As time goes on and a product catalog grows, it's not unusual for a company to reduce and eventually eliminate support for older products. In the case of ATI, AMD's graphics division, a new decision to reduce support for older graphics chips is about to take effect. To date, ATI has provided a new WHQL certified driver every month to nearly every graphics card capable of DirectX 9 acceleration. That includes cards all the way back to 2002's Radeon 9700 Pro. After this month's Catalyst 9.3 release, that will not be the case.
After Catalyst 9.3, products prior to the R6xx generation of graphics cards (that go by the Radeon HD 2000 series brand names) will be changed to "legacy support status." This means that these products will get quarterly WHQL driver updates, instead of monthly updates. AMD assures us that these products will still receive critical "hotfix" drivers if high-priority fixes are needed.
