I imagine there will be some negative feedback from this, but in reality, it kind of makes sense. ATI will be able to dramatically lower the size of the driver downloads and quite frankly the team isn’t spending much time on bug fixes or performance enhancements for that level of GPU. To translate from architecture codenames to actual card names, the GPUs that will no longer be included in the monthly Catalyst release X1900 and below. If we put it in context, that the X1900 was officially released in January of 2006, we can guesstimate that very few users that are regularly looking for driver updates are still utlizing that hardware. And if some are, then the quarterly driver releases will still likely be enough to satisfy.
As for ATI’s reasoning for this move, much of it likely has to do with reorganizing resources for properly support the upcoming transistion to Windows 7 drivers.
I have AMD’s official response to the news below for those of you looking for a complete list of the GPUs being relegated to the “legacy support” status.
The upcoming release of ATI Catalyst 9.3 will be the last driver to provide a monthly driver update for graphics products predating the R6xx series. What that means is all R300, R400 and R500 series products will be moved to legacy support status – meaning they will be removed from the core Catalyst update and QA testing will be reduced. Moving forward, these products will receive critical fixes if needed as well as updates on a quarterly schedule rather than the monthly schedule adhered to for current products.
Legacy support status is typically reserved for non-current products that have reached a point at which existing drivers optimize performance of the graphics product in question and further driver updates will yield little to no performance improvement. We continue to support non-current products well after drivers have reached this optimal state in order to ensure support for new applications and games.
By moving pre6xx products to legacy support status, we will be able to focus more of our software engineering resources on current and future products, operating systems and applications.
The following is a complete list of products moving to legacy support status:
ATI Radeon 9500 Series
ATI Radeon 9550 Series
ATI Radeon 9600 Series
ATI Radeon 9700 Series
ATI Radeon 9800 Series
ATI Radeon X300 Series
ATI Radeon X550 Series
ATI Radeon X600 Series
ATI Radeon X700 Series
ATI Radeon X800 Series
ATI Radeon X850 Series
ATI Radeon X1050 Series
ATI Radeon X1300 Series
ATI Radeon X1550 Series
ATI Radeon X1600 Series
ATI Radeon X1650 Series
ATI Radeon X1800 Series
ATI Radeon X1900 Series
ATI Radeon Xpress Series
ATI Radeon X1200
ATI Radeon X1250
ATI Radeon X2100 Series
ATI FireGL X1-128
ATI FireGL X1-256
ATI FireGL X2-256
ATI FireGL X2-256t
ATI FireGL X3-256
ATI FireGL Z1
ATI FireGL V3100
ATI FireGL V3200
ATI FireGL V3250
ATI FireGL V3300
ATI FireGL V3350
ATI FireGL V3400
ATI FireGL V5000
ATI FireGL V5100
ATI FireGL V5200
ATI FireGL V7100
ATI FireGL V7200
ATI FireGL V7300
ATI FireGL V7350
ATI FireMV 2200
ATI FireMV 2250
