ATI Radeon x1950 - ATI has dropped the support

[Oblomow58]

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.

 

[mdttb]

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.

 

[Jverse]

Put the ATI card in your Server 2008 (assuming it's not used for intense graphics.) machine and move the 8800GTS to your win7 machine.


Jv

 

[stormy13]

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.

 

[Avien]

ATI dropped the support for older cards because they wanted to focus and make the best use of their time to the newer products. Last official version supported for most ATI cards was 9.3. I am sure you can find some edited files out there. I think i read somewhere they dropped support in the main catalyst line, but plan on releasing updates for the old cards, just at longer intervals.

 

[Oblomow58]

Legacy support for older Radeon Models

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

 

[Avien]

Personally I have a 4890 and it is nice, but probably more then you want to spend. At the very least get a 4850, but as long as it is in the 4800 series, or even the 4700 series you'll be fine. You may also want to wait till the 5800s come out this summer for even cheaper prices. I believe all the new ATI/AMD drivers are open source for Linux, so you shouldn't have a problem finding one for them either. If your not a gamer, obviously go for the lesser numbered cards to save money.

 

[Oblomow58]

Thanks for your advise

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

 

[slithernet]

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

 

[Avien]

I really don't want to to get into it, but Nvidia has statistically had worse driver releases then ATI, along with taking quality away to gain fps. I believe there was a time when forceware came out and they were so bad everyone stayed on the older drivers, let alone nvidia would take months, up to 6months to come out with a new driver released while ATI does it every month. ATI has also made their drivers open source so the linux community can do what is best for themselves, i have yet to see nvidia mention the word open source.


And before I am called a ATI fanboy, I used to have multiple Nvidia Cards until I went to ATI. I got tired of seeing an FPS increase in drivers and slowly watching my graphic quality decrease.

 

[Oblomow58]

NVidia vs. ATI

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

 

[akash3656]

PCI-E x16 2.0 is double speed of that of first gen PCI-E x16. But even extreme high-end cards DOESN'T get bottleneck by PCI-E first gen. So, no big deal if your motherboard doesn't support PCI-E 2.0. BTW, PCI-E 2.0 is backwards compatible with PCI-E fist gen. So there shouldn't be a problem...

And if you don't need HIGH performance for games, why not you get a low-end card like HD 4550 or HD 4670. Or Nvidia's 9500 GT/9600 GSO/9600 GT... OR wait for CCC 9.6 (I heard ATi will give quarterly driver support). Btw, I'm running on X1650 AGP, and waiting for a new driver set (HOPEFULLY WILL HAVE 7 Support; but Vista's driver also work in 7[just don't install CCC if your installing Vista's driver!])

 

[retiredat44]

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

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:

 

[slithernet]

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.

 

[Cyberwolf]

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.

 

[Oblomow58]

Noise Energy Consumption??

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

 

[Hermanator]

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: http://www.sevenforums.com/graphic-...tx-9-radeons-windows-7-driver.html#post107728

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.

 

[stormy13]

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.

 

[Hermanator]

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.

 

[akash3656]

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.