ATI DirectX 9 Radeons Windows 7 Driver

[Hermanator]

As you are probably aware, ATI has moved it's support for DirectX 9 Radeon's to legacy. All cards older than the Radeon HD generation will now only receive quarterly updates. So that makes Catalyst 9.3 the latest driver for the older generation ATI Radeon's, and 9.6 probably the next.
ATI Reduces Support for Older Graphics Cards - Lab Notes by ExtremeTech

I have a X1950 Pro and would like to try Windows 7 RC soon. As far as I understand, Windows 7 RC comes with a driver for the older generation ATI cards, but without Catalyst Control Center. I also don't know whether the driver can run the full Areo skin. Therefore I would really like ATI to release Windows 7 drivers for the DirectX 9 generation. Although these cards are not fast enough anymore to run todays games, I would think that they are fully capable to run Windows 7 and all its eye candy.

So the next Catalyst release that we can expect for DirectX 9 Radeon's is probably 9.6. However, I have no idea whether these will also include Windows 7 drivers. I contacted AMD about this issue and I got the following response:

There are no pre HD card drivers for Win7. Perhaps if more people requested this to our feedback crew, this might change.

From this answer I still do not get whether we can expect Windows 7 drivers in the future, or not. Anyway, we now know what we (DirectX 9 Radeon's owners) are supposed to do: Catalyst Crew Feedback

 

[Mark Phelps]

I run an "older" card (x1600) and get "full aero" (as far as I can tell) using the default MS provided driver. I haven't tried installing Catalyst 9.3 as I've read that folks have had problems with that version and had to revert to 9.2 or 9.1.

Intel got away with not providing Vista WDDM drivers for their entire 915 chipset line -- and it didn't appear to hurt them any. So, I seriously doubt that AMD/ATI will reverse their policy and start providing new Win7 drivers for the cards they stopped supporting.

 

[Hermanator]

Good to hear that the "full aero" UI is also available with the MS provided drivers. However, I'm curious in what sense these drivers are suitable for gaming. (And where are these drivers from?) Occasionally I like to play some old games, and it would be nice if I didn't have to boot into XP for that.
Still, I have no idea whether a future driver release for older ATI cards will include a Windows 7 driver or not. I haven't been able to find anything about that. But I would like to pay attention to the fact that NVIDIA released a Windows 7 driver for the Geforce 7 series cards, which was the competitor of the ATI X1950 Pro at the time.

 

[akash3656]

Well, I get the full AERO and its a ok driver for games on my x1650... If you don't like the in-built driver, just get driver sweeper, install it, go safemode, run it, check "ATI display driver" and analyse then clean... BINGO now built in ATI drivers are gone.

FYI, Vista's drivers work fine in Windows 7, so just get a Vista version drive WITHOUT CCC and run it, go device manager, right click ur graphics adapter, update driver software, make it browse in C:\ATI\
Then it will install Vista's driver w/o issues....

BUT, i still hope they make new drivers for Windows 7 that are Windows 7 CERTIFIED drivers....

Thx for the catalyst feedback thing... I'm WRITING ABT win 7 with x1K series RIGHT NOW! although it may not really help, at least I've done my part...