropped the support

In general, you are right.
A few weeks ago I downloaded OpenSUSE and tried to install it beside Vista - What a nightmare, but now I have some knowledge on GRUB and Partition schemes and howto build a Boot Manager Cascade.
With the outdated ATI card it was not so difficult to get the proprietary 3D drivers up and running.
In the case of NVida it started up and X11 left the screen black just. I abandoned than and took a look to the new MS products (possibly I can run the recent Ubuntu or OpenSUSE on Hyper-V).

I think, even ATI disappointed me by dropping driver support for the Radeon x1950 I will purchase a new graphics card from than

When Windows 8 will come out in say two and an half year I will take a closer look at NVidia boards than.

Can you give me an advice on PCI x16 (2)? Actually the Radeon x1950 is plugged in such a slot, but as I read in the board datasheet, version 2.0 isn't supported - Is that a drawback for modern graphic cards?

Thanks in advance and best wishes for Sunday

Oblomow

I just made a comment about ATI dropping support for video cards that are only a couple years old.

Latest Catalyst won't istall in Windows 2000 with a 4670 - Guru3D.com Forums

sykozis said:

They're 3 generations old, and will be 4 generations old soon....that's what ATI is concerned with.

but we all can't buy new ones every frakking year! A user might get pissed if they think we can buy new cards every year. Sort of what happend with our auto industry. The built in obsolscence made people dump American cars and buy Japanese ones. We were treated badly.
uke2:

My windows gaming machine has ati cards, my linux machines have nvidia. My ati rep told me vista was built with ati, dont know bout win7. But it is also a known fact that nvidia has better suport for linux(ati has been doing better over the last year tho). But if your doing any gaming on a linux machine ur best bet is nvidia from my point of view.

FYI - 3 years for a graphics card is ancient. I realize your unhappy, but this is the PC world. Times change, companies don't want to be bogged down trying to support outdated hardware.

Plus, for $100 you can probably get a card that will outperform your old card by a factor of 2 or 3.

I purchased my Radeon X1950 card in Feb 2007, at that time it was a payable medium performer.
Now after two years and 3 month the software support is more or less discontinued, the recent version of Catalyst 9.3 is quite buggy in x64 (orphaned tooltips).
I know, actual cards for about $100 can outperform my recent card by a factor of 2 or 3.
But will they also outperform my card in energy consumption?
(The ATI 4850 / 4870 /4890 all have two six pin power connectors, only the x4770, which is nowhere in stock at the moment, has just one like the x1950)

What about noise during operation, especially at boot time?

ASUS offeres for about 120$ a Nvidia 9600GTS passive card - After I am disappionted from ATI, if I get the same value for my bucks, I will prefer Nvidia.

Or is the technical leadership of ATI so large that the customer is forced to agree to software service duration with is below hardware guarantee?

Regards, Oblomow

I also have a X1950 Pro. It's fast enough to run Windows 7, and since I don't do any (serious) gaming, I do not really like to replace it.
Please read my topic here: ATI DirectX 9 Radeons Windows 7 Driver

I can understand that ATI does not release drivers for older cards at a certain time, but I think that leaving out drivers for a new OS leaves a lot of people in the cold. However, I still haven't been able to find out whether the coming 9.6 catalyst would also include a Windows 7 driver for DirectX 9 cards.

Hermanator said:

I can understand that ATI does not release drivers for older cards at a certain time, but I think that leaving out drivers for a new OS leaves a lot of people in the cold. However, I still haven't been able to find out whether the coming 9.6 catalyst would also include a Windows 7 driver for DirectX 9 cards.

How is this for a very good reason for dropping support (or at least scaling it back) for older cards in a new OS,

Microsoft Microsoft Windows 7 Next-Gen Graphics7 Cutting Edge Graphics - DWM and WDDM 1.1 - OS, Software & Networking by ExtremeTech

So what do you get with WDDM 1.1? For starters, the DWM will use DirectX 10 instead of 9 and offer some nice performance enhancements. DWM will now use the same consistent amount of system memory no matter how many windows are open. Your graphics card memory usage will still increase as you open more windows, but that amount of memory is cut in half relative to Vista.

and another,

AnandTech: Windows 7: Release Candidate 1 Preview

Next up we have the Windows Display Driver Model 1.1, which in turn is the lynchpin for several other graphics related features. WDDM 1.1 itself is not particularly impressive, but it’s what it allows that is. For all practical purposes, all we need to know about WDDM 1.1 is that it’s a minor revision of WDDM that requires DX10-class hardware (rather than DX9-class on WDDM 1.0) and as such allows the operating system additional features.

Notice a trend here? Also begs the question; should ATI continue to devote time, resources and money to developing drivers for cards that aren't fully supported under the new OS? As to whether there will be any Windows 7 support for the older cards in the next driver time will tell, but don't be surprised if there isn't.

And Nivida cards prior to anything from the 8xxx series and up will also have the same problem in Windows 7, and probably just a matter of time before they drop Windows 7 support for those cards as well.

I'm not an expert, so I don't know whether it's impossible or not to make Windows 7 drivers for DirectX 9 cards. I just know that nVidia supplies drivers for Windows for their DirectX 9 cards. For instance, for the 7900 GS, which was a competitor of ATI's X1950 Pro.

Trust me, although Nvidia supports the 7 & 6 series, it useless support. I saw many 7300 GT (Win XP) machines having problems when updating to latest driver... so no use... ATi on the other hand should release a driver once in 4 months (hopefully wherever i got that fact from was speaking the truth).... But i still have faith in ATI, unlike Nvidia which has many issues with older games (i never owned 1, but a heavilly disapointed friend who used Nvidia cards had wierd graphic corruption with older games, when my ATi x1650 just played them ok.... He now owns ATi card and has less complains... other than buggy graphic glitches for BRAND new games... (thats something Nvidia has an ace...).. Plus my x1650 worked out of the box in win 7 WITH AERO and games support, so no prob...

About ATi 9.3 drivers: These drivers are as buggy as hell, you should check it out when 9.3 released, benchmarks show that 9.3 sucks compared to 9.2... T.T Avoid 9.3 at all cost... Get 9.2 for PRE-HD ATi cards OR get a HD 4670 / 4770 / 4890... depends on what you want to do.

I'm not an ATI salesman or whatever but I'm a little bias-ed to ATI.